Ok, I'm not even sure if I'm on the right thread here, but here goes.
DS3 is at university but he's doing very little work, and the work he does do is always really late, he procrastinates & gets very anxious. He has trouble with other stuff as well: keeping on top of rent, chores, self-care. I've got a pretty good idea of what's 'normal for students'; my two older DSs had fairly typical times at uni, fairly disorganised, coming home with tons of washing etc - but they did enough work, and did well.
DS3 has no regular 'sleeping pattern' whatsoever, though it tends towards sleeping all day and - I suspect - playing online games all night. He scraped through his first year somehow, after a major crisis. I'm really worried he's going to run up a big student debt and not even get a degree out of 2 or 3 years' struggle. He's doing a subject that really interests him, yet every time DP or I ask how the work's going (we're very careful not to harp on), he says, haven't done any.
I think he has inattentive ADHD of some form; he's had other behaviours that point towards it - eg inability to organise himself; poor sense of time & place; dependence on others to tell him what to do, where to go; difficulty both starting projects and finishing them; fidgeting & fiddling with objects a lot; no sense of danger when crossing roads. I don't really understand ADHD, I'm Googling and trying to deal with all the acronyms, EFD, PDA, some of which seem to fit his behaviour one week, then not the next. I'm also finding quite a lot of traits that fit my own behaviour, both now & when I was his age.
He has no ADHD diagnosis - he won't go to the GP and talk about it.
He did quite well at school; always worked much better in a classroom than at home, but we put that down to the multitude of distractions at home.
I feel for him so much, but what has really surprised me is how much his behaviour is affecting me. I've tried, but I can hardly talk to him about this now. When I try to understand, he just gets super-moody and tells me "you don't understand". I can hardly bear to hear conversations between DP & DS; when the subject of work comes up & he says he isn't doing so well (which is usually code for 'not done anything at all'), my mood plummets & I feel the stress start to grip me.
How do I help him? - or can't I? I just want him to be happy, but dropping out of uni would hit him hard, I know. And how do I help myself not to get so depressed about it?