Post by hanonymouse on Jan 4, 2017 9:57:25 GMT
Hi All,
My name is ***** and I have ADHD. Yes, it's our "dirty little secret" and I'm not supposed to tell people about it. More so because I'm a business owner and it may have an effect on how my staff see me and may get in the way of winning new contracts. After all, who wants to do business with a person with "mental health" issues?
When the subject does come up, for example explaining why I'm taking medication and can't drink alcohol, or why I'm shaking because the medication has kicked in, I usually tell people I have "a neurological condition".
If I do dare to use the letters "ADHD", I usually get a look of horror, confusion. One guy even said "That's just a designer illness made up by drugs companies", clearly a Daily Mail reader. I felt like saying, "You f*cking live with it for a year and see if it's 'made up'". Others try to "understand" it and usually end up saying "But I can't concentrate sometimes", or "I have problems sticking with things", or "Yeah, when the kids are noisy, I can't think either". Trying to get them to understand that for squirrels (my name for ADDers), we have most of these problems, most of the time, not 'sometimes', and that our entire lives are affected by the problems we experience. We can't just "get a grip" or "knuckle down and do better", in fact, the harder we try to concentrate, the harder it actually is. Some who have done a little reading will point out that it's diagnosed lot more in the US than the UK and conveniently don't understand we have a p*ss poor ADHD service in the UK, or point out that in France it's very rare and usually dealt with through family therapy, so it must be a bad parenting issue!
Trying to explain to them that my brain lacks certain chemicals that regulate behaviours such as concentration and that my brain doesn't give me that little hit of dopamine when a task is complete just makes them glaze over and they just think I'm on anti depressants suffering from stress.
So, do you tell people you have ADHD? What do you tell them? How do you get them to understand that it's a real illness with a real effect on our lives?
I suspect that in some cases, my own in particular, there may be issues in up bringing which help bring the condition to the surface or make it worse, but I suspect that might not go down well on this forum
Would love to hear your thoughts and if you managed to get to the end of this post without doing 101 different things on the way...
My name is ***** and I have ADHD. Yes, it's our "dirty little secret" and I'm not supposed to tell people about it. More so because I'm a business owner and it may have an effect on how my staff see me and may get in the way of winning new contracts. After all, who wants to do business with a person with "mental health" issues?
When the subject does come up, for example explaining why I'm taking medication and can't drink alcohol, or why I'm shaking because the medication has kicked in, I usually tell people I have "a neurological condition".
If I do dare to use the letters "ADHD", I usually get a look of horror, confusion. One guy even said "That's just a designer illness made up by drugs companies", clearly a Daily Mail reader. I felt like saying, "You f*cking live with it for a year and see if it's 'made up'". Others try to "understand" it and usually end up saying "But I can't concentrate sometimes", or "I have problems sticking with things", or "Yeah, when the kids are noisy, I can't think either". Trying to get them to understand that for squirrels (my name for ADDers), we have most of these problems, most of the time, not 'sometimes', and that our entire lives are affected by the problems we experience. We can't just "get a grip" or "knuckle down and do better", in fact, the harder we try to concentrate, the harder it actually is. Some who have done a little reading will point out that it's diagnosed lot more in the US than the UK and conveniently don't understand we have a p*ss poor ADHD service in the UK, or point out that in France it's very rare and usually dealt with through family therapy, so it must be a bad parenting issue!
Trying to explain to them that my brain lacks certain chemicals that regulate behaviours such as concentration and that my brain doesn't give me that little hit of dopamine when a task is complete just makes them glaze over and they just think I'm on anti depressants suffering from stress.
So, do you tell people you have ADHD? What do you tell them? How do you get them to understand that it's a real illness with a real effect on our lives?
I suspect that in some cases, my own in particular, there may be issues in up bringing which help bring the condition to the surface or make it worse, but I suspect that might not go down well on this forum
Would love to hear your thoughts and if you managed to get to the end of this post without doing 101 different things on the way...