Life-changing ADHD diagnosis story 💚

1. SPSpeaker0:00

   I had a gentleman in his early 80s who was due to see me for an assessment, and he actually wrote into the clinic to ask if the appointment could be moved forward. And the reason for that is that he said that, "I'm not sure if I have time, you know, I'm going to be alive and around for the assessment." And he'd just been given a diagnosis of a life-limiting cancer, and he'd always considered the possibility of neurodivergence. But once he had the cancer diagnosis, he was worried that he might not ever find out whether this could explain things for him. He'd actually been doing really successfully, but there was one bit of his life that he didn't understand. We did his assessment, and he came with his daughter, who gave us lots of useful information. But what transpired was that this was a man who struggled through much of his childhood with inattentive symptoms and also hyperactivity symptoms, called a naughty boy, then went into a corporate role. There was a lot of masking going on in his job that he didn't realize, and he then got to a stage where he couldn't cope with the demands of family life and his role. So he was married, he had a daughter, and he came back every day with n- no energy. Eventually, he started to use alcohol as a way to cope, and at one point when his daughter was aged eight, his wife cited his lack of interest in the relationship, his lack of interest in parenting, and his alcohol use as the reasons why she was separating from him. That was the first chapter in his life. In the second chapter of his life, he started to turn things around. He became sober, he moved out of the corporate world, and he became a decorator. He ran his own business. He did something he loved, and he only retired in his late 70s. Why did this man come and see me? Because the narrative he told himself was that, "I went through a difficult time, I made mistakes, and I turned things around by starting my own business, getting more freedom, and developing life in a different way." That's what he told himself, but it didn't explain everything for him. What he struggled with was the fact that he was now isolated. When we unpicked it and he realized how much of his first part of his life he had masked and how he had built his second half of his life around his ADHD symptoms inadvertently, it all started to make sense for him. But then what came was, I guess, what do you do next in that scenario? And for him, what was really important is, first of all, he needed to forgive himself. So he felt really guilty about the fact that his daughter had parents who'd separated when she was younger because he'd been through the same thing, and he'd repeated the cycle for his daughter. He needed to forgive himself about that. The next thing is that he needed to make contact with the people, the friends and family that were still living, that he'd lost contact with in order to explain to them and apologize to them for how he had been. And what his daughter said to us, uh, after all of this is, before his passing, this was one of the most impactful things that he did in his life before he died.

Episode duration: 2:59