My daughter diagnosed herself as having ADHD with the help of a friend of hers who had just gone through the formal process. They compared notes one night and ended in tears: “If only we had been diagnosed before, all would have been different.” A common reaction, apparently.
Needless to say, it took months of trying to find a psychiatrist who believed in ADHD and then to get an appointment. She had to go off all other meds before she could get tested, which was an extraordinary effort on her part, but she persevered. Finally, she was prescribed Ritalin.
And what a life changer. The most obvious first sign was that she changed from being a complete grub to being passionate about tidiness. Her mood improved, she didn’t get as angry with the world, and she was suddenly more relaxed. I really don’t understand how one tablet can make such a dramatic difference to what seem to be completely different behaviours.
BUT I had never believed in ADD (I thought it was just an excuse put about by parents of naughty boys: I’m so sorry friends!) and I was worried that she could have been just exchanging one under-the-counter drug for another legal one, and that she wasn’t now just high all the time.
So one Saturday morning I explained to my husband that I was going to test it out.
I don’t tidy, can’t tidy, it just doesn’t work. Because my daughter’s main personality change was to be able to tidy her room (you have to have lived with an ‘untidy’ teenager to understand the massive turnaround, not to mention the health benefits of no moldering plates of food under the bed) I decided that would be a good test for me to try.
So I explained that I was going to take a single tablet at 10.30 and hide myself in the garage to try and clean it up. Marie Kondo would just have ordered a bulldozer, I think. The double garage was full to the roof with three generations of so-called precious knickknacks all jumbled together with birds nests, power tools, an old snooker table and a rusty frig. There was no room for a car.
I wanted hubby to know that if I fell over or started rushing about in circles, then he needn’t call an ambulance, I was just testing out the tablets.
By 12.30, I was too busy to stop and have lunch. By 3.30, I had tidied the garage. But the most extraordinary part of it was that I could remember where I had put stuff!
Then, of course, I had to go back to my psychiatrist (who I saw for depression) and persuade him to agree with my newly found diagnosis. Which was a whole other story…!