“You can’t have ADHD, Miss. You’re smart.”

“You’re too organised to have ADHD.”

There are more. People who genuinely dismiss the idea as though I’m being silly.

Then recently, I came across this; “ADHD is not an excuse; it is an explanation — a totally physiological explanation,” Dr. Littman says. “The smarter you are and the better you compensate, the more people will doubt you. The harder you struggle to cope, staying up late at night to pull things together, the more people will doubt your ADHD. They don’t see that the cost of your success is terrible depression, anxiety, and burnout.”

Dr. Littman pretty much nails it. People don’t see the worst of ADHD because those of us who have it cover it up as best we can. Why? Because given that so few people understand the condition (or even believe in the condition), the inevitable outcome when they see ADHD behaviours is the labelling – lazy, stupid, reckless, unmotivated, undisciplined, ‘blonde’, rude, stubborn, weird, anti-social etc. And who wants to be seen in this way?

So ADHDers try their best to act ‘neurotypical’, succeed a lot of the time and with no need for understanding, compassion or sympathy being deemed necessary are thus locked into that pattern of trying their bums off, and weeping quietly on their own in private when they fall in a heap every once in a while.

This is why advocacy and education is so important.