I’m 53 and I have ADHD - and I’m finally going to get treatment
ONCE a high-flying magazine editor in Dublin, living the classic, harried executive lifestyle, Kate Kerrigan swapped it all to be a fulltime novelist and live in her idyll — the fishing village of Killala, Co. Mayo. But rather than being a sleepy existence, it’s been anything but for the 50-something mother of The Teenager (15), and The Tominator, seven (oh, and there’s the artist husband Niall, too). It’s chaos, as she explains every week in her hilarious and touching column...
I AM off to London tomorrow to get an assessment for ADHD. I am already attending a psychologist for counselling, but I can’t get full treatment until I get diagnosed by a psychiatrist.
That will be the day after tomorrow — short notice and a long journey. The waiting list for the handful of private psychiatrists in Ireland prepared to diagnose the condition in adults is over a year. Apparently, the indemnity insurance is sky high because the medications to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — ADHD — are stimulant ‘controlled’ drugs so many medical professionals are reluctant to diagnose adults.
Children with ADHD are treated — but those of us who have made it as far as adulthood with this debilitating mental condition just have to ‘get on with it’ until we collapse.
It doesn’t go away. Hyperactivity internalises and causes inner chaos. Between 25-40% of prison inmates in the US have undiagnosed and untreated ADHD. So, it’s real, but hard to diagnose, and easy to put down to other reasons.
An excuse for bad behaviour as children turns into ‘scatterbrained’ or ‘chaotic’ as adults. I’ve had it since childhood, but the past few years I assumed that late motherhood and grief were the things turning my life into nothing more than dozens of small, pointless acts repeated over and over again.
Important things that needed to be done — like writing a whole book — become swallowed up into an endless list of ‘two minute’ jobs. Ordering in the oil online, cashing in that birthday Amazon voucher, leaving my glasses in to the opticians for new lenses, hanging up the washing, emptying the dishwasher, booking that hotel, firing off emails, feeding the children, feeding myself — making a hair appointment — all these things only take two minutes. Put them all together and they are my entire life. “I HAVEN’T GOT TWO MINUTES!” I roared at my husband the other night. I was beside myself with rage trying to fill in an online form. I could not focus and kept wiping the whole thing and having to start again. A twominute job that was threatening to never finish, like one of those hideous dreams when you are locked in Brown Thomas overnight and told you can have whatever you want, but you can’t choose.
My husband took a deep breath but I could tell he was longing to shout: ‘Jesus – give it up woman!’ I was longing to scream back: ‘This is ALL your fault!’
Even thought it wasn’t. But that’s what marriage comes down to sometimes. Having somebody else to blame for your own failings.
After years of running about inside myself, I now know that this overwhelming too-much-to-do meltdown is not his fault but its not my ‘failing’ either. It’s my brain. My pre-frontal cortex is got getting the messages it’s supposed to get and my executive fiction is skew-whiff.
I have been living off hyper-focus hysteria and sheer willpower all of my life. Because I have zero capacity for normal focus, ordinary things like driving a car and cooking sausages require a gargantuan effort whereas exciting things like writing a book or speaking in public come easily. But most of my life is spent driving and cooking sausages. Hence the problem. At 53, I am flipping exhausted. Exhausted from years of not being able to stick to a routine. Exhausted from the compulsion to do every little thing the moment it pops into my head. Exhausted from running to stand still.
‘Have you got your passport?’ my husband said anxiously. ‘Checked in?’ ‘Paperwork for yer man? You know where you’re going?’
He has been my checklist for the last 20 years. This is a huge thing for him too. I am being redefined from ‘forgetful flaky wife’ into a person with a mental condition. He’s worried I’ll go off the rails and use ADHD as ‘an excuse’. ‘Not an excuse,’ I tell him. ‘An explanation’. He sees me off and tries not to worry that I’ll crash the car on the way to Knock.
Sometimes you don’t know there’s a stone in your shoe, then, once it’s pointed out, you start limping. But that doesn’t mean you should leave it there.
So I’m going to London to take this ADHD stone out of my shoe. For my marriage, my boys and me.
Freedom here I come.