Sari Solden was looking for answers. Why was she having memory issues? Why couldn’t she get her life organized? Where did this feeling of deep shame come from?Sari’s books have changed the lives of generations of women with ADHD. Her early research uncovered the truth that the disorder looks different in women.More on this story:A history of ADHD medications ADHD and shame ADHD symptoms in womenFor a transcript of this episode and more resources, visit the Climbing the Walls episode page on Understood. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give
Chapter 1: Who is Sari Solden and why is she important in ADHD research?
This is Sari Solden.
We met at her house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As I walked in, she joked that it isn't usually so clean. She pointed to a tray of cheese and crackers and grapes and said, this is all for show. She knows it's what you're supposed to do when someone is coming over. It's expected. We set up in her office.
She seemed a little nervous, and she held her resume in her hands as we started talking, in case she forgot about any major moments in her career.
I mean, so like for the 30 years, I like spoke everywhere constantly and I became a really great keynote speaker. And this is a famous speech I did.
She walked over to the door and pointed to a cork board with photos on it.
I moved to the farm and we had sheep. And here's one of my sheep. You'll see what he looks like. So this is about shame. So we moved out to the country because I thought, oh, if I live out there, it doesn't matter. Nobody will worry about what my house looks like or anything like that.
And then on the way home from work every day, I would pass in these beautiful pastoral scenes and there's all these beautiful sheep and I got home and then I looked at my sheep and I kept getting depressed and I realized my sheep were messy. And then I felt bad every time I realized what I had was sheep shame. So I realized, so it didn't matter like what the context was.
I had internalized that no matter what it was going to be, I was going to be embarrassed by it or feel shamed about it. I had sheep shame.
Sheep shame. I get it. Sheep shame was a fun way of talking about the shame Sari felt in most areas of her life. She struggled with it for decades, without knowing why, or even knowing that other women felt it. That struggle led her to a profound understanding of ADHD and how much shame plays a part in it for women.
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Chapter 2: What personal experiences led Sari to understand ADHD in women?
Throughout, she treated many people with adult ADHD, and she noticed a pattern.
I'm seeing, okay, the women and men, even though they're telling me the same problems, having completely different reactions. So the men, they do not have the shame about the disorganization. And the women were hiding and pretending and ashamed and not being able to, you know, achieve or get out there or there is such secrecy. That was the thing I saw.
And it was really focused on their cultural expectations, what women have. internalized from the culture about what they should be able to do domestically, especially, you know, taking care of all the things, all the children's stuff, all the responsibilities. So they internalize these expectations deeply, even today still, and they idealize them and
Then they toxically compared themselves to other people and their self-narrative and the shame and the distortion. It was so much more for women. Women all the time say, how do other women do it? All they say is, how do they do it? They fantasize about some kind of organizational nirvana. When I get to that level, then I'll be happy and everything will be okay.
It's a nirvana they'll never reach without understanding why. She understood this because she'd felt it herself. She thought if she could just get organized, she'd enjoy work more. And just like she came up with workarounds, her patients figured things out as best they could.
Often there's self-medicating with Diet Coke or caffeine, or sometimes you have like OCD-looking compensation for the ADHD. And, you know, and they're very, like, I get like that before people like you come over.
Because if a woman couldn't do the things women were expected to do, like keep a house clean, there was something wrong with her. Even when they were diagnosed with ADHD, doctors acted like the goal of treatment was to meet these expectations.
I used to have a woman who would see a psychiatrist early on. A guy told her, well, take this pill, and when your house is clean, you're cured. I mean, it was bad on so many levels. That's what they used to tell women, like, okay, so the goal would be to clean your house, and this pill is going to cure you of who you are. These are real-life stories.
This sounds completely absurd, but apparently at least one doctor in the 1990s saw an ADHD diagnosis as solely a way to get women back to cleaning houses. All of this relates back to underlying challenges with what's called executive functioning and what executive functioning looks like in relation to expectations on women.
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