Misdiagnosis can cause long-term mental health complications
“Imagine being a young female, and always being told ‘hurry up, why are you always forgetting everything, why can’t you focus?’” Here, journalist and mother Patricia Tomasi, is describing for the Huffington Post an unfortunate truth for many women. A lifetime of being labelled lazy, dim and depressed, coupled with an unshakeable feeling that something is wrong with your brain in comparison to everyone else’s, is a reality for the countless females who have ADHD that has been overlooked or misdiagnosed.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]…they feel more social pressure to conform to societal standards…[/pullquote]
A chronic neurological disorder which affects the brain structurally and chemically, ADHD can become less intense for males after puberty. For many females, however, it gets worse with age. With as large as a 1:4 ratio, males are much more likely to have ADHD accurately diagnosed and treated at a younger age than females are, leading to an array of mental health issues in women who grow up with undiagnosed ADHD. One of the main reasons for this oversight is that young girls often display symptoms of ADHD in ways that diverge from the stereotypical, hyperactive behaviour that ADHD tends to produce in their male counterparts.
There are three types of ADHD: the hyperactive type, the inattentive type, and a combination type. Females tend to fall into the inattentive type, with their symptoms including things like being prone to daydreaming, being forgetful, emotional, anxious, (seemingly) unmotivated, shy, self-blaming and easily overwhelmed. These symptoms easily sink into the background of a classroom environment, especially when other children may be exhibiting symptoms of the hyperactive type of ADHD. This type too shows itself differently in girls than in boys, with girls showing signs of being over-talkative, fidgety, bossy, or overambitious.
The discrepancies between ADHD in girls and boys has to do with both nature and nurture. On the one hand, there is a difference in the brain abnormalities that cause ADHD in boys and girls, with the abnormalities lying in the basic primary motor cortex for boys, and in the prefrontal regions of the brain that support motivation and emotional regulation, for girls. On the other hand, girls are also prone to masking their abnormalities as they feel more social pressure to conform to societal standards of girls as being “put together.” Women who have grown up to find out in adulthood that they have ADHD report feelings of depression and anxiety that grew as a result of knowing they had an abnormality, but not knowing what it was and what to do about it.
The longer ADHD goes undiagnosed, the worse the side effects get. Self-harm, substance abuse, eating disorders, and social anxiety, to name a few, all sky-rocket until a woman is able to get help. Finally receiving medical help is often a great relief, with some women reporting that not only medication, but exercise too is a very efficient tool in relieving stress, improving moods, and helping the brain stay focused in the specific way with which a brain affected by ADHD has trouble. In order to best take care of yourself and your family, it is advised to get all members of the family, regardless of age and gender, examined by a physician if they exhibit any symptoms of a possible attention disorder.