Guess What?! (Ta-Dah) You’re ADD!

At last, someone sees me through my own eyes.

Life in the Fast Brain | posted by Kristen Caven

The most amazing thing happened after I quit my out-of-pocket therapist who Just! Didn’t! Get! what I had been trying to tell her for a year. (That sometimes I don’t know who I am when I wake up on an unstructured morning. That I have trouble sticking to routines she suggests and my days get away from me, or that I’m overwhelmed by all the wonderful things in my life.) Although kind and caring, she felt doubtful whenever we talked about ADD. She kept measuring me by the same confusing tests that required me to have been a problem child, which I never was.

Your symptoms hide under competence, confidence, and wisdom.

— Kristen Caven

On the day we parted ways, I flipped through my Attention Issues Class manual and found the name of a therapist in my health plan in another city that had been scribbled on the back. And finally, after years of educating professionals, on my nickel, about ADHD, someone saw me as a complete and complex person, and not a set of numbers on tests.

After just a short time together, Dr. Aha said what I already knew, “When you have problems, they are ADD problems, but you’ve developed so many successful ways of working with your mind and coping with your differences that your life mostly works (except when it doesn’t), and you don’t appear to have a disorder.” But he’d seen a lot of cases and saw me on the spectrum with (ta-dah!) combined-type ADHD.

“I can see why others wouldn’t catch it,” he also said. “Your symptoms hide under anxiety, but they also hide under competence, confidence, and wisdom.”

“Yes, sometimes I seem to have it, and sometimes I don’t,” I agreed.

“But inconsistency is the hallmark of diagnosing ADHD in adults,” he said.

I KNOW!!! RIGHT??? In college, my teachers called me “consistently inconsistent.”

I felt so relieved, so validated that a knowledgeable professional had finally seen me through my own eyes. (Driven by Distraction was already on his shelf; I didn’t have to loan him a copy or educate him on what ADD was about.) He understood that my challenges with forgetting things, being confused, feeling disconnected, losing track of things, and having trouble starting and finishing things, were the cause of my anxieties, not the symptoms.

He asked the right questions. Like, “is your house a mess?”

“No, my husband gets us to clean it for a family fun time on Thursdays.”

“What did it look like when you lived alone?” (Clever doctor!)

“Creative chaos, so I’d have friends over every month to force myself to clean it.”

And then, “Do you fidget?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem like you’re fidgeting”

“I can hide it,” I said. “I am always clicking my teeth to a tune in my head.”

“And you’re getting my full attention, too,” he said. I just wanted to jump up and hug him. He understood that my symptoms disappear when I’m engaged in personal interaction.

I told him what my frustrated father once said about me, something that sounded a little mean but that really defined my Life Issue.“You don’t do anything half-assed. You do things four-fifthed assed.”

Dr. Aha smiled when he heard that. He knew what it meant. And, after years of trying to understand, finally I knew what it meant, too.

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You’re Not ADD (Part 5): Want some Prozac?

Trying to get a diagnosis can be quite a thrill ride.

On my health plan, they have a process by which people are diagnosed with ADHD. First, you go to the 2-hour talk on Adult Attention Issues, where they pass out a test. Then you wait three weeks and they send you a letter. Yes, you have it. No, you don’t. It’s like getting accepted into college... or not. If you do, you get some meds and 4 appointments with a therapist who may or may not know anything about ADHD in adult women.

“When you have ADHD,” the teacher droned on, “you need to be entertained or you lose interest.” I wanted to bolt after twenty minutes of her slow-moving, monotone presentation.

— Kristen Caven

If, because they have awesome services in the Pediatrics department, you ask your child’s psychiatrist something like, “I think he’s this way because of me,” they won’t really talk to you; they’ll say to go stand in line in the Adult department. (If you cry, because you don't understand and are desperate to ask questions like "is it because I was a terrible mother and could never teach him how to floss every night because I can't remember to myself?" Well, they’ll close the door extra-fast.) So, you just keep worrying and having all these questions that no one will answer until you do all your listening first.

In the Adult Attention Issues session, which is standing room only, they describe every aspect of what it feels like to have ADHD. I sat through this meeting twice, five years apart, and had to sit on my hands to keep from raising them every two seconds to chime in with additional information, since it was all so familiar. The test is full of questions that make you sound like a loser, which I’m not. On some questions, I had to be perfectly honest and answer both “Rarely true” and “Always true,” since one answer is correct when I’ve got fun things going on in my life, and the other is correct when I’m feeling overwhelmed. I wanted to explain this to someone, but no one ever asked me what I meant.

The first time I went through the process, they said I was on the borderline, not “disordered” enough to have ADHD, and the psychiatrist kindly offered me some Prozac or other anxiety medication. But I am not a fearful person, I told her, just an overwhelmed one. I only really worry about one thing: can I keep my shit together without dropping all these balls I seem to attract? Besides, I am keenly aware of my body and highly sensitive to medications; I even ask the dentist for a half-dose of novacaine. So Prozac? Thanks but no thanks.

The second time I went through the routine, same story...except now you had to wait 3 months to talk to a psychiatrist if you were 'borderline'. I decided to go ahead and take the 6-week Adult Attention class while I waited. It was all I could do, again, to keep from blurting out and being the cleverest one in the room. “When you have ADHD,” the teacher droned on, “you need to be entertained or you lose interest.” I wanted to bolt after twenty minutes of her slow-moving, monotone presentation. The woman next to me was just as agitated at the poor organization. We supported each other in chiming in. But the teacher said, “please hold your questions and comments until the end.”

One day I got a call, asking me not to return to class. I was baffled and hurt, feeling like I did in first grade when the teacher saw me as a trouble-maker after I screamed from a bee sting. The concussion had added to my antsiness, but was I really as disruptive as they said? Turns out they had intended to kick my confidante out of class for other awkward reasons, and the teacher (who assured us she didn’t have ADD), mixed us up. But I couldn’t take any more. They gave me a refund and I went back to square one.

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Like Son, Like Mother?

No need to wonder where my son's attention issues came from. This apple fell from my tree.

"He definitely has attention issues, but he doesn't have ADD."

This is what the social worker told me after evaluating Enzo's questionnaires, filled out by myself, himself, his dad, and two teachers (one of whom gave him the label of "high priest in the church of no homework," whose class he barely passed).

Discussing all the problems and pitfalls, it was like watching my own childhood being replayed, and even my life now.

After all, said the clinical expert, he's well-socialized, he can sit still (sometimes for hours on end), and has a good opinion of himself. Of the five matrices that determine ADHD, he scored normal in four of them — but was way off the charts with attention issues. That was after the first report card of ninth grade, where in two years his 4.0 had dropped under a 3.0.

When his first report card of tenth grade appeared, Enzo's GPA had slipped considerably below a 2.0. Now we were desperate for some sort of help, or even just some insight, or a referral to another idea.

I went back to Kaiser and stormed the castle. "So, what do we do about attention issues, for goodness sake? How can I help my child?" The guy gave Enzo one more test, this one on a computer — why they didn't just do that in the first place, I don't know — and voilà: a full-blown case of ADD-PI. All of a sudden, the gates of support opened wide.

Within a few weeks, we were in the embrace of what I call Kaiser's ADHD School. I took a series of classes on learning disabilities, parenting practices, and coping skills. We learned about medications and chose one to try. Every week, Enzo and I attended a Teen Group with break-out sessions for parents to ask questions like, "What's with the lying thing?" "How can we stop fighting over homework?" and "Where did he get it from?"

Lightbulbs were going off like crazy in my own head about that one. Discussing all the problems and pitfalls, it was like watching my own childhood being replayed, and even my life now. (I don't have a GPA, but for all my cleverness, I do have a pretty unimpressive AGI.) I had to bite my tongue to keep the conversation on the kids.

I called Adult Psych to explore the possibility that I might also have ADHD. It felt like I could have taught the introductory workshop. I read Driven to Distraction and recognized myself on every page. I took the Kaiser tests...and guess what they told me?

"You definitely have attention issues, but you don't have ADD."