I'm diagnosed with adult ADHD, ask me anything.

[BertieBotts]

Note to HQ - if you do decide to make a section for these feel free to move to appropriate section.

Note to those sick of these threads - sorry I can't resist a bandwagon and it's Sunday night with not much going on.

I had CBT which helped me to develop some of my coping strategies but I was following a book (I have no idea what it was now, sorry) which kept emphasising that the programme was meant to be used with medication and I wasn't on it so I think that didn't help.

There is a large element of wanting to learn to manage it better - different people have different levels of this because obviously we're all different but I suppose also based on how your life experiences have been due to it? I've always felt like there was something I was missing at least since I was 16 or so, I just had no idea what it was, so it was in many ways a relief to find out that it is a legitimate issue and not just me being rubbish, and that's motivated me to want to work out how to work with it but also DH has been incredible at supporting and helping me to do those things. And because I spend a lot of time on MN which is a female, and particularly mother, dominated site there are a lot of posts about partners who don't pull their weight and so I'm REALLY conscious of how draining this is in a way that I think most men even when they don't have ADHD are just completely oblivious to.

If you have more specific things you want to know how to cope with/manage/understand I might be able to help more because I feel like partly I don't really know every single internal process DH has which makes him not kill me or leave but also there are lots of things I could write but it was already getting really long, so I stopped.

back to mnxnt

Russell Barkley's talks on youtube are my #1 recommendation for anybody who wants to know how ADHD affects how they or a loved one will usually process things, BTW. They are ridiculously long, but stick the audio on while you do the ironing and listen in chunks. Nobody can explain it like he can and that's probably the biggest thing which has helped me learn where I need to put strategies in place.

Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to get an insight into ADHD from someone with the condition. Lots of food for thought here in considering my son (whose special interest is animation btw.) Wishing you all the best for the future.

We're moving this over to AMA now.

Ah thanks Lorna :)

I have a friend who has ADHD and he is finding that supplementing with magnesium l-threonate (basically magnesium but a particular type) is helping with clarity . Just in case its useful in future

Hi Bertie. I have recently thought that I may have ADHD - thanks to previous discussions on MN - and it also seems likely that one of my DCs has it too. So much of what you say resonates with how I feel but you have put it into words far more eloquently than I could! It is really encouraging to see how positively you seem to deal with something that is often viewed so negatively. You seem to have a great understanding of yourself which has to be a good thing!

You mentioned that you do not take medication Do you think that if you had been diagnosed when you were younger you would have tried medication or would you have used similar strategies to the ones that you use now?