Today I wanted to focus on an often misunderstood mental health diagnosis called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Many people think that kids or adults with ADHD are impulsive and have trouble focusing. This isn’t wrong, but if I attempted to describe a horse by saying that it is an animal with a mane and hooves I wouldn’t be giving a complete description about that, either. People who have ADHD have brains that are wired differently. Now, notice that I didn’t say, defectively. This different wiring often allows people with ADHD to see the world from a unique perspective, and there are a lot of very successful people out there who also have the diagnosis.
ADHD is often accompanied by difficulty processing information. They might have difficulty understanding instructions or verbal information. They might have a hard time with reading comprehension (though sometimes there can be an exception to this if the subject matter is extremely compelling or of high interest). They also might have a hard time transferring information that they see written on a classroom board onto a paper or computer in front of them. There are a lot of different areas in which comprehension or understanding can be affected. When parents or teachers don’t understand this, it can lead to frustrations and anger for the adult and the kid. There can be a sense of, “Why won’t he or she just do this?” The “won’t” in that sentence is the most important because the assumption is often that they are acting (or not acting) out of defiance or lack of effort. Here’s the thing, ADHD has nothing to do with intelligence. There are plenty of gifted people who also have ADHD, and while they may be incredibly smart, they can still have deficit areas. It may never occur to an adult that the reason the kid is not doing as instructed is because they simply can’t in that moment.
Kids with ADHD often tend to be less mature than their same-age peers. Much of this has to do with the difficulty that kids with ADHD tend to have in regulating their emotions. We have a saying, here at Restorative Solutions Counseling, that people with ADHD experience things at a 10 (on a scale of 1-10). In other words, it is very common for people with ADHD (and yes, I do mean adults too) to experience their emotional reaction happening before they have a chance to slow themselves down and think about the consequences of their actions. Even when they appear to be calm and regulated, people with this condition are still more impulsive, and they will often act before they think things through. The reason for this is because they often have delays in executive functioning. Executive functioning is a little complicated to explain, but it has a lot to do with our ability to plan, organize, and make predictions, and having delays in this ability negatively impacts a person’s ability to make good decisions. This can all have an impact on social relationships. Their peers may feel that these kids are unpredictable, and they often make easy targets for bullies.
Focusing is often misunderstood for people with ADHD too. It isn’t that they can’t focus; it’s that it takes a huge amount of effort and will for them to sustain focus. If you use your muscles too hard, they need a break. Well, your brain consumes a giant amount of calories, proportionate to its percentage of our total body weight, and sometimes it needs a break too. This break will usually be in the form of daydreaming. It takes a high amount of effort for people with ADHD to focus, especially if it is something that isn’t interesting to them. This is why these kids often hurry through their work in school and make careless errors. On the other hand, give them something that they find interesting, and they will usually be able to easily focus on it because they will be drawn to it and find it compelling. Unfortunately, sometimes people point to this and say, “See, he can focus when he wants to.”
I’ve said a lot about kids with ADHD, but this usually lasts into adulthood as well. The big difference is that once a person has reached the age of 25, their brain is fully developed. The last part to develop is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for, you guessed it, executive functioning. By this point, these adults have usually had a lot of practice figuring out how to make accommodations for themselves, and their brains have reached a whole new level of capability. They may always struggle, but they’ve often learned how to obtain support when they need it. I’ve witnessed people rolling their eyes at the mention of ADHD, but it is very real and it creates a lot of complications that are usually misunderstood. If there is one assumption to be made about people with ADHD, let it be this: They are probably doing the very best that they can.