ADHD Ask: Would My Life Be Better if I Was Diagnosed as A Child?

I was not diagnosed with ADHD until I was 39. A large (and continuing) part of my coming to terms with my new diagnosis was wondering how my life might have been different if I had been diagnosed as a child. There is a feeling that the person I am today is made up of coping mechanisms. If I didn’t have to hide, learn what was appropriate, and behave the way that made people comfortable, would I have flourished?

A Brief, Relevant, History of ADHD

When I was born in 1982, it was known as attention deficit disorder (ADD). It had only just been changed to that name in 1980. Previously the condition was called hyperkinetic impulse disorder.

In 1987 the name was changed again, to what we know it as now, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The 1990s brought an increase in ADHD cases. Awareness of the disorder was up, and parents were reporting symptoms to their child’s doctor. The diagnostic process was more efficient and medications became more effective as a treatment.

Mental Health Care in the 1980s

While mental health medicine seemed to be making strides in the 80s, they still held tightly to older mentalities. A 1983 Bulletin of the World Health Organization article discussed ‘developing countries’ housing options for the mentally ill, which it described as “unsuitable for humane and effective treatment”. At the same time, the article did a lot of self-congratulating from the point of view of ‘Western’ treatment and highlighted a collaborative study that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently undertaken. They admit that although the evaluation was yet to be completed, they were comfortable publishing the idea that “many of the needs of the severely mentally ill can be covered without additional staff and with only marginal involvement of psychiatrists”.

Common of this time was the phrasing used several times in this study, referring to ADHD and other mentally ill people as retards.

So, what do we say if we can’t use “the R-word”?

By the late 80s, it was becoming less common for academic studies to use the word ‘retard’, at least in relation to ADHD, as awareness of the disorder grew. This left a verbal gap in the market, and although studies found a way to avoid saying ‘the R-word’, the option they were left with was not much better.

This 1989 study, published in Child Development academic journal, found that “ADHD boys obtained higher…scores than normal boys.”

A 1993 Canadian Journal of School Psychology study looked at the link between ADHD children and their parents' positive or negative child-rearing discussions. The children in this study were sorted into three different categories, little aggressive-defiant behaviour (ADHD-LAD), aggressive-defiant behavior (ADHD-HAD), and nonproblem children.

The control group in this study, children without ADHD, are defined as nonproblems, so conversely, the children with ADHD are problems.

Not normal.

A problem.

This is what I would have been subjected to if I had been diagnosed with ADHD in the 1980s. Heck, if you look at the statistics, girls were so under-represented, I might not have even been considered.

It was my therapist who described treatment methods for children in the late 80s and 90s as ‘abusive interventions’.

I mourn who I might have been if I had known about being ADHD in childhood, but there is no guarantee or even a likelihood that things would have been better. I would have known that I had a brain deficiency, but not have been able to convince other people of that fact, or have them believe that I was anything other than ‘slow’.

I might have been known as ‘retarded’ instead of ‘lazy’, and had things that I loved in childhood withheld for my own good. I basically lived in the school library, and my relationship with books helped me get through the years — who would I have been if I hadn’t been allowed to read the books I wanted to? I played netball for over 5 years as a child — what if I had been excluded from that due to my disability?

Who would I be without the pieces of my childhood that formed who I am now? Instead of looking at what more I might have gotten as a diagnosed ADHD child, what would I have missed out on?

© Kristy Westaway 2021