The other night, NG noticed I was reading Women with Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life by Sari Solden and she inquired about it. I commented that I’m it quite informative and eye-opening. I don’t get the results back from my testing until next Tuesday, but I can definitely relate to the women used as examples in the first six chapters and I can see myself in the symptoms listed.
However, the one thing these kinds of books never seem to have, I’ve noticed, is an example of what is normal to compare the abnormal to. The book was written by a woman who suffers from ADD for women who suffer from ADD so it occurs to me that if you do have ADD, you don’t know what is a non-ADD life to compare your symptoms to. You can’t possibly know you are abnormal; more than likely you have gone your whole life thinking you are normal, that this madness is normal, unless someone else has told you it’s not.
So, as I’ve read these six plus chapters, I’ve had in my head the thought that my mother might be right that if I did have ADD, I probably would have been diagnosed as a child, and then there’s the comment that NG made that at some point her son’s doctors seemed determined that he had ADD, though he doesn’t. Then there’s the statistics that many women in my generation weren’t diagnosed as children because they simply weren’t hyperactive the way boys were and they were overlooked — girls were allowed to be flaky and flighty because that is a cultural trait of girls that’s considered feminine and expected. All of that is swimming in there and really I can’t begin to guess until next Tuesday and to be honest, I don’t know if I’ll trust the results either way.
So, I come back to the question I’ve asked a lot in my lifetime: What is going on in other people’s minds? What is normal for everyone else? There doesn’t seem to be an example of this sort of thing for me to compare to anywhere that I see so I can make up my own mind as to whether or not I’m closer to normal or abnormal. It’s easy to relate to the women in the ADD book, but I wonder if I couldn’t just as easily relate to normal women.
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It seems like an impossible diagnosis to determine. Normal for one person is not normal for another.
I’ve read Driven to Distraction, which states:
“…the diagnosis of ADD is based first and foremost on the individual’s history or life story.”
“…the diagnosis of ADD depends absolutely upon the simplest of all medical procedures: the taking of a history.”
The book also lists some suggested diagnostic criteria for ADD in adults…which sounds similar to what you have read.
All that I know is that I meet almost all of the “suggested diagnostic criteria.” Does that mean I’m ADD? Quite possibly. But the funny thing is, is that I bought this book to read because I thought that my husband might be ADD, but when I started reading it, I was recognizing myself moreso than him!