RIP Adam ❤️

1. APAlex Partridge0:00

   What is the emotional toll perhaps of someone who has AUDHD but never figures it out? Th- this reminds me of, of something that happened recently. Somebody, a mother contacted me from Canada. She emailed me, and she said that she has read my book, and for a very long time she was in grief because her son died a year ago. His name was Adam. He was a musician. He was, uh, at the age of thirteen years, he was selected as one of the BBC Musicians of the Year. Gifted. He saw music on the piano. He mastered the music in two months after he learned the basics of it, to the extent that people said that he is unteachable now. People could not train him because he was at that very level. He died a year ago of overdose, fentanyl overdose. The mother could not, uh, forgive herself. And send me the email. I cried for five minutes listening to the voice note and, and looking at the story that she had sent, the pictures of the person. From the very onset, like again, he was, he was brilliant, but he used to forget things. He, he ended up one day with just one shoe in school. Um, he was, he was not a typical ADHDer. And when mother raised concerns with, uh, with, with the school teacher, with, with, with the school nurse, and she laughingly said, "Oh, somebody who can memorize a forty-page sonata cannot have any learning difficulty." So it was completely dismissed. And then there was another side to him who was very preoccupied with things, with special interests. He would not meet people. Um, he would not mingle with people. He was, uh, taught in one of the best mus- musical sc- music schools in the, in, in the world. Like he was in Manchester, uh, then he went to the Hamburg, uh, Conservatory, which is one of the leading institutes, and he played all over Europe, but again, not socializing with people. The defining factor was, in his life, was the pandemic, and that broke him. He was devastated. He was locked in the, in the dome, not able to get out. Mother had to fly all, all the way from Canada because he had lost yet another passport, his sixth in a year, and the authorities won't issue him the passport. And mother had no alternative but to take him back because he was not able to sustain himself in Europe. And with that, his dreams shattered to be a musician. He could not hold a job. He started self-medicating. He then it went into using hard drugs. He was diagnosed eventually with ADHD, but was never medicated and eventually became homeless. And, and, and, and the world saw him as an addict. It could not go past beyond that addiction phase of his. Like he became invisible from a music- musical prodigy to, to being a homeless person on the streets. And according to mother, his whole life has-

Episode duration: 3:00