Dr G's ADHD Chat

Had so much interesting stuff, I decided I needed two episodes to include it all. ADHD is an increasingly researched diagnosis, so we get more and more information to use to help our ADHDers. This episode talks more about handling the neurological aspects of the ADHD brain, that hyper alert,creative, rapid responding brain can be trained.

Parenting an ADHD child is not for the faint of heart. Between the emotion regulation problems and the executive difficulties there is a tremendous amount of work for a parent. The first step is to keep reminding yourself that this is a neurotically conditioned not a behavior problem. I’ll discuss some of the other nuances of this condition in this episode of the Chat.

The morning routine is typically a problem time in an ADHD household. The problems of having everybody in the household having to get up, get ready and eat breakfast and be on time is challenging at best. It will likely never be perfect but you can. Make it easier on yourselves as the parents by starting the night before.

Given the ADHD impulsivity and the difficulties with employment, careers and relationships over 40 to 50 years, it is not surprising that middle-aged alcoholics with ADHD are common. In this episode I will explain some of the difficulties this group of ADHDers have including disillusionment that they haven’t achieved more in life.

ADHD teens are more impulsive and adventure seeking than their peers. They are also more prone to experiment with different substances. The most common of these is alcohol. It is easy to acquire because it’s available everywhere including the home. Treatment for alcohol in teenagers is a bit specialized and even more specialized for ADHD teens with alcohol problems. I’ll cover some of the most effective treatments and some of the approaches parents should take.

ADHDers have a higher rate of alcoholism than neurotypicals. Why should this be true? I’ll cover some of the reasons and some speculations about why this is so. I’ll also discuss some of the treatments available.

Does having ADHD make one more prone to alcohol abuse? Is the rate of abuse higher for ADHDers than neurotypicals? I’ll cover these issues and more. I used to do drug and alcohol evaluations, so I have worked with substance abuse of all kinds. Alcohol of all the substances of abuse is the one that’s hardest to avoid. It is literally available everywhere and is embedded in many people’s culture and religion. I’ll cover these issues and more that make alcohol a major problem for ADHDers.

We have covered the significant differences between females and males in the last 4 episodes. In this episode I will summarize what the research has shown about females and ADHD.

Another difference in females with ADHD is that masking is more prevalent. Masking is just a different way of saying that the ADHDer is trying to act like she doesn’t have ADHD. This involves denying any symptoms of ADHD or minimizing those she can’t deny.

Female emotional dysregulation is different from male emotional dysregulation. Males typically have stronger reactions and are more likely to react with anger. Female emotional dysregulation is usually less extreme and less easy to observe and identify. This is likely at least partially the reason that females are much less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than males. I’ll present on the different issues regarding female emotional dysregulation and its impact on diagnosis and treatment.

As If having ADHD wasn’t problem enough, Women have to go through further difficulties secondary to their menstrual cycles. The fluctuations in estrogen during the menstrual cycle cause further difficulties with the regulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with ADHD. I’ll discuss this issue further in this podcast.

Like many areas of medicine most of the research has been done on men. In fact for some time it was thought that women didn’t have ADHD. This was both because overall research on ADHD was in its preliminary stages and it was not known that there were multiple ADHD subtypes.When it was recognized that the more recognizable hyperactive type was not the only type and that there was a much quieter and harder to recognize ADHD, inattentive type. This is the type of ADHD most commonly seen in females. With improved evaluation procedures more and more females were being diagnosed with ADHD. It is likely that the actual incidence is essentially the same for both males and females. I’ll discuss what is known about females and ADHD in the next few episodes.

After spending 6 hours in an environment that was not designed for the way their brain works, your ADHDer comes crashing through your front door. What mood will your ADHDer present you with. How much homework do they have? Do they have everything they need to complete said homework. Did they have an okay day? Any behavior problems? This is a potentially dangerous time for you as a parent. Your major protection is to have established routines for what homework is done. Where it’s done. What about snacks? I’ll cover some of the major points in this episode.

School has started for all of us. It’s a time of stress for all of us ADHD parents when we have to put our children into a system that isn’t designed for them. As a result we have to do more preparation than the parents of neurotypical children. In this podcast, I’ll cover some of the things to do, hopefully mostly reminders of things to do to insure a smooth transition to the school year.

Many of us assume or were taught that getting goods and a lot of education are the most important factors in being successful. But, no there is actually something that is way more important to achieving success than intelligence or years of education and that is, resilience. Resilience is basically not giving up. More abstractly, it is about learning from your mistakes. It is also about not falling apart when you fail, but being able to learn when things don’t go the way you expected.

We have discussed parents who do not have ADHD, but do have and ADHD child, families with one parent who is neurotypical and one who has ADHD. Now we’re going to cover families with two parents who have ADHD. This, in my experience is relatively rare,but still has a lot of the same issues multiplied by having the whole family be ADHD.

The most common pattern I’ve seen in ADHD families is when one parent is ADHD and the other parent is neurotypical. This pattern is characterized by the neurotypical parent frequently feeling  like he/she is overworked and responsible for keeping the whole family on track. He/she is responsible for keeping track of all the appointment, usually also paying the bills, making arrangements for vacations and scheduling appointments. There is frequently a lot of resentment in these situations. One woman described it as feeling like she had an extra child. The ADHD parent frequently feels that he?she doesn’t get any respect. In this episode I’ll be discussing these relationships and some ways to regain comfort and satisfaction in the marital relationship.

As the parent of an ADHD child, your relationship is bound to be tricky. Sometimes you’ll be happy and enjoying your ADHDer’s sense of humor and antics and the next you’ll be upset and anxious because of a temper tantrum or frustrated by finding out that the two weeks of homework you worked over with your child never got turned in to the teacher. I’ll be presenting some of methods for recovering your calm and improving your relation ship with your ADHDer.

ADHDers are well known for having difficulties with emotional regulation. In spite of ADHD being a neurologic condition, there are still measures that can be taken to improve emotional control. In this sessions I’ll deal with some of these techniques.

It's probably the fault of our educational system that we all think that intelligence, as measured mainly by memory, is the most important skill for having a successful life. Success, especially for our ADHD kids has more to do with resilience, the ability to learn from mistakes and make improvements, than their grade point average or their standardized score on an intelligence test.