Telling people about my diagnosis | ADHD Information

 I had my official diagnosis in third grade, meaning I was 9 years old.  I have spent a considerable amount of time since then convincing myself that the specialist was a quack.  That everyone was wrong about me.  Then i began my career as a rehabilitation worker helping people with both mental and physical disabilities as I was in school and we were learning about all the different disabilities when we started to talk about ADHD it all started to make sense and i have now excepted my diagnoses and excepted tath it is a part of me. I decided that was no longer something i was going to hide, that it was no secret and everyone was allowed to know. Imagine my shock and discomfort when people who find out try to convince me that I do not have it. I get very frusterated because most people have a wealth of misinformation when it comes to this topic and truthfully most of us have at least one thing we are intensly interested in and we are good at.  So no you may not notice when I am at work, you can discount some of the strange things i do as quirks... but spend some time with me in my home and you will soon know what I am talking about. I just I am very frusterated with the response of most people who tend to view ADHD as an excuse for bad or lazy behaviour. I geuss i was just wondering if anyone else had a similar experience.

Hi AMYP:

Unfortunately people believe the propaganda about ADHDwithout understanding the facts.  ADHD is one of the most researched childhood "diseases".  I put diseases in quotes because in my opinion the problem is us it is that we fail to conform to many of societies standards.  Some of us hyper focus on things, or can't focus at all at meetings or things that are really repetitive.  Our brains work differently.  It is not bad or good it just is.

The rest of the world is not prepared for us.  We may use medications and or therapy to help us cope with fitting in. 

Anyway, these are just my thoughts.

This sort of thing runs so true that when you finally get the diagnosis, the only thing that lays heavy after all that time is being boxed when you decide the time is right. my parents, when I told them I was going for diagnosis told me just that - ADHD was small boys who couldn't behave themselves, like a particular family friend's small son. Its not true at all, obviously. ADHD still has the stigma and non understanding that Dyslexia still had in the early 20th century. People need educating generally, and who knows how to do it without the right PR?

I have found essentially the same thing... folks out there carry around a very simplistic, one-dimensional picture of what adhd is.  Hell, I carried around the same understanding up until I was diagnosed as an adult!   So, I haven't bothered telling very many people at work.   Those few that I have I've chosen carefully and did so because I know they've been puzzled by some of my adhd quirks over the years, so I was able to offer these as examples of how adhd affects me.  But for the rest, I don't bother telling because, as you point out, they are skeptical at best, which puts me in the situation of feeling I need to defend my assertion of having adhd and give them the "ADHD 101" lesson.   I'd rather not!    But then, sometimes, I figure if we with ADHD don't step up and educate our fellow adults, aren't we guilty of perpetuating the myth that ADHD is an affliction of little boys that bounce off walls?