About Me

I understand intimately what it is to live with ADHD+.

Four years ago I was commissioned by the Telegraph Magazine to write an article about the process of my ADHD diagnosis which had come over a decade earlier – WAY before the recent “explosion” in diagnoses that the media is so focused on.

In it I write that I sat sobbing in front of a psychiatrist, telling him that I had always felt that I was on a collision course with ‘something’; that sooner or later my inner madness would be revealed to the world.

I explained that I’d spent my childhood daydreaming at the back of the class, jiggling my leg, cracking my knuckles, gazing out of the window thinking about anything else other than what was being said by the teacher. Into adulthood I’d found it tortuous getting down to work, would blurt out whatever came to my head in a conversation with colleagues and friends and frequently found romantic relationships tempestuous.

The psychiatrist who diagnosed me with ADHD gave me the “textbook” definition of it: I had been born with this neurodevelopmental condition which meant that the system managing the concentration and transport of dopamine and norepinephrine – chemicals that filter unnecessary distractions and ensure appropriate responses to everything – simply didn’t function in my brain as it did in a neurotypical brain. With medication and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy prescribed, I was all set to turn my life around; I would be “fixed”.

Now, the dose of medication certainly helped to focus my scattered mind and the therapy helped draw me out of the depression my undiagnosed and unmanaged ADHD had sucked me into: I now boldly acknowledged my ADHD “superpowers” – those positives of the condition we often hear bandied about, the creativity tenacity and empathy that made me good at my job as a journalist and filmmaker.

BUT…

The problem was, pills popped and course of therapy completed, the truth was I felt far from “fixed.” I couldn’t tame a niggling feeling that there was something more at play within me: I still brimmed with shame at my skewiff inner logic and sensitive emotions and couldn’t shake a sense that everything from head to my toe, was somehow dysregulated and topsy turvy.

So, I started digging to understand what makes “ADHD”-me tick. Over the past decade – I’ve done a deep dive into ADHD – with both a journalist – filmmaker hat on and – over the past two years – as an ADHD+ Educator & Life Coach.

It is ONLY in these past two years that I have become aware of the MIND AND BODY CONCEPTUALISATION OF ADHD. It has helped me to make sense of myself in a way my diagnosis didn’t; it has simply been life changing.

This new conceptualisation – ADHD+ – doesn’t DENY the longstanding understanding of ADHD as a neurodevelopmental condition, rather what it provides us with is a new and fundamental layer of understanding it. It invites us to see ADHD through a mind and body lens, to understand ADHD – “in the brain” – to infact be only one aspect of a far more complex condition, a condition that is far better understood as one of dysregulation (mind and body). ADHD+ brings groundbreaking awareness of the physical conditions that frequently journey with ADHD.

This new understanding points us to meaningful and effective ways to manage ADHD holistically.