My Story: Coping With ADHD

By Saniya Ghanoui —

IK shares her experience with ADHD and her journey with finding the right diagnosis and treatment.

Transcript: 

OBOS Today: Can you speak a little bit more to that and how that treatment has gone and if you’ve found with having that diagnosis, has your treatment been positive or have there also been issues? 

IK: So far with that diagnosis, um, it’s been pretty positive, I think. Um so when my psychiatrist decided to, you know, kinda test it out by obviously giving me Adderall, um I think, obviously the progress of diagnosing me, it was like, there are two types of AD—There are multiple types of ADHD, but it can manifest differently and oftentimes what can manifest with girls is the inattentive type, so you don’t find that the girls would be as hyperactive, so it’s hard, it’s not as noticeable. And my psychiatrist felt, like diagnosed me with that, that version of ADHD so he kinda, so he prescribed me accordingly because there are different types of medications that you can take to treat it depending on how your behaviors manifest or how, you know, how your ADHD manifests, I guess. And it’s been pretty, my experience has been pretty positive.

Every, ever since I started taking ADHD, sorry not ADHD, Adderall um, I’ve um, [pause] I do feel a little bit more like myself, a little more in control of my life, and right now my um, my dosage is really low for my body weight just cause I’m starting out on it, but I do feel a significant change in my life where things are clearer, I, for the first time, I feel less hopeless, I guess or less anxious about the future because I’d constantly be, you know, for most of my life, I felt this, you know, this fear of failure because I feel like I’m not, I have to work twice as hard to do whatever every normal person can do with less effort, you know?

And it just made me feel like I was just, just you know, inherently bad at things, I guess [laughs] and just being able to see, really see that it’s, it wasn’t me all this time. It was just something that was out of my control, it was, you know, a health issue that can be treated has really, it just really been very positive for me that, And I mean the whole process of getting a diagnosis was really difficult because before this, it was often like, because ADHD can often look like, it can look like PTSD, it can look like, you know, just a lot of anxiety, it can look like OCD, so I was diagnosed with OCD for a little while, but that didn’t quite fit, you know, the medication didn’t help, and obviously going through, you know, receiving all these different diagnoses and having to test out what fits and what doesn’t and being able to, you know, also self-care throughout that with those, you know diagnoses in mind, it’s been a struggle but being able to find something that works finally has been pretty great.