Full Episode
Ned Halliwell, thank you so much for coming back onto the ADHD Chatter podcast.
It's a pleasure.
I want to, your first episode did incredibly well, and I really wanted to follow on from there. And I suppose a foundational question to sort of set the tone for the whole episode. What do you think are some common tough patches that you notice in people that you've treated with ADHD?
Well, until it gets diagnosed and treated, or as I like to put it, the gift gets unwrapped. The main problem is just a tremendous sense of underachievement. You know, I haven't done what I know I could do, and I don't know why I haven't done it. And then what I call the moral diagnosis starts piling in. I'm lazy, I'm bad, I'm undisciplined.
I haven't taken advantage of the advantages I've been given. I mean, just this slew of morally tinged versions of I'm a bad person. I mean, and so that's when they come to see me as adults and they have not been diagnosed. That's the person I meet. The extraordinarily talented person who is hanged down on themselves and just doesn't know what to do.
And somebody said, well, maybe it's ADD, so they come to see me.
Do you see a common theme in there? I'm going to use the word blind spots, like a common theme in their blind spots, or to put it another way, are there shared behaviors within the ADHD community that confuse that same community until they hear others are doing the same, and then suddenly it makes a lot of sense to them?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, until they get the unifying concept of ADHD, which, by the way, is a terrible term, that brings it all together, then it's all the sort of helter-skelter patches of problems. You know, the disorganization or laziness, so-called laziness, or... wrong job, bad marriage, you know, impulsive, just this collection, this smorgasbord of life problems.
And until you see the unifying concept that brings them all together, it's like whack-a-mole. You take care of one and something else pops up. And that creates a problem of its own. You're running around all the time trying to fix things up, And you can't do it because they keep falling apart.
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