Navigating the ADHD diagnostic pathways while being neurodivergent is not easy. It can be incredibly challenging when we're also doing this to support and advocate for our children. Understanding our stories and beliefs about how ADHD has shown up for ourselves allows us to recognise the power of advocating for new stories to show up for the next generation.

This week's guest, Dr Tom Nicholson, lectures at Northumbria University and is a Neurodiversity and mental Health Specialist who has delivered hundreds of speaking events and guest lectures on ADHD, Mental Health, Neurodiversity, and Neuroinclusion.

On this episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast, Kate and Dr Tom Nicholson speak about:

• The Stories we are told as we grow up that have become beliefs
• Tom's support from his mother's advocacy
• Tom's experience in education and the attitudes toward ADHD in the 90s
• The different archetypes of ADHD mothers
• Needing more awareness and advocating and less overhyped celebration of ADHD
• Empowering Parents with the best way to help their ADHD children
• The positive power of teaching
• How to interact with the educational system with ADHD
• Being High-achieving and being 2E alongside ADHD and Autism
• Burnout alongside neurodivergence
• Navigating a neurodivergence diagnosis within the healthcare system

You can find out more about Dr Tom Nicholson's work here:

Look at some of Kate's ADHD workshops and free resources here.

Kate Moryoussef is a women’s ADHD Lifestyle & Wellbeing coach and EFT practitioner who helps overwhelmed and unfulfilled newly diagnosed ADHD women find more calm, balance, hope, health, compassion, creativity, and clarity. 

Follow the podcast on Instagram here.

Follow Kate on Instagram here.

Find Kate's resources on ADDitude magazine here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Gratitude link

Welcome to the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

I'm Kate Moore Youssef and I'm a wellbeing and lifestyle coach, EFT practitioner, mum to four kids and passionate about helping more women to understand and accept their amazing ADHD brains.

After speaking to many women just like me and probably you, I know there is a need for more health and lifestyle support for women newly diagnosed with adhd.

In these conversations, you'll learn from insightful guests, hear new findings and discover powerful perspectives and lifestyle tools to enable you to live your most fulfilled, calm and purposeful life wherever you are on your ADHD journey.

Here's today's episode.

Today we have Dr.

Tom Nicholson here.

Now, Dr.

Tom is a lecturer, he's an academic at Northumbria University and he's also a neurodiversity and mental health specialist.

He has his own company in neuro inclusion training and has a vast amount of knowledge, knowledge in this area of mental health and neurodiversity.

So I just wanted to welcome you to the podcast.

I'm really, really excited to just get stuck in.

Thank you.

I'm really excited to be here and on the tail end of Neurodiversity Celebration week.

It's quite a nice way for me to sort of round off that week and have hopefully a positive, enjoyable conversation about ADHD and what's happening in the research at the moment?

Yeah, and that what I'm really interested in is because you've got a pH, you are an academic, you're a lecturer, so you're really at the forefront of the research that's coming out.

So we kind of like hear, you know, hear about this much later down the line, but actually you're there at the forefront.

So can you tell us a little bit about your research and maybe the PhD that you did and the topic that was on?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think what's also probably of relevance that I'm also neurodivergent myself.

So I was diagnosed ADHD at 5 years old and I am autistic also.

And so my interest in this research kind of stemmed from my experience and my experience growing up, my educational experience.

So what my research does, what my PhD was on, was understanding the experiences of parents across the ADHD diagnostic journey.

So thinking about what experiences do parents have across that one, two, potentially three year journey of waiting lists and assessment and then getting the diagnosis, what stories do parents craft and develop to understand that experience?

What stories about themselves as parents, as mothers, as fathers, what stories about their children and then also how the journey itself changes those stories.

So perhaps thinking one of the things I was really interested in was the story you think you're going to have before the assessment, does that match with a story that you actually have post diagnosis about what does ADHD mean to you, what mean to you as a mother, mean to you as a father?

And how you see your children and then the language of disability and positivity within that.

And how do you make sense of that journey, that child often very challenging journey.

Yeah.

I mean is that actually fascinating?

Because when you say the word stories, do you mean like the beliefs that we hold and the stigma that we have seen and I guess our conditioning and our how we've perceived neurodivergence?

That and more.

It's very much how do we construct and make sense of our experience.

So that sense making and that story could include who are the protagonists, who are the helpful figures in your story, in your journey, who are the antagonists, who are, what are the people or systems or barriers that present challenges and problems to overcome on that journey?

And then on top of that, how, what is the role of sort of societal pressure on the pressure that we place on mothers, on fathers, the system and how the systems of healthcare and education interplay within our stories and in how some stories are filled with interactions with say healthcare or social care, whereas other stories and parental stories are filled with educational challenges.

And one thing that definitely came out in all stories was fighting and battles and fighting for diagnosis.

And I'm sure we'll go into loads of detail because there's so much to talk about here.

Yeah, the story was almost any way in which parents make sense of what is happening to them, for them, with them.

Wow.

So this was your PhD project, I guess.

What drove you to this?

Was it a personal endeavor?

Was it something that you were seeing while you were working in the mental health arena?

Like what was the sort of the driver there for you?

It was very funny enough.

I actually wrote about this in my thesis because it's a really interesting thing you get to do in PhDs is explore your own sense making through that journey.

And what drove me to ADHD in general so is was my early experiences.

So I was diagnosed adhd.

My mom was a mental health nurse.

I described my early life family wise as attachment focused and loving and supportive and my educational journey as institutionally abusive.

I was told my entire educational journey that I was the problem, that I was a bad child, I would be in prison by the time I was 16 or I would never amount to anything.

And this was from 5, 6 years old.

So those are the stories that we're talking about.

Yes.

And this, this was a story that was given to me.

So my story was one of the typical bad child, naughty child, adhd, bad boy ADHD and the lack of hope that came with my story.

Yeah.

However, I was particularly fortunate in that my story changed a little bit when I went to high school and found people who were more supportive, more inclusive, who gave me a better story, a more positive one, which acknowledged my neurodivergent challenges, but supported and bolstered and nurtured my ADHD neurodivergent strengths.

And then from there I had this sort of driving passion that I never wanted and I don't want any other children or young people to have the experiences I had.

And so I went into mental health nursing and I was a ADHD nurse in the neurodevelopmental assessment pathway.

So I was responsible for the assessment, diagnosis, treatment and intervention of young autistic and ADHD children in Newcastle and Gateshead.

But then when I was in there, I saw more of these systemic barriers.

I saw more of the challenges and the long waiting lists and not quite feeling like that was enough, that I was making enough impact.

So what's the next step?

It was then do a PhD, getting to research, try and find a way to impact on policy and impact on more people and change the sort of societal or the cultural narrative.

And that was around the time when I also developed my personal trip, my ADHD neurodiversity training business.

So I've been straddling kind of to a tightrope almost of the academic research focused work on improving research in this area and then also supporting the training and the education and the understanding of adhd, both to health, social and educational environments, but also to the general public.

So I did have a public lectures on ADHD as well and navigating neurodiversity.

So kind of my entire life has been adhd, both from a, a challenge perspective.

Early on to then the.

My career.

My careers.

And again, so doing a PhD just felt like a natural next step for me because I am one of the fortunate people who I am particularly strong academically, but I struggle in other areas.

And so yeah, it's been.

Can I ask, I mean obviously you're saying that your mum was a mental health nurse.

So where, how old were.

Sorry, what era, what date were you diagnosed?

1996.

Okay.

So sort of, yeah.

So ADHD was sort of coming out.

It was being diagnosed in boys.

The stigma was there.

Everyone's talking about Ritalin and it's that kind of like mid-90s stigmatized view on what ADHD looks like.

And we sort of did.

I remember, I remember that exact time.

I was 16 and my brothers were both diagnosed.

Probably late 80s, early 90s.

No, I would say probably late 80s.

They were both diagnosed and like you say there are these stories and like your mum is kind of like the hero in this situation because she was obviously at the forefront and she was thinking there's no way my kid's going to be written off like this.

So do you feel that you had this advocate on your side?

Oh, I could talk about how wonderful my mom was for hours.

So my mom was the type of mom.

So it was unconditional love at all times.

It was acknowledging my challenges.

But she was fighting the school.

She was constantly going into the school.

She was challenging the status quo when the school were constantly putting me on report cards and giving me punishment based systems.

She saw how I was being treated at school and how I was constantly being punished.

And then she vowed to stop punishing me at home and stopped telling me off and always extolled the positives and the virtues.

You know, I used to tap and I would bang my hands all the time.

And it was my mom who bought me a drum kit so that I would have in drum lessons so that I would have something to feel good about myself and to feel some sort of self esteem around.

And I got, I was doing, yeah.

Grade 5 drums.

I was in a Djembe African percussion ensemble as the lead soloist at one point which is very unusual for the northeast of England.

And I don't know if you can see in the background but I've got a drum kit in the background now which My son, my 20 month year old son and we play the drums together.

So yeah, my mom has been just that absolute rock throughout my entire journey.

And she was the.

I've got pictures of my graduation where she's just beaming.

Yeah, but that her story and her journey because she still has these doubts about her parenting ability during that time because of what she was told by society at that time.

She was told by teachers that she wasn't good enough.

She was told by teachers it was her Fault I was a naughty boy.

Yeah.

And those stories, unfortunately haven't changed as much as we would like to see, and that was one of the findings from my thesis, was that we're still seeing those same mother blaming, parent shaming stories, but we're also seeing some real positives.

And I love that you described her as like the hero of the story or the protagonist, because that was also one of my findings, is that mothers particularly have to put on the mantle of being the advocate, the hero, the protagonist, the valiant parent who fights against the system.

Yeah.

And that's exhausting.

I mean, that's hugely validating for everyone who's got kids who are also neurodivergent themselves, themselves.

Because there is a theme.

You know, I've done it with my kids.

I've been the advocate.

I've been the one that has emailed teachers, got on the phone, got to school, done those things because of my, thank goodness, my knowledge in this area that my family history, my own understanding of my ADHD and seeing it present in my kids in different ways.

My husband's been a bit more hesitant because he's just not been part of this world.

Even though we both believe he has ADHD himself, he's not had an official diagnosis, but the more he, he understands, he's like, definitely I had adhd and it was just channeled in very different ways, but he still wasn't armed with the knowledge.

And so it's been an exhausting journey for me.

I'm going to talk personally because you're advocating for your child, you want your child, you get, I mean, again, this sense of justice, of having ADHD is so profound in us that we will not accept someone, you know, treating our kids badly or saying something negative or lowering their self esteem when we know it's already taking a beating internally.

And I hear this a lot with other women as well, that they are getting their own diagnoses after their children.

So they're navigating that themselves, processing, grieving, all of the stuff that they're going through.

But, you know, being parents, we do prioritize our kids, you know, hopefully, and want to kind of make the world a better place for them.

So it's a, it's incredible that you are honing in on these because, you know, all the conversations I've had on the podcast, we've never really kind of gone there because there is a lot of guilt shaming and you know, parents, you need to be doing this or you should be doing better or you shouldn't Allow them to do this or that.

You know, if anyone knows about parenting an ADHD child, there's certain things that you cannot force them to do.

And it's.

It's really hard work sometimes incredible in other times.

But it can be really challenging.

And we see it's like a mirror as well.

So they can trigger us, we can trigger them.

We see ourselves, you know, thinking, oh, I don't want to them to make the same mistakes.

So we overcompensate and then we project and there's just this whole cauldron of all sorts of things going on.

But essentially, I think what you're doing right now is validating our experiences.

Messy.

And sometimes we don't have the answers.

We don't know what we're doing, and sometimes we are making mistakes.

But I wonder if what you found in your thesis was that if there was an underlying love and, you know, constant advocacy for your child.

And what you said, I wrote that down.

This, the positive reinforcement, if we focus on that, were you seeing a better outcome?

Hey, so it was.

It was a really interesting question.

And I think it was less.

It was varied.

I would support.

I would say it was a varied response.

Because I think what's really important to know is that obviously everyone's individual journeys are different and everyone's experience are different.

And some of the length of time that they're waiting for diagnosis, the core occurring, multiple diagnoses for those who are potentially twice marginalized, if they're LGBTQ plus or if they are a minority group in some of that way.

But what was really fascinating, I think this is helpful to kind of almost answer your question, is to explore what the typical story was.

Because if we know the typical story and then some of the offshoots, then we can start seeing where are those pressure points.

Because all parents, both mothers and I had a father, only one father in my study, which is actually fairly typical of ADHD research, is really struggling to recruit fathers.

And very much if we can support fathers, we can also support mothers.

And I think that's a really interesting area to discuss as well.

But all parents talked about an early recognition of there being something different.

They described it often as a problem, but they were aware of their children being different or divergent in some way prior to diagnosis.

And so they would seek this diagnosis and they would seek that journey, and they would start that journey.

And what the diagnosis was for a lot of, from almost all parents was, was understanding.

It's about finding understanding, not just for you to understand your child, but for the child to understand themselves and also for the world to understand the child as well.

So it was this real diagnosis was very much about understanding and developing understanding for all parents in my study.

And then we start coming up against the barriers of the system and the fight that you have to have.

And this is where it varies in terms of how much of a battle each parent has with that system.

Some parents talked about really validating school experiences or at least having a single validating educationalist or teacher who was helpful.

But most talked about the system being fundamentally broken, about having to wait way too long, about be feeling like the, the system itself breaks you as a parent.

It's so burdensome and so invalidating and so challenging towards your self affect and who you think you are.

That parents are going off sick from work, that one are stopping work altogether.

Most and again all mothers, mothers are breaking down because of what the system and the diagnostic process is doing to them.

Mothers who saw themselves as strong people, emotionally strong and then the just constant setbacks and blaming and whatnot.

And so you end up with.

I found sort of three different types of, I call them archetypes of mother on that journey.

Three different types of mother that we see and we can also.

And mothers can oscillate a little bit across these.

So we've talked about that sort of good heroic mother, you know, the mother who strives for everything for her child.

She will do everything she possibly can to improve the life of her child.

She will advocate, but she.

But on a more insidious level, our ADHD mothers are on the diagnostic journey, are forced to portray themselves as good mothers.

They have to prove that they are good mothers so that their needs and their concerns are taken seriously.

So it's almost like I am a good mother, therefore my children's behavior or non typical behavior is not my fault.

So can you assess for ADHD please?

There's almost this like need to justify and show that you are good enough, you are already a good parent, you're already a good mother.

And then I can be taken seriously which is just additional burden and work.

That's the sort of one of the more positive archetypes.

The second one I called, they call the guilty, the broken or the fragile mother.

And these are moms who are broken emotionally by the system.

Again, the ones who become mentally unwell, their well being is so decimated because of this societal violence that occurs towards them.

This sort of forcing of well, have you tried this?

This is your fault or even you are responsible for your children not Being successful or having these difficulties and that being too much for many, understandably so.

And yeah, that's where we saw.

I, I saw mothers going off sick from work, quitting work altogether because of the journey.

Again, not, not about parenting an ADHD child.

This is not about the additional typical parenting burdens and challenges and fun.

This was about seeking diagnosis.

And just literally the process of seeking diagnosis and seeking that validation breaking you down.

Is that because there's a higher chance of the mother being neurodivergent themselves and struggling with overwhelm and just feeling like they're drowning in.

Whether it's the paperwork, whether it's the remembering to fill in forms or is that, is that part of it?

That's, that is very much part of it.

And there's a super fascinating finding I had which was about how the stories of parents, mothers who already have a diagnosis of ADHD themselves were different from those who were non neurodivergent mothers.

And part of that extra challenge, yes, it was the additional burden, was the fact that it's harder to go through all this paperwork.

It's harder to remember all these appointments when you are your ADHD yourself.

It's more challenging.

It's, you're already emotionally potentially dysregulated.

You have, you've already had difficulties with shame and being blamed your entire life anyway.

And then medical professionals using language like disability and disorder and mother's going, I never thought considered myself disabled, I never considered myself to be broken.

But the way that it's being portrayed in my child is now I'm having to face, well, hang on, am I disabled?

Am I a disabled person?

I'm seeking disability support through the league, through the sort of social care systems for my child.

And then it's forcing you to recontextualize your own identity as a mother in relation to adhd, which was something I've never seen in the literature before about how a childhood diagnosis forces you to face your own diagnosis in a different way, really interest.

Another really interesting example was one mother who saw her ADHD as her nemesis.

It was not a superpower, it was not positive.

It was something she wanted to be rid of, she wanted to medicate.

She did not like her own adhd.

It was her anathema, her nemesis.

But she didn't want her children to see their ADHD in that language and so had to forcibly change and alter her own perception of her own ADHD so that her children would be able to see that modeled behavior of actually adhd.

Isn't this Negative thing.

Yeah.

And that again, when I talk about stories, the story of yourself has to change.

Yeah.

Oh.

Which is work.

And that's what I talk about, work, parenting work, contextual, conceptual work.

And there is one more type of mother.

Go, go, go.

And this is a mother you.

You were kind of talking about with yourself just before, Kate, where you talked about, you know, a lot about ADHD already, and that's really beneficial.

And this is where our insider or informed mothers come in.

Our informed mothers are mothers who they either already know about ADHD because they are professionals, they've worked in healthcare or social care or education, so they have a decent level of awareness, or they've read all the books, they've read the journal articles, they've been listening to podcasts such as yours for the past two years.

They feel knowledgeable about adhd.

And so they're going into these assessments with the right language, with the language that they know will get people to listen to.

They're using nice guidelines, they're using best clinical practice guidelines to get preferential treatment in the sense of saying, actually, if I make a complaint, it's going to be listened to more, because I know what words to use.

I know what you need to do in line with the Equality act or the Disability Discrimination Act.

I know what needs to happen here, and I will fight for it using my knowledge or using the people who I know who work for SIPs or CAMs.

And those informed or insider mothers typically got faster diagnoses or faster assessments, or almost nearly exclusively went private and went for private diagnosis, which I thought was really interesting, and also displays another one of those in inequalities in ADHD diagnosis, that if you have the funds and the financial resources and the capital, then you can get quicker assessments, potentially more robust assessments, or more inclusive assessments of more than just one condition or one difficulty.

And you can get it within weeks and not years.

So, yeah, that's all the mothering roles.

It's unbelievable, the layers, the so many layers that we're talking about here.

I don't know any other mental health condition or however you want to describe.

You know, ADHD with so many complexities and so many different things attached to it, because it's.

It's there.

It's part of our genetic makeup.

We've probably seen it through the generations.

And, you know, you mentioned at the beginning, we're at the tail end of your neurodiversity celebration week.

And I sort of.

I'm not entirely comfortable with it.

I've not embraced it.

As much as I thought I would, because the word celebration, I'm not, what am I celebrating?

I'm not celebrating people's mental health being in such dire, you know, dire straits that they've had, you know, suicidal ideation and addiction problems and disordered eating.

Awareness, yes, we need awareness, we need to talk about it, we need to normalize and.

But the celebration for me feeds into the.

It's a superpower, it makes you really creative, it makes you a fantastic entrepreneur, which it can do.

But there's always two sides to everything.

And if you are a fantastic entrepreneur, there's a very high chance that maybe you are a workaholic and you may have OCD and you may have depressive times and all these different things.

It's not just, you know.

And that's why I like to have these conversations the podcast, because there's moments where I do celebrate ADHD and there's moments where I've cried on this podcast because it's so heartbreaking and I've seen it play out in my family.

It is so interesting because my parents, I think, still have a negative story about adhd.

They don't quite see any of the other stuff around it.

Yeah, this is, I agree.

And I have the same sort of tentative, trepidatious response to celebration events because yes, we can celebrate our neurodivergent strengths, but I consider them contextual strengths.

You know, Michael Phelps's ADHD is contextually, his hyperactivity is contextually very strong and it's a benefit when he's swimming.

But it wasn't a strength at school when he was told that he would never amount to anything.

Exactly.

A talk to Loughborough University just two days ago on it was about productivity in higher education and adhd.

But fundamentally I was talking about celebration and neurodiversity Celebration week.

And I was saying, yes, we can celebrate, but at the same time, let's not lose sight of the fact that we have a five times risk of suicide, dying by suicide.

We are eight times more likely to have a depressive disorder, seven times more likely have an anxiety disorder.

We are over represented in prisons, we are over represented in the socioeconomically deprived areas.

And it's thinking that we can, we can celebrate, but can we also challenge, can we, can we, we don't have a week to challenge the systems as much.

And I think for a lot of people who I've worked with, clinically and otherwise, is there isn't a lot to celebrate because of the lives that they've had.

The traumas they've experienced, the educational traumas, the lifetime traumas.

And the celebration of neurodiversity feels premature for them because we still have the systemic societal barriers and stigma.

And what you're talking about with your parents still having that negative perception of adhd, a huge proportion of the people I meet and work with also still have that negative perception because it's continuing to damage the lives of children, young people, parents, adults, et cetera.

It's often quite nuanced, these discussions, and it's got to be balanced because we don't want to go too far in the other direction and talk so much about strengths that we don't get, HR policies that support us, talk so much about superpowers that we don't get reasonable adjustments.

And we don't acknowledge the sort of discrimination that occurs in schools when we punish ADHD children for standing inappropriately of which is a diagnostic symptom of hyperactivity, or we punish children for shouting out loud or being late to lessons or lectures, when that's core symptomology.

It's a core symptom of what we would expect to see.

And yeah, so it's, it is a.

It is a really tricky place to be.

And I've wrote a bit about this, about the, how the neurodiversity paradigms, these positive paradigms are fantastic and really are helpful.

And I predominantly come from a social model.

I predominantly come from this positive paradigm.

But you also can't deny the objective lived experience of impairment for some people, where the intensity and level of their inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity is to the point where they actually really struggle to function, even when society is set up supportively for them, when they are by themselves at home wanting to have a conversation with their wife and they are so inattentive that they're struggling to do that.

Or maybe they never get a partner because they struggle so much to communicate.

But one, one.

And it's, yeah, it's this fine line.

And then how do we pair in medication?

How can we, how do we conceptualize medication when we want to be this purely positive social model change environments perspective, when we're also acknowledging that medication is helpful to us.

And how do you balance that?

And that was part of my findings as well as how do parents balance that?

ADHD medications efficacy is incredibly well evidenced and well researched.

But what, what are we medicating?

To what extent are we meditating?

We can't.

You can't medicate someone out of a terrible school system and A shame, failed school system.

It's a journey and a challenge on parents.

And again, the burden of childcare predominantly falls on mothers.

So it's predominantly mothers who are affected by this and that additional burden, that cognitive load is overwhelming for many, understandably so.

Yeah.

And then you throw in sort of like privilege, like you mentioned before, that sometimes it really is luck of the draw, you know, your socioeconomic situation, you know, if you can afford to go private, you can then afford therapy and coaching, you can afford to be titrated and stay, you know, in the system with medication.

Like so much of it is dependent on whether you can afford all the support.

And it is completely overwhelming of remembering, you know, to take your blood pressure or get your child to make sure that they get weighed and all these different things.

And when you've got more than one child who's neurodivergent it and you're working full time and you are juggling life because being a mum, being a woman right now at the moment is really, really hard work.

We've got all these expectations on us and we want to do the best for our kids and we're dropping balls all the time and then that those, the dropping of the balls then feeds into the self shame and to the judgment and to the critical voice that we've already got going on of I should be doing more, I should know more, I should be helping them more.

And then if we've got a situation at school, like you say, if we haven't got that support system at school, we really see, you know, and I've seen it, I feel so grateful and lucky that my kids on the whole have had certain teachers, I'm not saying all teachers, but certain teachers who have got them, whether they've understood it's neurodivergence or not, they just kind of get their personality and they've guided them towards the subjects, they've held them, you know, if they've not handed their homework in time or they've had to be punished, you know, stupid detentions.

And one teacher has, you know, saw that my daughter kept getting detentions and basically just said, well, let's go over your maths homework together.

Let's use this time to kind of reinforce your maths again.

Like these little, these people, the teachers can play such a pivotal role in building a child instead of crushing a child.

And I'm keen to understand the tom back, you know, when you were diagnosed and what they were saying about you.

And now look at you, I mean, highly academic, being able to Achieve what you've achieved and to direct and channel all your energy and focus into what you're doing now is incredible.

Was there a point where you kind of I can't do this.

Or were you always fascinated in academia and last question.

I always do this about 10 questions in one.

Do you think that the autism has helped you with your academia or is that me just stigmatizing autism?

Great question.

Series of questions.

I'll try and do them in chronological order as best I can.

And so all of my training, actually I, all of my training I deliver about a third of it is around the research evidence and the academic perspective, but in a digestible way.

Some of it is on the clinical perspective of ADHD and what we know clinically and what helps and what is supportive and what are the evidence based things that are effective and helpful.

And then the last part is always about my own journey and my own story and I my own narrative.

So I'm very open about my experiences and I bring report cards to my sessions and I read out the report cards and I've got a few of them here just on my other screen to talk about the story that I was told.

This is my year 6 end of year report card written by the head of the year.

Oh dear.

Perhaps we are going to have to curb this streak of independence so that Tom isn't quite so noticeable.

His interest and genuine enthusiasm for the world around him is great to see and should help him gain approval.

We hope so.

And so what I learned at school was that you need to gain people's approval and you shouldn't be independent.

My personality and social development for a whole year was summed up in one sentence.

Tom likes to be the center of attention and can be quite, quite disruptive to achieve this Now I love being the center of attention I get.

I'm a public speaker, I'm a professional public speaker.

I love being on a stage in front of hundreds of people.

It is my joy, it is my happy place.

But I was told at school that that was undesirable, that that is not something that you should want.

You know, I've got more.

Tom remains a frustrating, a very frustrating student.

Tom is lazy.

Tom is struggles to know when it is an appropriate time, when any appropriate time to speak.

This is an issue that Tom can easily resolve because the belief was that I could easily resolve these things.

My report card says one of my goals on my report card.

Tom will not use his hands to fiddle with any possessions, completely impossible goals.

And so unfortunately when I was about 11 again.

So all of my peers, I was being bullied by my peers as well as my teachers and my peers told me like, I wasn't welcome.

I was told I went on holiday to Florida and I came back because my mom and dad won a little bit of money on the Lucky Sevens football.

And we didn't go on holiday very all the time.

And I was told by a teacher when I was seven that it was so much better when you weren't here.

And then in year six, I went on to Majorca and I came back and another teacher told me, tom, it was so much better when you weren't here.

Oh, my God.

And so what happened again, horrific.

But what happens in that time is you start then believing that the world, everyone would be so much better when you weren't here if you weren't here.

You start really believing that actually everybody would be better off.

And then that five times increased risk of suicide starts making a lot of sense.

So I was 11 and suicidal for a couple of years.

And you know what got me through that was just, was my mom was my.

My loving parents, was my loving family.

And so my narrative was very much, you are a failure and you are broken and you are defective.

And.

And I'll be honest, I think I probably, I probably held that narrative till about 26, 27, even through some of my work, my clinical work of myself, because we carry our school bags our entire life and we carry those stories our entire life.

But there were also individual teachers who challenged that narrative, who discovered that I was really good at some things, that I was academically quite strong.

So I always loved, I always loved learning.

I loved the process of learning, but I despised education.

I hated education because I hated those environments.

And what I learned, in spite with some teachers, was that you could love learning for the sake of learning.

You could love learning because fun.

And I was being taught history with role play and figurines by Mrs.

Wright at Cromwell High School.

She's incredible.

And Mr.

Spurs was teaching me that I was really good at it and I could finish my work really quickly.

So he'd give me extra work and extra work and I would.

Didn't tell us, I don't know if you could do this.

So I'd fall, I'd show him that I could do it and I would do as much as I could to get it done.

And then I ended up getting an extra GCSE just in my lessons because of how much extra work I did.

And then in my A levels, I went to I didn't take lunch breaks because I didn't like being outside as much.

So I ended up getting an extra A level.

And what these three, these two teachers shown showed me is that actually I was really academically strong.

And then I was then put on two gifted and talented programs and I was on the young gifted and talented register.

I was sent to Oxbridge on an aspiration day.

So I was gifted and talented, but that was missed for 15 years.

And I was told I was a crap student and a bad student who couldn't learn.

And yet from 15 onwards I was told actually you are exceptional to use the language.

And I went straight from.

I told.

Apparently I told my mom when I was about 13, I said, Mom, I am going to be in education till I'm 30 and I'm going to do a PhD just because I thought it sounded cool.

And then I got my first degree and my first degree was ancient history.

And I did that because I thought it was interesting.

I read a book, a fiction book on it and I thought was interesting.

So I just did a degree in it, you know, completely impulsively, didn't really think it through and loved, but loved it.

My did I always see myself as doing something like this?

Kind of, but more because I thought it was interesting, not because I wanted to like be in academic or be in academia.

I just always, always love the process of finding stuff out and taking things apart and learning them, but not practically.

I'm terrible with my hands, you know, I can't put up a shelf, but I can write an essay in two hours.

So it's like I my strength.

And to link with what you were saying about my.

I think it's potentially a bit of an autistic way of thinking.

For me, this quite rigid cognitive way of thinking is I can pick up information really quickly and I can detract my emotion from that information quite comfortably.

So I can change my opinion.

My opinion can be changed, my perspective can be changed.

I'm not.

I'm able to slightly unemotionally explore the research and concepts and allow.

And I'm very comfortable being challenged and that's like intellectually challenged and having my theories challenged and things like that.

And so I think that does hold you in really good stead for academia and for academic work.

But it also makes friendships and relationships challenging.

It makes friendships more challenging because not everybody thinks like that, you know, not everybody is as detracted from their, their emotions and their ideas or their principles or their beliefs.

And so I love debates and I love the process of debates and not everyone loves that.

Yeah.

So it's a really.

Although it might sound like I've had some have been really fortunate that I am academically quite strong and that is my, my area of strength.

I don't want to detract from the continual, constant difficulties that are just slightly different for those who are academically successful or achieve academically.

I'm hoping I'm writing an abstract with my coach and a colleague about what they call twice exceptionality.

So being gifted, high iq, high achiever and being neurodivergent or adhd.

And how do you fit into that story?

How do you fit into that narrative?

Because you have different difficulties sometimes.

Do you find that you burn out because.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I've got to be really careful.

And I burnt out during my PhD, but that was also in part due to Covid and lockdown and going from speaking to, you know, 100, 200 students a day to only speaking to one person for a year because everyone else was on a screen and not turning their cameras on and losing all of that social interaction.

And then I do constantly have plates spinning.

You know, I finished my PhD and what most people would say then was lovely, I'll have a rest.

And my brain went straight to, so what's the next challenge?

What's the next big thing?

So now I'm training for an Ironman triathlon, which is.

I wasn't expecting you to say that.

So 2.4 mile swim, 120 mile bike ride and then a marathon all in one go.

It'll take us about three years to train for it because that's how my brain works.

It works with these big challenges and I really love that.

But that is also exhausting.

You know, I, as I said, I have a toddler, I have my own business, I'm an academic, I have a wife and I have a home.

And balancing all of that whilst also wanting to do a Iron man for some reason.

And like that, last year I read 75 books because I love reading.

Reading is my special interest.

So yeah, burnout is consistently earth, an underlying threat.

Bring it back to, I guess what you're doing in companies.

Are you finding now that people are opening up to being accommodating at work?

And that is just a matter of time that all companies, bearing in mind that the women mostly who I coach are coming to me and they're burnt out from being in their corporate jobs because the companies and the, you know, the jobs and the careers they're in are just not right for their ADHD brains and nervous systems.

So do you see a change happening, a wave of change?

I do, I do see more.

I've got an appetite for this sort of stuff.

Yeah.

Why?

But what I have found is buy in is often a little bit tricky.

So it's demonstrating to organizations that they, that this sort of ADHD neuro inclusion training or just ADHD awareness training would be helpful.

Often you think you.

A lot of.

I still see that resistance of do we really need.

This is really important for us.

And then once you get in there and once I get in there and then do that first session, suddenly it's will you train all of our staff?

Will you train the managers?

Will you, will you get involved and do more?

What else can you do?

We need more people in.

And I think it's.

Once you're in there and once you, once you've had some of these conversations, there's a lot of openness.

I'm finding a lot more than I've ever seen to adapt and to make changes and to support the neurodivergent staff or stakeholders, whether they be students, pupils or patients.

But I am still finding the resistance of the do we really need this?

How did.

How do we justify the expense almost what is the metric?

How can you prove that this will lead to further profitability or productivity or employee wellness?

And it's.

It's hard to get that in just an email, isn't it?

But yes, that I am seeing things improve, but I'm also seeing in some areas things going backwards.

I'm seeing in some areas in the nhs, because of the crisis that we're in, in terms of staffing, that we're falling back on even more deeply entrenched medical models.

We're seeing more sort of disorder, negative based medical language.

We're seeing the splitting apart of holistic person centered organ teams and treatment pathways to more rigid binary.

This is the ADHD assessment pathway, this is the autism assessment pathway.

If you want your ADHD diagnosis, it's this pathway and it's three years long.

If you want autism after that, that's another year, as opposed to a neurodevelopmental mental health assessment.

And that's again, it's funding, it's challenging.

But in the corporate space, yes, I am seeing things improve, which is really heartening.

And in schools I'm seeing some wonderful practice.

I still see a lot of bad practice, I still see a lot of horrific things, but I'm seeing some truly revolutionary stuff.

Normally by individuals who are paving the way and trailblazing.

And I think that's what we have to bear in mind, is that individuals can make massive differences for another individual or for teams or for hundreds of people, but the burden shouldn't just be on those who are neurodivergent in those organizations.

Yeah.

Which I think is something that happens, you know, and also what we're seeing is, as you say, women in these spaces who are.

Who are experiencing this sort of intersectional challenge of both being a woman and being neurodivergent and that dual stigma, that dual challenge.

And then what I'm also really interested in is when we add in further intersectionality, if you were a black woman in a.

In a corporate environment, or if you are a trans woman or you're gay or queer.

And I've got a PhD starting, I'm supervising a PhD that starts in October on the experiences of LGBTQ + parents of ADHD children.

Because that's an area of research that just has not be.

It's uninterrupt, it's scarce.

It's just nothing there.

So how are those experiences different?

And this, like, this is a separate conversation about what I'm interested in is how do we support fathers on that ADHD journey and to understand.

To be involved in going to appointments, to be involved in going to school appointments more to acknowledge their own adhd.

Because if we can support fathers, we can also better support mothers.

We can share that burden.

We can reduce that burden and begin going through that new fatherhood journey.

Myself, very recently, that sparked a new area of interest for me of how do we do it?

How do we get dads involved more?

I mean, I think it starts from pre birth, but maybe we can stop sending dads away on the first night of the child's life and put that.

Send that implicit message that this is Mom's responsibility.

Even though mom has just gone through potentially a significant bodily trauma surgery or what have you, how do we get that?

And then how do we make sure dads get involved in research?

How do we do that?

And I think that's probably a project that's coming in the next few years about we need to get dads involved so that we can support and empower mums more.

I think that's so powerful, so, so important.

And I.

Yeah, that for me, you know, I normally kind of feel it in my body once I hear something quite profound.

And that for me is huge, huge, huge, huge.

So I really do hope that you.

You get to do that while resting, while enjoying your books and your drumming and your iron man and being a dad as well.

And I just want to thank you so, so much.

I mean, I think we could have carried on talking, but I kind of like to keep the conversations under an hour.

That's my remit for the podcast.

But I just want to say thank you so much for the work that you're doing and what you're doing to help this community, because it's huge and the fact that you are at the forefront of the research and then you are simplifying things so the wider communities can understand what's going on.

Just want to thank you so much.

Thank you very much and thank you for letting me come on and talk about this stuff.

It's sometimes quite hard to get what happens in our universities out to as many people as possible.

I'm not the only one doing this sort of work.

There's some real cutting edge work happening in the ADHD space at universities.

I've got colleagues doing work here and we want people to hear it because actually, what we're seeing in practice is 10, 20 years out of date.

Yeah.

What the research is saying now.

I really hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

If you did and it resonated with you, I would absolutely love it if you could share on your platforms or maybe leave a review and a rating wherever you listen to your podcasts.

And please do check out my website, adhdwomenswellbeing.co.uk for lots of free resources and paid for workshops.

I'm uploading new things all the time and I would absolutely love to see you there.

Take care and see you for the next episode.