How and when did you come to be diagnosed? [ADHD] was something that I really had to get to grips with, and hadn’t really suspected, until lockdown happened. And suddenly, all of the tools that I now recognise as being effective ADHD methods to focus and work more effectively suddenly vanished overnight. I’d had a few suspicions that the way that I approached work might be a little unusual, but I just thought I was eccentric! I was just better at working at night, I would suddenly just work in these huge intense flurries and I could produce absurd quantities of work under a very short deadline – But that was very variable as well. During the first lockdown, I really needed
external structures to help focus. There’a key element of the ADHD toolbox called body doubling, which is essentially, if somebody sat next to you doing something, even if it’s not the thing that you’re working on, that presence tends to get you into the headspace to focus on the thing that you need to. It’s something that I’ve used unintentionally extensively throughout my life – I used to sit on Google Hangouts for eight hours a day, just sharing my screen and idly voice chatting with people online in completely different countries, we’d all be painting and working together. So once I’d had that moment of realisation, I
posted about it. Quite a few people reached out to me and suggested different processes that could speed things up because it’s very slow getting diagnosed on the NHS, and that involves paperwork. I proceeded not to do that for a year. Then, in January 2021, rather than going through all of these methods I just went the path of least resistance and just asked to be referred on the NHS. It takes a while – the NHS, as everyone is acutely aware right now is chronically underfunded, especially with regards to mental health support. And for me, I was very lucky that it took me a year. But even since that in terms of further support, I haven’t had a huge amount. I got my recommendation, and a stamp of yes, you have ADHD, and that’s kind of been it. But still, I’m very appreciative to have that. But it does take a while, and there are some people that have been waiting for a couple of years. You know, it’s quite funny. When I was getting
diagnosed with my psychiatrist, I said I worked in games and she laughed and said ‘oh, I see so many people who work in games. I saw someone from games just yesterday!’ It does seem to be a thing.
How does your ADHD present itself in the workplace, and how do you manage it? It was just generally not being able to focus as much as I’d like. If there’s something that’s quite intensely admin heavy, it would require a lot more cognitive load to be able to dig into a really complex email, for example, or source a lot of very complicated files. And I think there’s a lot of internal frustration as well, the feeling that I can’t do the tasks that I need to tackle or I’m not quite sure where to start. I have a lot of methods and tools that I’ve kind of gleaned over the years to tackle that, but it doesn’t make it less difficult to just jump in. ADHD brains benefit from structure, and losing that
can be just completely disorientating. Like all those things you do when going into an office or established work from home setup, that no-one really had when they were suddenly forced into their bedrooms to work. There’s so much that was lost because of that. There’s ways of getting around it. I use a lot of
deadlines to get things done, and if I’m going to lose something, I’ll be much more engaged. I did a short story writing course, and I was really struggling to get
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