ADHD Chatter
The Truth About Female ADHD, The Invisible Struggle (Leading Psychiatrist Explains)
30 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What still shocks Dr. Yath about ADHD?
We've let women down in both the diagnostic stage of ADHD but also in the support that we offer them.
Chapter 2: How do ADHD symptoms manifest at different life stages?
We're looking in childhood for very clear symptoms of an impairment with hyperactivity or inattention. Girls are more likely to develop emotional maturity and make efforts to conform to social norms during their childhood.
Chapter 3: What is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and how does it affect individuals with ADHD?
That invites itself for masking to start taking place. Dr. Yathramesh is an ADHD specialist psychiatrist with a unique twist. He's treated people with ADHD from ages 18 all the way to 100.
So, with regards to ADHD, he's seen it all.
With ADHD, people often gravitate to fast reward, fast feedback mechanisms in order to help cope and regulate your emotions. It could be alcohol, cannabis. cannabis, shopping, various things that ultimately could lead to an addiction.
Chapter 4: What is the connection between ADHD and criminal behavior?
Do you think if left unchecked and that propensity to seek the low-hanging fruit, the quick dopamine, can that lead to a dangerous path of crime perhaps for somebody like that? I think that... Can I have just a second of your time? If this podcast has helped you understand your brain or made you feel less alone, can you do me one favor? Can you hit the follow button?
And I'll repay the favor by continuing to book the best and most exclusive conversations on this topic. Please enjoy the episode and always remember, you're not broken, just different, and you have always been enough. Dr. Yath, welcome to the ADHD Chatter podcast.
Chapter 5: What is the grieving process after an ADHD diagnosis?
Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to have you here. The patients that you've treated for ADHD, they range from 18 years old to 100 years old. Is there anything that still shocks you about ADHD?
So, there are so many things that shock me about ADHD, but I should start off by saying that I guess the reason why I treat people within that range is I'm a dual trained general adult and old age psychiatrist.
And as I went through my training, I essentially developed skills with treating neurodivergence in both the adult population, but I also took those skills into the work that I was doing in the older adult population. I think what shocks me about ADHD at the most is the fact that the symptoms can still persist over the different age groups.
And in particular, I think what I've learned from working with people across those different age groups is that although the symptoms themselves can sometimes go away for some people, actually, as life gets more complicated, things can get more complicated for older adults. So yes.
So the symptoms of ADHD can stay consistent throughout someone's life, all the way from 18 to 100, but the way they manifest and show up and cause challenges, does that change as you go through life and get a bit older?
Absolutely. So let me talk you through the different life stages. Okay, so we're going to start with children. Now, I'm going to call this the dependent stage, because at this stage, what we're looking at is the amount of dependence that you have on your parents or your teachers or whoever it is that provides support around you. Now, with children,
When it's obvious that you're acquiring more dependence on those people compared to others, then we start to notice problems with ADHD. But therein lies the challenge, because if you're very good at masking your symptoms, if your symptoms were there, but you had a sibling who had, let's say, hyperactive symptoms that were more obvious, then
if there were symptoms that were happening, but there was something else going on like parental divorce or conflict, and they could be rationalized or justified in another way. For all those different reasons, it's very possible to get through childhood where you have symptoms, but they haven't manifested into something that we might consider ADHD. So then we go on to your early adulthood.
And in this stage, I'd call this the independent stage, because in the independent stage, you're trying to become self-sufficient, but you might find manifestations of ADHD there where you can't. So I'm talking about the people who do really well academically at school, but
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Chapter 6: Why have women historically been overlooked in ADHD diagnoses?
At this stage, you can struggle with trying to bring all of those different skills together. Why? Because you don't have the opportunity to mask in the same way that you did before. All those times that you used to give yourself that downtime, gone. All those times where you used to be able to prepare for conversations,
prepare for those situations that you knew were going to be anxiety-provoking for you. Gone. And at this stage, ADHD can manifest rather than with symptoms, but with a difficulty with managing the complexity of life.
Chapter 7: How does ADHD cause distress in individuals?
And there is a whole separate thing I can tell you about with the retirement stage, and perhaps we can talk about that later.
I've never ever heard it explained in such a fluent way before, how it kind of can show up at various stages of one's life. So I suppose... At different stages of your life, you have different support systems around you, your environment changes. And in response to the sort of ever-changing landscape of what you are in as a human being, how much your ADHD shows up changes depending on that too.
Do you think as you grow up and you transition through these different stages, can ADHD get easier to manage as you as an individual become aware of your traits, your challenges, and you're able to self-reflect on them?
Yeah.
Chapter 8: What is involved in the ADHD assessment process?
So there are two arguments for why you might think that ADHD can become easier to manage. And I'd say for some people, it absolutely is the case. So first, pattern recognition. You start to be able to recognize those triggers before you let them get to the stage where it becomes a problem for you. You know those people that if you spend time with are going to be triggering for you.
You know those situations, those opportunities that if you say yes to, they're going to completely...
override you and you know how to avoid those situations so yes for some people pattern recognition helps the second thing is emotional maturity so when you were younger your rsd may be driven by lots of perceived threats hypothetical scenarios about what could happen in the future but now as you get older you start to actually realize what does happen.
And that can help your RSD to have a more mature understanding about the difference between perceived and actual threat. So this can be really helpful with being able to have the capacity to manage some of the ADHD symptoms that you have. But I would caveat that by saying that you've got capacity and you've also got demand. And as you progress through your life stages,
the demands on you can also grow up and expand. And when they grow, if your capacity doesn't match the demand, then you personally might not find that ADHD gets easier as you age.
So interesting being able to recognize your patterns and therefore it gives you the tools to mitigate and avoid perhaps an RSD trigger. Are there circumstances in someone's life as they get older, new experiences that their ability to see coming because of that pattern recognition isn't so useful because they have never experienced that life event before?
Yes. So when we look at the experiences that you have as you age, so let's look at some of the most common scenarios here. Parenthood. For women, the menopause. For both men and women, the experience of progressing up the leadership ladder within your working environment.
for both men and women again, the experience of complex physical health challenges as you age, and again, going through retirement. At all of these life stages, you're experiencing things that you never may have experienced before. And one of the most difficult challenges with this, and I'll give you an example of this, okay?
One of the things that people in their later stage of life tell me is that they look back at a certain period, it's around middle adulthood, where everyone is caught up in the thick of things. And during that time, what happens is that you don't have as many interactions with your friends and family around you, but those interactions can be detrimental depending on how they play out.
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