Tag Archives: mental health

Being diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s | Part One – Why?

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The first time I properly read about ADHD, I was trawling the internet, trying to work out why I couldn’t concentrate on my copywriting job in a bustling open plan office. I’d casually mentioned to my fellow copywriters how hard I found it to focus, and they looked at me with kind, sympathetic, but confused expressions. They definitely didn’t seem to struggle the way I did – they’d tune in and out of conversations with the rest of the creative team seamlessly, and often when working on a big chunk of work, they didn’t even wear headphones. I, on the other hand, was at my wit’s end after three months.

I felt like the only time I could actually concentrate was after people had started to filter out of the office after half 4, and I would get all my work done in that last hour of the day. So I started forcing myself out of bed at 6, to get to work for before 8, so I could have an hour or so before the office filled up. I was getting about 4 hours of sleep a night because no matter how exhausted I was, I would always get distracted on my way to bed. And my home life was a shambles. My partner James was working full time and studying for a master’s degree, so he had absolutely no free time, and I just could not handle managing the house – which was embarrassing, given we lived in a 400sqft flat and I was a fully grown adult.

I was on the verge of breaking down completely – I was wrecked physically, mentally and emotionally, but the thing is, this wasn’t the first time. In fact, I’d spent the year before I got that job working from home as a sporadic freelancer, specifically because a similar (though less intense) thing had happened to me in the job before. And before that? The same again, and before that was university, where my struggles were experienced a little differently. I was in a cycle of trying something new, liking it for a while, then becoming overwhelmed and bored at the same time, breaking down, having a rest, and going again, each time getting steadily more and more burnt out at the end of it.

At school, the term system, with long and frequent holidays was probably the only reason I made it to adulthood, because I NEEDED those breaks. It wasn’t that I hated school – in fact learning is something that sustains me like nothing else. It was because I was constantly trying to corral my brain into listening to my teachers, being stressed from getting to the end of lesson after lesson and realising I hadn’t paid attention to any of it, the time constraints, doing what I was told when most of the time I felt compelled to be doing something else. My greatest fear was getting into trouble – so I never let anyone know that I was fed up, or that I hadn’t listened, and I would never express my frustration or boredom outwardly. Because I was a teacher’s pet, I was often privy to conversations that the adults at school deemed me ‘mature’ enough to hear – things like their opinions on children who were disruptive, I even remember one being particularly derisive about a fellow pupil’s recent ADHD diagnosis! That exposure reinforced the shame, fear and embarrassment I felt about my secret inability to concentrate on my lessons.

I was determined that no one would ever know I wasn’t paying attention, because I’d heard what adults said to children who weren’t performing well – “you must try harder”, “you have to listen better”. But I dreaded that, because I knew I was already trying my hardest to pay attention, and it wasn’t happening. I felt like if someone said those words to me it would be all over – I would be a confirmed failure. I couldn’t hide it to begin with though – I took ages to learn to read and write, and for the first years of school I was in a remedial class for maths. When I eventually learned these skills, I soon caught up, became a total praise-hog, and ended up with such accolades as getting the ‘most merits’ in a school year, and being in the local paper for my GCSE and A Level results.

What I know now is that throughout my life I’ve been relying on quick wittedness to ‘fill in the gaps’ and ‘work stuff out’ when I haven’t been paying attention – which is why back when I was a tiny child, a knower of nothing, I didn’t fare very well. It still happens. In conversations at work, when socialising, and at home, I’ve learned to fake listening so well that people have no idea my mind is elsewhere. I can glean a few words here and there, and pretty much work out what someone is talking about. By the time it’s my turn to contribute, I’d be able to offer insight or feedback and people are none the wiser that I’m doing it based off of about three sentences. Would you believe I’ve often been complimented on what a good listener I am? It’s true. This, I’m aware, makes me sound like the worst person ever. I know how bad it sounds, but the shame I felt is one of the reasons I kept all these struggles to myself. I didn’t have the vocabulary or ability to express that I couldn’t listen to people, because it was such a humiliating secret for me. Now that I know, I have felt empowered to ask people to repeat stuff, or to request that we get into a setting where I can concentrate better (such as being free to move and fidget).

The thing about ADHD that a lot of people don’t understand is that it’s not actually a ‘deficit’ of attention. That term is based solely on what it looks like on the outside – of course if someone isn’t paying attention to you, it’s understandable that you think they’re lacking attention. But people with ADHD actually have an overabundance of attention – the issue is that we don’t possess the same ability to direct where our attention goes. ADHD attention is a powerful, wild and untamed thing. It’s a bit like bodies of water. Someone without ADHD has attention that behaves like a river – it can be redirected, it flows evenly, it can get a little rambunctious at times, but for the most part, it’s a stable enough entity that you can safely build a whole town on its banks. ADHD attention is the north sea. You never know what it’s going to do next, it’s rough, powerful and destructive, but also awe-inspiring. Good luck building anything on it – your foundations could be swept away by a ten minute squall. Neither one of these attention types is worse than the other, we’d never say “why can’t the north sea be more like the river thames”. We accept them for what they are. Just as we should accept attention diversity.

There are several reasons why things came to a head when I was in that copywriter job, but in terms of realising I had ADHD, the primary one is that it was the busiest environment I’d ever worked in – and a job I thought I wanted to do for years. The overwhelm of the office and the unexpected boredom despite my initial excitement when I was hired meant that I couldn’t hide or ignore the issues I was having anymore. When I started researching, I was looking for tips on how to concentrate in a busy office, but pretty soon stuff started coming up about ADHD. I started reading, and as I learned more, every example I’ve written in this blog post (and much more) flooded my mind. The way that ADHD is diagnosed in adults is by checking off criteria from a list called the DIVA (Diagnostic InterView in Adults) – and evidence from both childhood and adulthood must be present. As I read through the criteria, I realised I had memories and specific examples for all of them, from every single stage of my life. And for the first time, I realised my secret shame might not be so shameful, and might not need to stay so secret.

This is the first part of my story about how I ended up with an ADHD diagnosis in my 30s – I hope it was interesting for you, and if you’re going through something similar right now feel free to reach out! And please check back for the next part – I’m intending to make this into three parts, the second one on how I ended up getting an assessment, and the third on the assessment itself.

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What we’re getting wrong about nature and mental health

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The May rain is warm, pattering gently on the roof of the nearby greenhouse. As I tip the seedling out of its pot and into my hand, small water droplets land on my skin, and the smell of wet ground fills my nose. Nothing else exists but me, this little marigold, and the freshly dug hole that is about to become its home. The usual cacophony of negative voices that live in my head – panicking, criticising, doubting, ruminating – they are silent, watching the plant as my hands tap it down and smooth out the soil around its stem.

There is so much discussion about the healing power of nature, how houseplants boost your mood, how gardening can help with depression, how nature walks can ease anxiety. I don’t disagree with any of it (obviously…) but I do think we’re missing some important issues in our conversations about nature, plants and mental health. Since it’s Mental Health Awareness Month, I thought now would be the time to share some of these thoughts.

(Dressing up as Mother Nature to add authority to my point)

So, what is it that we’re getting ‘wrong’ exactly?

When you read articles about the impact that spending time in a forest has on your stress levels, there’s always something else lurking in the same sentence – the concept of productivity. Everything circles back to the idea that we are only worth what we produce, and what our money can buy. It’s not just workplaces that push this idea – so much advice I read, articles extolling the virtues of nature, they all seem to come back to this idea that the primary benefit of nature is that it makes us more productive. This couldn’t be more wrong. We should be looking after our mental health to become happier, calmer, more at ease, more joyful – not because these things make us more useful, but simply because that’s how everyone deserves to feel. Even when it isn’t mentioned explicitly, it’s almost always implied – employers don’t set up gardens for their employees for the sake of being nice – the expectation is that productivity will increase as a result. And if it doesn’t? That groundskeeping budget won’t be coming back next year! Not only is this a sign that our attitude towards mental health and nature is flawed, it’s also a sign that our understanding of nature itself is completely disconnected from reality. We’re ignoring the message that the natural world spells out for us every single time we engage with it – living things have needs, and if they’re failing to thrive, their needs aren’t being met.

Every single living organism experiences life differently. Some plants will grow anywhere, even literal concrete – others need special soil before they’ll even consider growing a millimetre. Some plants need protection from the wind, others will forget how to grow if you don’t expose them to a good breeze. It doesn’t matter what we think about their growing requirements – if we want to enjoy that plant, we have to respect its needs.

Put a plant in the wrong soil and the leaves will turn yellow. Don’t give it enough light and branches will die off. Forget to water it enough and it won’t flower. Neglect to give it the right company and won’t produce fruit. You mess with a plant, and it makes its dissatisfaction clear. That’s not to say that plants can’t be grown in inhospitable conditions, but if we want a plant to do something that it wouldn’t usually be able to, we have to put a LOT of effort into making it happen. The work that goes into forcing early rhubarb, or producing chrysanthemums for bouquets, or keeping desert plants happy in a dark home is enormous, and its necessary – a plant is a product of its environment, you get out what you put in. And this can be extended to larger natural examples too – gardens, forests, meadows and so on. You get the picture.

So what does this have to do with us?

Hopefully the analogy I’m making is clear. When you’re given an unrealistic deadline at work, and stress yourself out to meet it, what is your employer doing to help you to make that happen? When we grow plants, if we want to benefit from whatever it is that they produce, we have to take away every possible stressor so that the plant can do its thing. Why do we think we’re any different? We constantly expect ourselves to be up and about at the same time every day, as productive in the morning as we are in the afternoon, as energetic on Thursday in December as we are on Saturday in July. We’ll skip a meal and then be shocked when we can’t concentrate. What part of our bodies are so different to a plant’s that we can somehow pour from an empty cup, when we have endless examples of plants resolutely not being able to do that?

Capitalism is the reason that we constantly expect ourselves to be consistently over-productive. Our society is obsessed with more, more, more. Massive, endless productivity. The concept of ‘doing less’ is almost heretic. Employers will tell you they care about your mental health, but pay you a wage that means you can never truly feel secure. For those of us who are doing ok, the threat of poverty hangs over our heads as a stick that capitalism beats us with – but imagine if you told a plant “I’m not watering you unless you produce another flower”? And for those who are struggling, under or near the poverty line, capitalism tells them it’s their fault for not working hard enough – “If you’d made nicer flowers I would have given you more water”.

We need to take this into account when we talk about nature and mental health, because nothing will ever truly change if we don’t address the way society is currently set up. Being burned out and stressed, constantly being bombarded with advertising for things that will ‘make us happy’, being told over and over again that it’s individual, not corporate or governmental responsibility that will make a difference in the world. This is what needs to change for us to finally have a chance at realising our potential for love, happiness and satisfaction. Humans are resilient little plants, doing our best to grow in the wasteland of an unsustainably consumerist system, which tells us that because we’re just about managing to grow in their hellscape, we’re responsible for perpetuating it, and we’re responsible for how well we do in it. If one of us says “Actually, this wasteland is making things really hard for my roots to grow” the capitalist farmer will tell us “Well the plant next to you is fine, stop being pathetic.” Of course, we all know that the plant next to you is probably struggling just as much.

Humans are not here to be farmed for their productivity. We cannot repackage nature into a neat little ‘apply to the affected area’ salve for employers to use to make us work better. That is not what our existence is about. Let’s embrace more than just our ability to nurture, protect and grow plants, and apply that phenomenal human skill to ourselves too.

Stress, eczema and Eau Thermale Avène

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I’m not going to go into much detail about why I abandoned this blog (a blog that I was really quite proud of to be honest) for six months. What I will say however, is that about two months ago I woke up to an itchy rash all over my torso. Having never seen anything like it before, I was horrified. Apart from dry hands I haven’t had any issues with the skin on my body at all. I ran off to my doctor immediately, and was diagnosed with eczema. When I told the doctor that this was the first time I’d had it, he seemed confused. Was I under any particular stress, he asked.

After I described to him exactly what kind of stress I was under, he sent me off with a steroid cream prescription, an IAPT appointment and instructions to come back if it got any worse. Suffice to say, I am coming out of this experience MUCH stronger, and FAR wiser.

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As I walked from the GP’s to get the prescription, my skin was on fire. I sent my boyfriend a text screaming for help, and he suggested a bath. What on earth was I supposed to put in a bath when I had this all over me? Everything I use is full of essential oils something you should never put on eczema. Lucky for me, my lovely local pharmacist knew exactly what I needed. Eau Thermale Avène Lipid Replenishing Cleansing Oil.

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I put about five pumps of this into a mildly warm bath, and my skin was so, so soothed. The irritation went right down, and I actually didn’t need to use very much steroid cream at all. I used the Cleansing Oil for about two weeks in the shower after that, by squeezing it onto a sponge and using it like soap. It foams up really nicely, and leaves the skin feeling clean and soft.

If you’re struggling with your skin I can’t recommend it highly enough. The soothing nature is incredible, I found that my skin felt calmer as soon as I rubbed it on. I’m so happy I had it.

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Since my skin healed quite quickly, I wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of the bottle (you get a LOT for your money). Then one night I ran out of the makeup wipes I’d been using. I thought this stuff, being so gentle, must be ok for use on the face, and boy was I right! My waterproof mascara melted away after I lathered up twice. So if you decide to try the Cleansing Oil for a pesky skin condition, (which it then ends up curing) I highly recommend using the rest as a makeup remover.

I was having a rough time, and I would like to take a end by saying that IAPT stands for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, and is the NHS’s attempt to make sure people can get help when they first need it. If you’re struggling with something in your life, and haven’t gone to a doctor about it, you CAN now. This initiative is designed to prevent irreparable damage being done to your mental health, and no matter how mild you think your problem is, they have something in place for you.