AD/HD
In this article, I describe how I came to discover that I have AD/HD, and recount some of the struggles that I went through before getting diagnosed with it. I am only just beginning my journey of getting treated for it, having been put on 20mg of Adderall XR (click here for my preliminary thoughts on this drug), and hopefully the account that I describe here will afford someone else the assurance of knowing that this developmental disorder doesn’t need to wreak havoc on your life. So while it’s never too late to be diagnosed, erring on the side of caution, and of an improved livelihood, is obviously best, and, hence, you really need to act early!
I am 23, about to turn 24. I am currently in my second year of Ph.D. studies in philosophy at a top 20 university in the U.S, and was very recently diagnosed with ADHD. Already you’re thinking: can’t possibly be a sufferer of ADHD, right? Well, I wish I was fibbing, but I’m not. And since I notice there is a tendency among certain types to be suspicious whenever a new ADHD diagnosis is associated with either a high achiever or an adult, I hope this introduction to the circumstances of my discovery that I have ADHD might do a little to dispel that notion.
So, here’s my story, in 3 sentences, of my life before I was diagnosed at said university (obviously, I will be cheating with a few judicious uses of the semicolon):
(1) I’ve always been a very average student, and out of high school, applied to 1 university, surprisingly got in, where I proceeded to almost flunk out my first semester.
(2) The next semester, and all semesters following, I discovered caffeine, and its ability to boost my mental endurance, so I literally took like 20 a day (I started out with 3 or 4 a day, but gradually built up tolerance to them); I got my grades way, way up in 2 semesters, and then transferred to a different university, where I continued with the same regimen my 3 years there.
(3) I graduated summa cum laude there, with highest honors from the philosophy department (ranked in top 3 in the world), and, took something like 5 caffeine pills right before I took, and aced, the GRE (99% in verbal and analytical writing sections, 80% in math section, compared to my straight ~80% scores on my SATs, which I took without caffeine); and ended up at a prestigious Ph.D. program as a result.
Surely there was a difference-maker somewhere in there, right? Yes, you guessed right - it was the caffeine! So what made me go to the doctor to see if I had ADHD, if I had apparently stumbled on a miracle drug? Well (and here I pull some content from a blogpost I made about it two weeks ago), it’s something I’ve always suspected I might have, if I thought it was real. And I started to think it was real when I began this year to register the fact that, while caffeine helped with my mental endurance, it didn’t help at all to manage my attentiveness. That explained why I was staying up 20 hours in a row, spending 20 hours reading a 20 page article, day by day.
After going through all the physical and mental hardships I went through this last year in grad school, despite the caffeine, just to stay afloat in my department, and acknowledging the fact that the only reason I graduated with all the honors that I did, was because of the inordinate amount of caffeine pills I ingested daily, I was finally all too eager to accept that I might have it, and that if it’s a real condition, I’m its best example.
So I went to the doctor, did all those standard tests, and my suspicions were confirmed. I had, apparently, an attention deficit much worse than even most ADHD sufferers. Essentially, there was a 17 point gap measured between my intellectual ability and processing speed compared to the normative population. That is, my general intelligence was 17 percentage points higher than my processing speed.
After I was diagnosed, I was able to breathe a half- and heavy-hearted sigh of relief. Everything made sense now. My impatience and restlessness, and how marginally effectively the solutions I came up with helped to curtail them. That though I often impressed upon others a sort of bookish brilliance, I was acutely aware of the fact that I merely compensated for my extraordinarily wandering fancy by staying up much longer than them, often pulling 3 or 4 overnighters in a row. This was the trick to doing well on my assignments and exams. I figured those days that I could do the same throughout grad school, and that probably, there was nothing too abnormal about it.
But actually being in grad school has multiplied my struggles to a degree no non-lethal amount of caffeine can help to alleviate. Sure, I can stay up long, but when I am faced with 80 pages to read per class per day, and I can only read and retain information at a rate of 1 page an hour, there is a real problem here. As an undergrad, usually, we were assigned 20 pages between classes per class, often less. Basically, grad school has helped me to see the monster below the surface. It’s a little late, but not irremediably late.
As I walked out of my doctor’s office, he said something that struck me keenly: “There’s something special, Torrey, about your case - that you managed to turn out so well. Because your life has been much harder than it otherwise would have been, had you been diagnosed much earlier.” Special, of course, in an ambivalent sense: on the one hand, it is a testament to my character that I didn’t drop out of high school or college despite my struggles; on the other, my life has not been optimal. You don’t have to live this alternate possibility.
So I leave you with this advice: if you suspect that you have AD/HD because of lifelong struggles with staying focused, go see your doctor right now!
Last updated: 7/10/2011
