Battle of the Neurodiversities?

I have ADHD. Obviously, I’ve always had ADHD, and in retrospect it explains so much. The reason I know I have ADHD is because my oldest, who is a teenager, was diagnosed with ADHD, and I recognized in them what I went through and how I behave and react and feel and (over)think. I decided to get tested and the result was unsurprising.

My youngest, who is headed towards ten years of age, has been diagnosed with autism, though his is not quite typical and they are still puzzling out the specifics. (I had previously assumed he has ADHD because he regularly copes through hyperactivity.) He’s always had autism, obviously, and again in retrospect it explains so much of his behavior, his responses, his emotions and his thought processes.

Both autism and ADHD are classified as a neurodivergence – also called neurodiversity – meaning that there are connections and processes in these brains that are just a little different from those in the neuronormative brain. With both my children of school-going age, I have seen a notable distinction in how each is perceived, though: ADHD is generally taken a lot less seriously than autism.

What do I mean when I say this?

There is a difference between the way people respond to ADHD vs autism. Autistic people are, for better or worse, considered defined and constricted by their condition, and as such there is a tendency to understand that certain adaptations and adjustments should reasonably be made in order to allow autistic people to function, even thrive. Schools, entertainment venues and many other places make those adjustments and offer options to accommodate people who have autism. They rightly understand that there is only so much that autistic people can process and handle, and that there are certain things they cannot deal with.

I see this in the amount of help my youngest gets in school, and the modifications his teachers make to prevent him from getting overloaded and shutting down, never mind getting his work done. I’m very grateful for this, and I’m so happy that it’s possible. My son needs the adjustments that he’s getting, because without them he would simply not cope.

My oldest, the one with ADHD, is very lucky to be in a school that does its best to make allowances where possible, but the difference with autism as a neurodivergence becomes clear when we see that there are some teachers who believe that, because they take medication – a therapy, not a cure – which makes it possible for them to focus better and maintain concentration for longer – at the expense of an enormous amount of energy, it should be noted – their ADHD should somehow not be a factor. My kid gets high marks, they pay attention in class. See? If they take their pills, the ADHD is gone and they don’t need anything extra; no difference in approach, no attempts to reduce stimuli, no measures, such as additional preparation time for projects or tests to prevent crushing stress. There is no reason for them to be overly sensitive to sharp tones, chaos or loud noises, expectations, stress, because the pills are taking care of all that and so they now need nothing more than the other students do.

For people with ADHD who are not on medication, it often seems like the assumption is that now that they know they have ADHD they can just put a little extra effort into not being so busy or concentrating a little better. I’ve even heard someone say that ADHD is a lot harder on the people dealing with someone with ADHD than it is for the person who has ADHD, because these ADHD folks are so busy; it’s exhausting!

That, to me, is just delightfully and infuriatingly ironic, because that overload that “normal” people experience when interacting with people with ADHD is the overload that we experience all day every day interacting with a world filled with neuronormative people. On a regular person’s busiest day, I can promise that their heads are likely at most half as busy as mine is on a regular day, even when I’m on medication.

The main disconnect is in the idea that ADHD is still seen by too many people as somehow voluntary, willful, a choice. That somehow, we choose to have filters that don’t work well, minds that are constantly going and in directions we have little control over half the time, heightened emotional vulnerability, a need to vent the constant activity in our heads through excessive talking or movement, difficulty with impulse control. All of this wouldn’t be an issue if we just applied ourselves.

Well, let’s get to the science behind that for a minute. ADHD is essentially a dopamine regulation issue. We all produce dopamine, but where a non-ADHD brain has enough extracellular dopamine floating around to direct it to where it is needed, ADHD brains will re-absorb the extracellular dopamine, causing a deficiency which results in inhibited executive function. This is why someone with ADHD has trouble directing focus, maintaining concentration, sitting still, planning, correctly estimating time and duration, etc. These executive skills can be taught, but for someone with ADHD that simply takes more time and it also requires a lot more energy.

The dopamine deficiency also causes our “filters” to work inefficiently, if they work at all. A non-ADHD brain will make a preselection of what is relevant, interesting or necessary to be dealt with or even enter the brain, meaning that there is far less for it to process because there is a manageable amount of information that comes in.

An ADHD brain doesn’t really filter very well, if at all: every bit of information enters, resulting in a quickly overloaded processing center, because not only is everything that is seen, heard or felt there to be processed, there is no clear order or priority in which to do that. In a normal, calm environment that’s already challenging; now imagine a situation in which there are more and stronger stimuli than usual – a PE class, a free homework period, a class project.

Now, knowing this, compare this with the level of understanding and support given to a student with autism.

I think it’s obvious where I’m going with this: while ADHD often seems less constrictive than autism, often looks more like a case of too much energy, and has pharmacotherapeutical options to help reduce its effects, it is a real neuropsychological condition and the people that have it deserve to be taken seriously. Like people with autism, they need accommodations, adaptations, adjustments, understanding and acceptance. There are things they are not able to do the way neuronormative people can – just as there are things they can do that neuronormative people cannot.

We know enough about autism to know that those who are on the spectrum deserve our kindness, our patience and our best efforts to help them learn, grow and succeed. I really hope that we can make ADHD better understood, so that those who have it will be given the same consideration that is extended to people on the autism spectrum.

In the end, what we should all want is for these children to not only manage but thrive, to have confidence and to enjoy themselves. And for that, they also need our kindness, our patience, and our best efforts to help them succeed.

Clash of the ADHDs

If only my living room could look at tidy as this one. Just for a minute…

I’ve not written a post in two weeks for various reasons, and in this post I will address one of them.

As I’ve previously mentioned, we live in a house with one diagnosed ADHD person (my eldest), one undiagnosed but certainly ADHD person (myself), and one person who most likely has ADHD (my youngest). My brave husband is, as far as we know, mostly if not completely neurotypical.

Just in regular circumstances, we have to work decently hard at keeping the discipline to get things done in such a way that everyone can feel comfortable in our shared spaces. It’s a struggle on occasion to keep everyone on task: emotional dysregulation stemming from both ADHD and teenaging/pre-teening tend to get in the way when reminding folks of chores needing to be done and routines needing to be maintained. As for myself, I’m occasionally just effing bored with being a housekeeper, if I’m allowed to oversimplify for a moment (which I am; it’s my blog).

Added to this is the fact that a pretty prominent feature of ADHD is the absence of a filter for incoming (sensory) information (also for outgoing information) which makes processing in real time near impossible sometimes.

Now, no two people with ADHD are exactly the same, though there are certainly similarities in the ways ADHD expresses itself in people. In our house we have three distinctly different ways of dealing with what comes at us in a day. The eldest likes to either go inline skating or – more often – dive into their phone for entertainment or contained conversation with friends in various parts of the world. The youngest likes to jump around, hum, sing, talk (a lot), make noise and want to engage with his sibling, who is just looking to disengage for a while. Clash number one.

I just need to escape into a book or a movie, or do some physical exercise, or really engage in anything I need to focus on (focus is hard) without being interrupted by either directed remarks or questions, or a barrage of sound. Against a backdrop of vocal expression and arguments by the eldest that they need to not be disrupted by the youngest, that’s clash number two.

Now, all the above is just in regular circumstances. This past week, we’ve had extraordinary circumstances, because the only reasonably normal person (I use the term tongue-in-cheek because what the hell is normal?) is laid up and isolated with COVID. Leaving ADHD senior in charge of ADHD junior nos 1 and 2. The being in charge part isn’t the problem, that I can handle. I know what needs doing and I will get the essentials done, but having to manage the clash of the ADHDs on top of that has been a challenge for me because the overload is off the charts at the moment, and so I’ve found this week to be particularly challenging.

Keeping a handle on the household has been an, uhm, interesting exercise. Not because I can’t tidy up a space or do dishes or laundry, but because the junior ADHD (for both the preteen and the teen) also brings with it an enormous amount or unregulated chaos, since keeping organized is notoriously difficult for even well-regimented ADHD folks.

[Thought: there has to be a market for tidying shows like Marie Kondo and The Home Edit geared specifically to people with ADHD. Anyone?]

So I’ve been spending my time trying to figure out how to get a handle on things in the house while my husband recovers from COVID. For now, the only solution I can come up with is more discipline, and directing each of the kids towards their own spaces in which they can process their overload in their own way, away from the shared spaces.

To what extent is my solution realistic? No idea. I’ll let you know how it turns out. Wish me luck. 😏

Did I HAVE To Say That?

I’d like to talk about something I’ve been struggling with lately: social awkwardness. It’s an issue that doesn’t just affect me, who displays it, but also the people who have to deal with me.

My social awkwardness is conversational and stems, I’m pretty sure, from my (suspected) ADHD. I have no filter for things going in, but I also have no filter for things coming out. What makes it worse is that I’m actually pretty sensitive to situations, emotions and context, and my verbal expression sometimes feels almost involuntary.

Painful example: this morning I was at a shop that I regularly visit, and there’s a lady that works there that has tics. We are quite familiar with tics in various forms – we know someone with Intermittent Tic Disorder (also known as Transient Tic Disorder), we know someone with Tourette’s – and for some reason I mentioned it to her. God knows why, to be honest, because it clearly embarrassed her, and I felt awful right away about that.

I suppose on some level I wanted to mention it because I hate how little understanding there is of and for these disorders, and so I think that actually talking about it would help a great deal. But that’s my feeling about it, and I shouldn’t foist that on others.

On a related note: I should probably considering shopping somewhere else from now on.

These kinds of things – the awkward interactions – have been happening more regularly of late, as the (suspected) ADHD has become less controllable for me and I hate it. I’m really hoping that an ADHD diagnosis and treatment will help bring this (and various other things) under control.

All this is to say, I suppose, that a) maybe I should just not speak when in public, b) I am going to feel horrible about this for the rest of the day and possibly longer, and c) the sooner I get my diagnosis and hopefully medication and psycho-education the better.

Stick to It

Featured photo by Renáta-Adrienn on Unsplash

Today school starts again for my youngest, and tomorrow the oldest also begins the new academic year. The youngest does not want to go. The oldest is actually kind of looking forward to it.

When I ask the youngest why he doesn’t like school, his answers are both true and hilarious: “It takes all day!” and “You have to work all the time!” (He’s really not going to like adulting.) When I ask the oldest what they like about school, it’s mostly the artistic and creative subjects and extracurriculars, and there are many of those – it’s one of the main reasons we chose this school.

But while my children have opposite feelings about being in school, what they have in common – and in common with us as well – is that the academic year brings both order and chaos for them. So yesterday we decided to try something that is new (well, to be fair, not actually new at all – we have tried this before, but this time FEELS different and therefore new) for us as a family: we made. A. Schedule.

That’s right: the household with three ADHD people and one seriously outnumbered neuronormative guy (who doesn’t really like schedules that much either) came up with a schedule.

Freedom in discipline, we hope.

The main goals for us are to not be driven nuts by either our activities, each other, or ourselves. Of course, for us to find out whether we’ve actually made a good schedule this time we have to do the most challenging thing of all, and where all previous attempts at organizing and structuring our household have failed. We have to … wait for it … *whispers* stick to it.

As I confessed earlier, we have tried to organize and streamline things many, many times before in this house, but for some reason making the plan and then sticking to it has proved unbelievably difficult for many different reason: unexpected events, low energy levels, hyperfocus, no focus, emotional responses to not quite being on schedule resulting in veering even more off schedule (it’s an ADHD thing, I’ve been told). You know: reasons.

But we keep trying. We spent a fair amount of time for this latest attempt making sure that the goals we’ve set ourselves are actually feasible, and that there is room for the unexpected. We’ve also built in repetition, and regularity for the things we want, not just for the things we need.

I think that might be where we’ve gone wrong in the past: we placed the emphasis only on the things that were needed, not on the things that make us feel good, happy, and creative. That’s different this time around – we made this schedule to meet our own needs as well as others’.

There will still be challenges, of course, but we also have one more thing that we didn’t have before and that is a better understanding of at least three out of four brains in our family (the ADHD ones). It means we can take each other and ourselves into account more, and that in turn means both more realistic plans and more reasonable expectations.

The academic year has just started so I have no idea how well or even if this time we’ve found the winning formula, but with everything we’ve learned the past year, and a new approach based on kindness and fulfillment as well as goals and achievements, I feel like this time we have a good chance at success.