My husband has attention deficit disorder. Well, he hasn’t actually been diagnosed. He’s way too ADD for that. Trying to get Erik a diagnosis in the Netherlands, where we live, involved multiple phone calls to get referred to the right place; form-filling and questionnaires; a long wait to get an appointment; having to go over the forms and questionnaires with an assistant psychologist; digging out old school reports; and arranging interviews with Erik’s dad (who has suspected ADD) and brother (who has diagnosed ADHD) to find out what he was like as a child.
Needless to say, Erik did not complete the process. It’s a miracle that anyone with the neurological condition does. ADDitude mag, a publication for people with ADD and ADHD, lists the signs of ADD as: “poor working memory, inattention, distractibility, and poor executive function”. Executive functions are skills that help you get things done like plan, manage time and multitask. Erik doesn’t have the ‘H’ in ADHD – he isn’t that hyperactive. But people with ADD don’t get on with bureaucracy.
Erik doesn’t appreciate being told that the way his brain works is “poor”. He spent the first 40 years of his life not knowing that he might have ADD. Instead, since childhood, he was told that he was weird, stupid or broken. He then spent five years wrestling with the idea of having it: first rejecting the label, then accepting it in private but still feeling afraid to talk about it to others.
