ADhD Awareness Day

Today is Attention Deficit (Hyperactive) Disorder Awareness Day.

It’s amazing that this even got organized! J

Aware? Doesn’t that mean I have to be paying attention?

ADD shows up differently in women than in men. I think this was one of the reasons it took so long for someone to first recognize that I had it. Yes, it was by a teacher. However, she never taught me in a classroom. It was when my mum went to a seminar on ADD to recognize it in her students and instead she recognized it in her own family.

I was just always considered a good student who just didn’t apply herself - so much so that I almost didn’t graduate from high school on time! I always wondered if I had been disruptive in class, instead of daydreaming and not saying much, would they have looked for a learning disability? I also have to remind myself that it wasn’t a commonly known thing when I was in school, especially without the hyperactivity.

There is a link to estrogen and the effects of it on the ADD brain. I’m beginning to think that this is why I am having trouble reading books. While the unmedicated me of elementary/jr high school was an avid bookworm, the adult unmedicated me is now dealing with other things going on in the body and brain and cannot do the hyperfocus of reading anymore. The irony; someone wrote a book about it – but I haven’t read it.

For those of you who want to check out library books about ADD, here’s a warning: at the Seattle library I tried checking out a book on the topic. It said there were seven copies. But when I tried to put it on hold, I found out that all seven copies were lost. Yup, sounds about right.

Some of my favorite books on the topic:

Understanding Women with AD/HD by Kathleen Nadeau & Patricia Quinn

Women with ADD by Sari Solden

Healing ADD by Daniel Amen - This one describes 6 different types of ADD. There is a quiz to figure out which type you are. You take the quiz and then someone who knows you well also takes the quiz, answering questions about you. He describes the different types and what works best for them, down to which meds are best for which type of ADD you have. According to this, I have Frontal-Lobe ADD. And the meds that I found the most success with were exactly the ones that were listed for this type.

Books that Help:

ADD Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life by Judith Kolberg & Kathleen Nadeau

View from the Cliff by Lynn Weiss

http://www.addresources.org/ This is where I found an adult-ADD support group in Seattle. There is a side-support group that meets at the same time for civilian-spouses. Unfortunately they meet at the same time I usually am doing a show. It’s only once a month, which means I get to a meeting once every four months.

There are great new gadgets to help people – some are good even for civilians (that’s non-ADD people).

The ADD-Planner. http://www.addplanner.com/index2.html

I don’t know if it is this one or another program that won’t let you do other things on your computer until the task at hand is done. So no getting on the internet if the spreadsheet isn’t finished or it won’t let you start up your game of Civ until the proposal is written.