My ADHD Journey (so far)

My path of self-discovery since suspecting I was neurodivergent, then being diagnosed with ADHD, has been a bit chaotic and not the least bit linear (no surprise there). I’ve done my best to lay it all out for you below, as a kind of ‘this is how it happened for me’ for you to take as you will. Perhaps it’s something for you to relate to, or perhaps it’s simply something to read and chuckle over. Either way, I hope it’s at least entertaining, and maybe even a little informative…

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It’s 2020, the year of the dreaded pandemic, although we didn’t know it yet. My husband had accepted a job in Taiwan the previous year, after some coaxing from yours truly, because, wow, what an adventure. What could possibly go wrong? We had a one-and-a-bit-year-old daughter, and we were apprehensively looking forward to getting out of our comfort zone, discovering a new country and culture, and trying out the expat lifestyle. Husband had been out for a few months prior to the move to find and secure a flat for us (which involved a lot of video call tours), and we’d chosen somewhere super close to the city centre, unlike most expats who settled a good hour or more north. Arguably, mistake number yī.

So, we upped and moved in January. And just to set things off on a superb start, partway through our 14-hour flight, the captain turned around and took us back partway to drop off an unwell passenger in Istanbul, increasing our flight time to 21 hours. The longest flight we’d ever done. With a fourteen-month-old baby.

In many ways, we were lucky to be in Taiwan during the pandemic. We were able to go out and about, with face masks for protection, long after the UK were stuck indoors. When quarantine did hit, it was mostly precautionary as COVID cases and deaths were impressively low. However, we couldn’t travel for a while, and when we could, we had to quarantine on return in either a government-provided building or an expensive hotel. You were not permitted to leave your room/s for 15 days, and food was left outside your door. We did this ONCE, when we visited family in the UK for a few months. The multiple, brutal COVID tests were enough to put us off bothering a second time (one of mine caused a nosebleed, and my 7-year-old daughter still struggles to have anything go up her nose despite only being small at the time).

Anyhow, I digress.

We’re in Taiwan, a different climate, a different culture, a different language (mostly Mandarin, for anyone wondering). I’m a new stay-at-home mum with two years left on my part-time undergraduate degree in English Literature and Language. I love my daughter, she’s a wonder, and every day brings something new and fascinating.

But my anger starts to build. I’m irritable. Her stubborn nature gets to me too much. I find myself shouting at her too often, at my husband too often, and I have to hide more often than I’d like to admit to have a cry and try to get my head straight. To remind myself that she’s just an infant with her own frustrations and not some manipulative demon determined to push me to insanity. I’m sure many mums out there can relate to this, of course, but it was the physical pain I felt and the anger at myself which I just couldn’t cope with. Concerning thoughts scratching at the edges of my mind that gave me pause.

Eventually, my husband managed to convince me to seek help. So, I booked an appointment to see a psychiatrist at the International Priority Care department at a nearby Taiwanese hospital in July 2022, where I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed Sertraline. I worked up to a dose of 150mg, which I remain on to this day, and I still honestly don’t think I could cope without it. However, this was, this is, just grappling with my mood, and with the fun and games that is the female cycle, I will still have a few bad days (or even a whole week) each month. But that’s another whole topic of its own.

At the same time as starting up this course of anti-depressants, I signed up for online therapy, in the hopes that some counselling sessions with someone who didn’t know me might be of some help. Even if it was just to unload. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I did think it would be a lot more formal than it turned out to be, which was a relief. I was matched with a lovely American lady named Melaney, though our locations caused a bit of scheduling difficulty. I confess that the session started off a little awkwardly; it doesn’t come naturally to us Brits to discuss what bothers us, and perhaps I find it more difficult than most. Who wouldn’t feel at least a little awkward and anxious in their first therapy session? But she was very understanding and had a lot of experience with anxiety and neurodivergence, something we didn’t discuss or explore at first, as it simply wasn’t on my radar. I knew nothing about ADHD beyond what the majority at that time thought they knew: that it was a label for loud, hyperactive and disruptive boys. It wasn’t even Melaney who first broached the subject with me. My husband and I stumbled across an advert on social media for an app, you know the type, there are a fair few out there now.

We were sitting watching TV one night, and we were both reading through this website detailing signs and symptoms of ADHD…and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was like waking up from the matrix, like finally understanding a really complicated problem, like getting to that point in a really good book or movie where there’s some huge twist you never saw coming, but which made so much sense. How could all these funny things I did and the struggles I have relate to a single common cause? How could they all somehow be linked and explained by one thing? I thought you had to be a bit of nuts to have ADHD, someone who doesn’t shut up and doesn’t stop moving? I didn’t think I was like that.

It soon became clear that you don’t have to be those things at all. And even if you are, you might not be like that all the time, and many other factors shape how it manifests in each person – such as being more likely to struggle with telling time, figuring out how long tasks take, getting super tired after being in busy and loud settings for a period of time, and having what feels like some weird force which simply stops you from getting off your butt to do the thing you need to do.

How on earth are these things related?? With ADHD, that’s how. Mind: Blown.

So, I take what I’ve found to my next therapy session with Melaney. I want to ask her about it to find out how I can be sure I have it. Then came the next shocker; she’d already suspected me of being neurodivergent. We talked about it for some time, she explained how things were done in the US, but didn’t obviously have any knowledge of how Taiwan’s healthcare worked. She sent me a copy of the form, which specialists use to diagnose ADHD in children, as there wasn’t one catering to adults. I went away from the session and filled it in as best I could, and she confirmed my answers would equate to a diagnosis if taken to a specialist. So she encouraged me to seek this out with the Taiwanese psychiatrist I’d been seeing for my depression. Not long after that, I was on titration for methylphenidate (which you may know by the brand name, Ritalin) to treat my ADHD symptoms. Before moving back to the UK, I’d worked up to 20mg of delayed release to take first thing in the morning, with an extra 10mg quick release to take at around 2 pm if I felt like I needed it.

So, what were the effects? Were they noticeable? Did methylphenidate help?

For me: yes, the effects were noticeable, and they helped. The feeling was bloody weird in the best way. I suddenly had all this time to play with! Where had all this extra time come from in my day? Was it always there? How does medication make you feel like you’ve got more time?! Well! What was actually going on was this…I suddenly had the ability to make decisions without hesitating over something for a year first, without getting distracted by all the other choices available to me about any given thing. This also stemmed from the serenity that had suddenly blanketed over my mind. The chaotic mess that once existed, that feeling of having a thousand tabs open all vying for attention, had been quieted. I could think more clearly. So, because my mind was quieter, I wasn’t just able to make decisions but also to make them more quickly, and a task such as popping to the shop for a few items could take me half the time it once did, leaving me with that feeling of having more time. It felt utterly life-changing; there was hope. I could look forward to functioning more ‘normally’, to being less of a challenge for my very patient husband, and a gigantic frustration to myself.

Alas, all stories have their obstacles, and mine came in the form of the NHS. We moved back to the UK in July 2023, and I soon discovered that my newfound mental freedom wouldn’t last much longer.

It turned out I couldn’t just come back and ask for a continuation of my medication via the UK healthcare system; I had to go through the whole process again. Silly me. Thankfully, I was able to bring about three months’ worth of meds back with me to see me through the summer, but this wouldn’t be long enough to bridge the extensive gap of time it takes to gain a UK-recognised diagnosis and treatment. The depression kicked up again, and I sought help with the GP in October 2024, who was at least able to screen and then treat me for this straightaway, getting me back onto Sertraline. I’d rationed the Ritalin and managed to keep it going until around December.

Then I began working full-time again the following January, after not having worked since my daughter was born near the end of 2018.

Let me tell you this, in case you hadn’t already figured it out. Going into a full-time job after five years of being a stay-at-home mum with newly diagnosed (and freshly aggravated) ADHD, which you’ve unknowingly dealt with all of your life, is not fun. My husband would scoff loudly at this, but it was an epic mindfuck shitstorm I’m still grafting hard at, frantically treading water every day. I’ve lost count of how many evenings I’ve come home from work, suffering with burnout, without fully understanding for a long time that’s what it was. It is NOT easy.

Back to my journey.

The GP referred me for ADHD screening with the NHS first of all, which was abysmal. I had an appointment with a mental health nurse, rather than any kind of ADHD specialist, who sat me in a room and basically asked me to talk about myself while she took notes. I found the session rather cold and uncomfortable. I was nervous as hell, which also caused me to blabber mindlessly on and forget a lot of the points I’d meant to bring up about my actual struggles. I was sent a letter a ridiculously long time later, which quoted the wrong patient name, so it had clearly been churned out and an amendment omitted by some genius, and stated that they didn’t believe I warranted any further assessment, ultimately dismissing me. I was lucky to have a kind and empathetic GP who advised me to pursue the ‘Right to Choose’ route, which meant I could contest the decision and request an assessment with a private practice instead.

I looked through the options and chose Psychiatry UK, the reason for this I can’t remember now, but there would have been my own brand of logic to it at the time. They emailed me directly, asking me to log in to their portal and complete a few forms. FML. This was another epic mindfuck. Surely they know the struggles an ADHD person has with this sort of thing?! The pre-assessment form had 18 questions, split evenly between hyperactive and inattentive traits. Depending on how you answered each (never/sometimes/often/always) then meant having to fill in a box with examples up to 1000 words in length. For both childhood AND adulthood. This hurdle did me over; October soon swung around, along with an email to say the deadline had passed. Balls. Here goes procrastinating on starting this process again from the beginning, or so it seemed.

In a completely shocking turn of events, I did absolutely nothing about it. But then I received another email from Psychiatry UK, out of the blue, asking me to complete the forms because some appointments had become available. What the..?!

So I forced my tired, burnt-out butt to finish off the forms. It was gruelling, it was torturous, and there were many pauses to stand up and pace aimlessly about. I did some of it at work, latching on to any passerby to start a totally unimportant conversation, mostly about how much of a shitter these damn forms were, but I finally got them done over the course of two or three days. I clicked submit. Appointments appeared instantly, as early as that very same weekend, which I couldn’t attend due to work commitments. So I chose the following weekend instead. Even this was a surprise: I figured I’d have to take half a day off work or race home to make the appointment on time, but there were weekend and evening slots.

I still don’t understand how this happened. After dipping in and out of these awful forms for an entire year, I was suddenly able to finish them off quickly and get an appointment straight away.

Once again, I was nervous as anything on the day of the appointment; I decided to take the Teams call in our study with my husband for moral support and a memory jogger. I knew I’d either forget key info or go off on a tangent, so having him with me would keep my mind herded in the right direction. I have these metal fidget loops, which I kept with me to help with the nervous energy, and I’m glad I did because my fingers were twirling them a hundred times a minute. Oh, and I’m strangely afflicted with tremors too, which were kicking up big time. A trembly, fidget-fingered mess.

Dr Zeeshan Ahmed was friendly, knowledgeable and hugely empathetic. He also seemed genuinely sincere. I couldn’t help thinking about how many of these patient experiences he must hear day in and day out, but he truly sounded like he cared. This was the absolute opposite of the conversation I had with the NHS nurse. Granted, he’s probably endorsed far more handsomely for his time. He went through a series of questions with me, essentially going back over the form in conversation, which gave me a chance to elaborate and recall more anecdotes I hadn’t thought to include previously. It flowed well, and the hour went by pretty quickly. He concluded the appointment to say he believed that I had combined ADHD, and he’d be writing to my GP with details about the appointment and diagnosis.

I could say I was relieved, which I was, but by this point, I already knew I had ADHD without a shadow of a doubt. But I had the confirmation I needed to finally get the help I knew I needed from the UK healthcare system.

Plot twist: whilst titration has now commenced, I am now in a queue for medication with an estimated 10- to 12-month waiting list.