HOW DISCOVERING I HAVE ADHD SAVED MY MARRIAGE
Filmmaker Kate Horne and her husband spent a fortune on relationship counselling – but finally it was her realisation at age 33 that she has ADHD that helped put her marriage back on track. Here she reveals how her diagnosis changed her life
ISAT sobbing in front of a psychiatrist. Tears pouring down my face, I recounted the tribulations of the past five years of my marriage, during which my husband had lost all patience with my skew-whiff sense of logic, my neurotic inarticulateness, my misplacing of car keys, last-minute changing of plans and complete inability to follow simple instructions or order anything at all.
In this make-or-break session almost a decade ago, I explained that his constant stream of criticism, along with my inner berating voice, had pushed me into a depression. That while my life might’ve spawned the trappings of so-called success – articles written, documentary films made, husband bagged, baby made – I’d always felt that I was on a collision course with “something”; that sooner or later my inner madness would be revealed to the world.
Now aged 33, it seemed the time had come. At the end of the agonising hour of my appointment, the psychiatrist reassured me that I wasn’t lazy, crazy or stupid, as I’d spent all my life believing. Rather my issues with restlessness, impulsivity and distractibility were the symptoms of ADHD – attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder – the condition he determined I’d been born with.
Initially I was shocked and, I admit, somewhat insulted – wasn’t ADHD something that afflicted hyperactive schoolboys? But no, it seemed I was one of the many women who’ve spent decades waiting for a diagnosis.
As with many other supposedly male-dominated disorders, ADHD presents itself differently in girls and women. While I was daydreaming at the back of the class, jiggling my legs and cracking my knuckles, my behaviour was caused by the same internal malwiring as the boys.
The system that managed my concentration and transport of dopamine and norepinephrine – chemicals that filter unnecessary distractions and ensure appropriate responses to everything – simply didn’t function as it does in a neuro
‘THE PSYCHIATRIST ASSURED ME THAT I WASN’T LAZY, CRAZY OR STUPID, AS I’D SPENT ALL MY LIFE BELIEVING’
typical brain. Finally, things made sense. The diagnosis had solved the riddle of my life and – as I was soon to learn when I returned home to research the condition frantically – it might’ve quite literally saved it. Adults living with untreated ADHD are seven times more likely to have had multiple car crashes than those who don’t have the disorder, for example. After the revelation, with medication and cognitive behavioural therapy prescribed, I was all set to turn my life around. What I wasn’t ready for was the response from my family, who initially cast doubt on my diagnosis. “It makes no sense that you make films with a Herculean determination but you can’t lift a finger to fill in a tax return,” loved ones goaded me.
IT DIDN’T make sense to me either. The reality was that nobody had any real sympathy for me and I couldn’t blame them: everything about the disorder I was lumbered with for life was contradictory and topsy-turvy. The result was that after the initial elation at discovering an answer to why I’d lived life full throttle and in utter chaos, I was left feeling incredibly alone, brimming with shame at the workings of my mind.
In the midst of lockdown gloom last year, however, it became clear that I wasn’t alone. Forced into their homes with no escape from their own behaviour, many people began to question whether they too might be suffering from ADHD.
In Britain, Google searches for the question “Do I have ADHD?” have nearly doubled every year since 2018; so prevalent was the question on social media during the pandemic that it seemed to give “Do I have Covid?” a run for its money. TikTok clips about ADHD went viral, accumulating billions of hits and millions of likes.
This was encouraging news. For years there’s been a widespread dismissive attitude towards the disorder – down in part to the response to a book by behavioural neurologist Richard Saul entitled ADHD Does Not Exist.
Its publication in 2014 chimed with fears of an ADHD “epidemic” and a statistical rise in offering young children medication, with anxiety around medicating childhood and playing into the hands of “big pharma”.
ADHD, screamed tabloid newspapers, was just an excuse for bad behaviour and was all down to bad parenting.
Nevertheless, social media seemed to be offering a different perspective. So I ventured onto TikTok myself to see what all the fuss was about.
The first clip I saw was The Difference between an ADHD “Actor” and a Person Who Truly Has It, an engaging minute-long post taking aim at stereotypes and conveying the anxious, whirring inner chatter of an ADHD brain, from @tomboymani, a young Hawaiian with almost 350 000 followers.
I came across the American psychiatrist Dr Edward Hallowell, who has ADHD himself. Hallowell’s “Ned Talks” include nuggets of advice on everything from dealing with negative thoughts to remembering to have breakfast, along with words of affirmation and encouragement.
“ADHD is like having a Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes,” he tells his 100 000 followers with infectious enthusiasm. “Strengthen the brakes and you have a champion!”
Next came videos about ADHD in girls, which brought tears. I wanted to hug my younger self: the schoolgirl who swung from dreaminess,
scattered thinking and introversion – no remote control for the bank of television channels constantly vying for attention in my mind – to chattiness, with a weakness for distraction and distracting everyone around her.
I shivered when I recalled the times my impulsiveness had driven me to lay sticky fingers on items in shops when no one was looking, my hands pouncing on anything – and later anyone – that took my fancy.
After going down the TikTok rabbit hole, I was able to name the extreme emotional pain I’d experienced throughout my life. Rejection sensitive dysphoria is a common symptom of ADHD that can imitate mood disorders and involve suicidal ideation and feelings of anger.
A massive apology for all the blows I’d inflicted was owed to my long-suffering family and husband. If only I, my parents and my teachers had had the benefit of these resources in the ’80s.
I thought of all the young girls living with undiagnosed ADHD. In the US, for example, boys are more than three times as likely to be diagnosed. American research also shows children from ethnic minorities are far more at risk of going undiagnosed.
How many girls are quietly despairing? Research suggests that adults with ADHD are far more likely to have attempted to take their own lives.
Identifying with a video on TikTok is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s when you actually start to seek help that reality bites.
Numerous parents have told me that when they mentioned they suspected their son or daughter had the condition, their suspicions were met by the child’s school at best with wariness, at worst with a reluctance even to discuss it, teachers having been cautioned by those in authority against any labelling of a child.
Many psychiatrists, including my own, are frustrated by this attitude too.
“It’s important that ADHD is addressed before it destroys a child’s self-esteem and has a negative impact on their entire experience of and performance at school,” Dr Mike McPhillips told me. It’s estimated that those with ADHD receive 20 000 negative messages by age 10 – so of course they’re bound to see themselves as fundamentally different and flawed ( just as I did).
Once ADHD is formally diagnosed, a child can get extra support in the classroom, equipped with strategies and tools to regulate their attention and motivation, from discreet “fidget strips” (pieces of velvet or scratchy fabric stuck under desks to entertain restless hands) to regular movement breaks.
It’s also only in being professionally diagnosed, of course, that a child can access the medication that years of studies have shown effectively and safely treats the disorder.
But the reality is that diagnosis is a privilege, and often a costly one. While I fell through the cracks as a child, I’m aware that I was fortunate enough to be able to afford to see a private psychiatrist to be diagnosed as an adult.
But before this happened, my husband and I’d spent thousands over the years on relationship counselling – according to some research, the divorce rate in couples affected by ADHD might be up to twice that of the general population.
AS TIME has gone on, however, I’m not only grateful to have made it through four decades in one piece, but I’ve also become aware of the upsides of having ADHD. It started with my parents who, despite often being flummoxed by the workings of my mind, didn’t give up on me until I’d found something at which I could thrive.
While I struggled at school, they observed that when I spoke different languages, my brain engaged in the unjumbling and sequencing of new verbs, adjectives and nouns; I was focused and flying. Mastery of French and Spanish came in useful when I pursued a career in journalism and documentary filmmaking.
The pressure of deadlines, the novelty of a new story and the intensity of filming conspired to make the career a great fit for what are (my psychiatrist informed
me) ADHD’s “superpower” traits.
“You’ve really managed to benefit from the upside of ADHD,” Dr McPhillips said in our intense first session.
While I thought my world was falling apart, he helped me to focus on the positives of my condition: creativity, tenacity and empathy.
With my “superpowers” engaged, I can join the dots and “think outside the box”. They enable me to spin new angles on what others dismiss as well-worn stories, and also mean I can be great at addressing a crisis.
My powers of persuasion are second to none: I’ve convinced a press secretary to grant me an exclusive interview with then US President Bill Clinton, the head of Colombia’s armed forces to lend me a helicopter to fly into a lost jungle city, and an air-traffic controller at an international airport to delay all take-offs until I’d finished filming an interview on her runway.
My own inner struggles have undoubtedly also enhanced my ability to empathise with the subjects of my work, who’ve often granted me access to their life story while denying it to others. ADHD brains thrive in professional kitchens and in the pursuit of entrepreneurial endeavours, too.
Indeed, Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal credits his with helping him dream up culinary magic tricks, and once out of the structured school system in which he struggled, Richard Branson has more than flourished.
Writer Emma Mahony embarked on a new career in teaching aged 53, when many of her contemporaries were thinking about retirement, which she puts down to “that engine inside us, powering our ADHD brains”.
There’s no doubt in my mind that my ADHD diagnosis was life-changing and life-saving; had the condition not been identified, I might simply have been prescribed antidepressants, which, failing to address the root of my inner turmoil, would likely have left me even more despairing.
Meanwhile my husband and I credit reading The ADHD Effect on Marriage with turning our relationship around in the year after my diagnosis. Through the book, author and marriage consultant Melissa Orlov, whose partner has ADHD, helped my husband understand that my inept loading of the dishwasher and inability to follow a recipe or read a map, were not, in fact, motivated by some warped desire to infuriate him, but that my brain is flummoxed by anything that involves more than two steps to completion.
With great personal anecdotes, Orlov manages to shift mindsets. “Yes,” she acknowledges, “the nonADHD partner might be legitimately angry and frustrated”, but as long as the conversation focuses around the disappointment they feel, the person with ADHD will simply become defensive, overwhelmed, angry and full of shame – emotions that doesn’t help get things done better.
Orlov suggests it’s far better for someone in my husband’s position to first vocalise the frustration, but then affirm that he’s focused on figuring out a plan to which both of us can contribute.
In the case of my relationship at least, the divvying up of household tasks – my husband taking on the tax return while I go to battle with the garden weeds – has worked wonders.
Given that I, like so many ADHD sufferers, procrastinate a lot – rarely getting down to work until a deadline looms – I’ve taken Orlov’s advice about breaking loathsome admin tasks into bite-sized chunks to avoid being overwhelmed.
My husband and children used to think I was mad running up and down stairs, whipping up clothes and lobbing them into a washing basket as the seconds counted down on my iPhone timer, but it was the only way to get through these mind-numbingly dull chores.
Thanks to Orlov, I ensure that our daily tasks are now highlighted on a schedule stuck to the fridge and then try, really hard, to stick to them. Yes, I might want to build a den with the kids in the sitting room on a Saturday morning – brilliant – but now I programme a time for it because otherwise before I know it, I’m down that rabbit hole, painting the Sistine Chapel on the sheets and – boom, it hits me – it’s midday and I haven’t got any idea what I’m going to feed them for lunch or dinner.
However, having all this advice is one thing – putting it into practice is another. Of course there are fraught days when I rip the schedule off the fridge, feel a bubbling rage and lose my cool with my calm and composed husband.
Despite the medication I take, which allows me to start and finish mundane tasks and order my days, I’m always aware that “it” is there. As a friend who’s in the same boat says, “It doesn’t let up. It demands constant work, managing, reining in, self-censoring – all of which can be exhausting. And at the end of the day you might find yourself collapsing – as you’ve been working four times harder to get things done.”
Yet for every me, and for every Blumenthal and Branson, there are millions who’ve never harnessed their ADHD superpowers, never discovering something that allows them to thrive.
A 2018 British report showed that underdiagnosis of ADHD means many people are unable to keep a regular job or work at all, a situation estimated to cost the country billions every year.
In addition, there’s the huge impact on the prison service to be taken into account – it’s estimated that up to 40% of the adult UK prison population could have untreated ADHD. People might often have been incarcerated for crimes committed impulsively or because they got into a fight when they couldn’t control their temper.
I’m intent on using my superpower traits to bust the stigmatisation of ADHD and other neurodivergent brains. If that entails a trip onto TikTok, then all the better.
‘MY BRAIN IS FLUMMOXED BY ANYTHING THAT INVOLVES MORE THAN TWO STEPS TO COMPLETION’