ADHD manifests differently in girls and they’re usually able to mask it more.
I’m not sure to what extent it’s actually manifesting differently or being masked better than institutional bias against the idea of women having ADHD - diagnoses are about 3x more rare for women…
If I've understood what I've read over the years correctly, a large percentage of girls with it get diagnosed bipolar, completely missing the underlying ADHD cause of the depression/anxiety. This can turn into an absolute horrid experience as they get prescribed strong drugs that can really mess you up if you don't need them, and they most likely don't.
I think it is at least in part due to it manifesting differently. This is slightly different because it pertains to autism, but a while back I read about how one of the theories of why autism seems to be lower prevalence is girls is because the social norms of girls/boys are different. For example, young boys tend to socialise with team sports, which can be highly reliant on non-verbal communication. In contrast, because neurotypical girls are (implicitly and explicitly) taught to take on caring roles, an autistic girl is more likely to be "taken under the wing" of a neurotypical girl, providing more opportunities to develop social skills via social mimicry.
I'm just one autistic woman, but this certainly scanned with my lived experience. As a result of this, I wasn't diagnosed until my teens, after a full on mental breakdown led to a psych eval.
I agree with you that institutional bias plays a huge role: I had a partner who had ADHD and was diagnosed quite young. When we discussed our experiences of the early years of school, I was struck by how similar our experiences were in terms of our behaviour, but how he was read as being a naughty boy (which is what led to his much earlier diagnosis) whereas my distractibility and fidgeting was seen as either me being unstimulated in class, or anxious. I think I'd have probably been diagnosed way sooner if I were a boy acting as I did.
But what's really interesting to speculate on is the way that my behaviour and understanding of my self changed over the years, as a result of that institutional bias. I think that there's a self reinforcing cycle at play, where an institutional bias leads to women and girls with ADHD (and/or autism) developing a particular set of masking skills that makes them further illegible to the systems that dispense diagnoses (which then reinforces said institutional bias).
That being said, I've noticed a lot of progress in recent years on this front, especially in the community. My friend is a high school teacher who almost certainly has ADHD but is on the very long waitlist for an actual diagnosis. Despite not having a diagnosis, understanding herself better has helped her to cope better in her life, and through community and solidarity, feels that she is better equipped to understand and support neurodivergent students in her classroom. People like my friend are one of the ways that the reinforcing cycle of institutional bias, even if progress on that front is slow.
It can manifest itself in the same way for men but it is usually then never discovered untill maybe much late in life when you have someone with depression and anxiety coming to the doctor's who may also miss the fact that it could be ADHD
Literally me
Tried a bunch of anxiety meds that didn't work, tried some antidepressants that didn't work, got a different doctor and they were like "I think you might have ADHD".
8 months later got an appointment and talked to the doc for an hour and got a new prescription for ADHD meds, and my life has massively improved since.
NGL I think getting that diagnosis may have been one of the best things to have happened in my life. I just wish I didn't have to wait I til I was 29 to get it.
Raises hand
Able to, forced to, I mean what’s the difference amirite? This coming from a dude who has often felt like people treat me worse for it but has seen just how nasty people can get with women for the same thing.
No
I hate it when people say “[person] is ADHD”. A person is not a disease. If someone has cancer, do you say “my aunt is cancer”? Weird and insulting.
From the autistic side of things, a lot of us dislike “has autism” or “person with autism” because it implies there’s a hidden, non-autistic person underneath the autism. Not everyone feels this way of course, but for people that do they may transfer that way of speaking onto other things like ADHD as well.
Since ADHD is also a neurodevelopmental condition, it’s less ‘transfer’ and more just the same notion for a different condition.
Otherwise, yeah, this. I’m ADHD because it is a part of me. I can take medicines to help it, but it is the way I am.
Interesting, thanks for sharing a different view on this. I can understand that. For ADHD it’s the same of course, you can’t separate your personality from it. A question like “Would you like to have not had ADHD/autism?” makes no sense, because then we would have been entirely different people.
I’ve never heard someone say “I am autism” or “[person] is autism” though, like people seem to do with ADHD. In the case of autism, what would you use instead of people-first language?
ADHD isn't a disease...
You made an even worse error with that, IMO. I agree with what you're trying to say, but you failed horribly at doing so.
Kill her kid, all ADHD gone.
"I'm so OCD". You ARE obsessive compulsive disorder?
Yeah, you don't say "I am diabetes/cancer/leprosy".
I’ve personally only seen that used by dumbasses who just liked to keep their stuff organized and who had no idea what a devastating condition real OCD can be.
No but you do say "I'm diabetic" which uses diabetes as sort of identity within the sentence structure.
Similarly "I'm a cancer survivor" and "I'm a cancer patient" are ways someone with cancer could structure a sentence to give weight to the way cancer and the experiences of cancer fundamentally change this person's personality and identity.
While "I am ADHD" isn't perfect, it's a very new use of language to try and create an identity form, and it will continue to evolve and sound more natural.
Personally I still find myself saying "I'm autistic and I have ADHD" in most situations, but if I know I won't have to explain the term too much, I do prefer "I'm AuDHD", because it's an identity first phrase, and it feels as natural as "I'm autistic" or "I'm diabetic".
But the difference grammatically between "I'm autistic" and "I'm ADHD" is minimal, yet I agree one sounds fine and the other just sounds stupid. And other than exposure, I can't place my finger on why.
Funny how this works but yet I got diagnosed as an adult THEN my brother got diagnosed haha. We do everything backwards.
how can someone be an adhd
If parents are declaring one child as diagnosed but not another it’s because they went to health professionals and respected their diagnoses. Your attitude is gross, toxic, and harmful.
That's a lot of assumptions there bud
Not to mention that neurodivergence in girls and women is severely underdiagnosed due to differences In manifestation combined with hegemonic standardizations and diagnostic norms.
Female-bodied people show different symptoms and may be more commonly dismissed as “quirky behavior”.
So your assumptions that one is tested and the other wasn’t may, in fact, be just as “gross and harmful” as this user accuses someone else to be.
When I was 8, my 4 year old brother, 40 year old father, and 35 year old uncle whom I lived with all went to get screened for autism after my brother's pre-school recommended it.
3/4 of us walked out with autism diagnoses.
I was given the official psychiatric assessment that I had "learned and developed autistic traits and mannerisms due to growing up in a household with no neurotypical influence" and the advice was that I would grow out of it once I made enough "normal" friends at school.
My brother started occupational therapy and other programs, and at each one, the practitioner would recommend to my dad that I join too to "help her brother feel safe and comfortable" and I would litteraly participate in the Autism therapy programs with my autistic brother.
Over my years at school, I picked up official diagnoses for dyscalculia and dyspraxia and that explained a few of the struggles I was having. The autism OT I was already doing covered support for my learning disabilities so nothing except the paperwork changed.
And sure enough, I made neurotypical friends at school, and a lot of the autistic-like traits I exhibited as a kid were no longer apparent in my behaviour.
I had a lot of mental health issues as a teenager and young adult. But what millennial isn't depressed and anxious? I was growing up with 3 autistic men as a teenage girl, I rationalised that my dysfunctional emotional state was justified by my life circumstances. I was a dramatic teen.
Hearing and visual impairment, and other physical health issues with muscle tone, and struggles to heal due to poor proprioception that got worse in my 30s somehow lead to a re-assesment for autism as an adult.
Big fucking suprise. I'm autistic. Always have been.
Sometimes health professionals don't get the full picture. They're human.
My presentation is drastically different from my male family members, and I was parentified by my fathers autism from a young age - I remember being as young as 10 and my dad saw my ability to blend and socialise, he'd send me into stores or get me to make phone calls for him if he was having anxiety over it. This was not something that was discussed at the time of my first assessment.
My special interest was, and still is, anthropology. I maintain that loving the study of humanity and human culture means I've been able to intellectualise my way through social situations that neurotypicals feel their way through on instinct. I suspect I've done this from a young age, and that this further muddied the waters for that psychiatrist who assessed me when I was 12.
If I'd gotten reassessed in my later teens, or early 20s, I'm certain the result of the assessment would have been different then to, even with the same psychiatrist. You get 4 hours with a perfect stranger,just on some random day, and they're supposed to make an assessment on your entire life?
We trusted their assessment, which is why I fumbled through life for 20+ years under the assumption I could learn my way out of feeling autistic.
Trust your healthcare professionals, but remember that they're human, and second opinions are important, especially if you're struggling with the treatment plan, or lack thereof, from the first doctor.
