My ADHD journey
Photo by Mark Harpur on Unsplash
Hi, I’m Anita. Have we met? Let me introduce myself…
I have navigated and healed from long-standing and recurring wounds of depression and anxiety. And I know that others can heal too, with the right guidance, support and treatment.
I was a doctor (GP) for over 20 years and now work as a CBT therapist. At the age of 55, I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, a revelation that helped me make sense of a lot of my life. About 30% of adults with ADHD experience depression and nearly 50% experience anxiety in their lifetime. I also have a strong family history of both these conditions.
Alongside medical and therapy treatments, I began a committed practice of meditation and studying Buddhist teachings, aligning with my lifelong passion to understand myself, others and the world. Both professionally and personally, I have learned how to heal myself and this learning has been very hard-won. It’s been tough, starting and slipping, then setting out again, but gradually, the wounds have turned to scars. I have no delusions that the wounds will never trouble me again, because it is the nature of recurrent mood disorders to reappear at times of stress. Yet I have learned invaluable skills and trust in my capacity to maintain and restore my buoyancy.
Writing about a personal journey like this carries the risk of appearing too linear or neatly wrapped up. I have read many stories that seem to lead up to a tidy ‘hallelujah’ moment, but my journey has been anything but straightforward. It has unfolded through luck, opportunity, the generosity of others, and the privilege to access treatments privately.
I hope that by telling my story, you will find some elements you can relate to and that you feel inspired and hopeful for yourself or your loved ones with ADHD.
Let’s start at the very beginning. I am the only child of loving and hard-working parents who emigrated from India to London in the 1960s. As an emotionally sensitive child, I was academically bright but often left outside friendship groups for being nerdy. I had few of the classic childhood ADHD symptoms but experienced significant social anxiety from the age of 8. I remember ‘Sunday night tummy feelings’ when the thought of returning to school would make me feel nervous and nauseous and I was anxious about eating in front of others due to my thin frame.
I found my footing at medical school, presenting a more confident version of myself. I studied doggedly, often starting to revise long before my peers, because I struggled to grasp concepts as quickly. This approach worked until I faced bullying examiners during my final medical exams, which I then failed, having never failed anything academic before. This triggered a bout of minor depression, which shifted once I realised that the world and my life did indeed continue despite my 'failure.'
My first major depression hit when I started my 100-hour per week junior doctor job, feeling isolated and alone. Despite this, I kept smiling and performing competently, though internally distraught and exhausted. I took a few days off sick and then switched to the next job. I staggered on through the brutal years of GP training, with periods of overwhelm and times of energy and enthusiasm. I took on new ventures, did freelance medical journalism, became the first Asian woman on the Council of the British Medical Association, and contributed to NHS change management programs. I also got married, lived in France for a year while my husband completed an MBA and we had two children. I became a partner at a GP practice, training upcoming GPs and delivering countywide changes in diabetes services. I began to see that my relentless striving, perfectionism and systemic frustrations would likely lead me towards burnout. My decision to leave was quick rather than impulsive, shocking my colleagues who were unaware of my inner turmoil.
However I’d totally underestimated how much my identity was intertwined with ‘doctoring’. Without medicine, I struggled to redefine myself. This led to several bouts of depression as I explored and rejected various career paths. I tried antidepressants but experienced significant palpitations and had to stop. Talking therapies gradually helped. I joined EY as a Director in healthcare management consultancy.
Despite enjoying the change, my heart still wanted to help people directly and personally - I am a clinician at my core. I eventually trained as a CBT therapist, a decision inspired in part by my own therapy experiences. From the outset of training, I felt like I’d come home, that here was an opportunity for professional and personal understanding and caregiving, with flexibility and variety to accommodate my own needs.
I started my private practice with little experience of neurodiversity, a topic that neither my medical nor my CBT training had delved into. A chance encounter with broadcaster-journalist Adrian Chiles, who later wrote about his treatment with me in his Guardian column, led others to seek therapy with me. I soon recognised symptoms in my son, daughter, and eventually myself. We all followed a full diagnositc assessment pathway and received ADHD diagnoses.
And then we hit a couple of really tough years. Our son was just leaning into university life when Covid hit and the resulting disruption to structure and routines deeply unsettled him. He returned back home. Coping with his ADHD symptoms on top of my own, was grim. As a family, we also experienced other significant and chronic domestic pressures, that I could seemingly neither fix nor escape from. Months of heightened anxiety gradually exhausted themselves into another depressive episode. Â I felt utterly joyless and as though the colour had drained out of life, leaving me with black and white only.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy was helpful but not sufficient as a standalone treatment and my options for antidepressants were severely limited due to a newly diagnosed heart condition (long QT syndrome - this is what had caused my previous palpitations). Feeling hopeless and trapped, I heard about repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS), a UK government NICE approved treatment for hard-to-treat depression. After starting rTMS, my mood lifted significantly within 10 days, the despair lifted and I began to feel like myself again. My treatment was privately funded, expensive and time-consuming, but it worked.
Since then, the external life problems have eased, and I remain well. I make my wellbeing a daily priority. I ensure that I exercise, eat and sleep well and connect with awe-inspiring nature and art. I balance socialising with making time for solitude and by meditating and studying the Buddhist teachings. I go on daylong and longer residential Buddhist retreats every couple of months, and I have my online meditation community too. Through meditation, I’m learning how to focus my attention where I want it to be, instead of being dragged about by my ADHD mind. It definitely takes practice, but the prize is that alongside the other interventions that I’ve learned through therapy, I can now better regulate my emotional responses to stressors.
So that’s me. I’ve negotiated my way through thickets and sunny uplands, I’ve had chance encounters and support from treasured others, and I’ve had to learn and work stuff out for myself too. It is with the Buddhist spirit of ‘dana’ or generosity that I want to share these professional and personal learnings with others who suffer similarly.
The aim of my Substack articles is to teach from my scars and I hope they help anyone who values support. I offer them freely in the spirit of giving, or ‘Dana’ as Buddhists say.
You can Subscribe below and get all of my future posts sent directly to your inbox.
Thank you for sharing your story; by opening up and sharing our vulnerabilities we are united in our humanity and can help one another. It’s a very loving thing you are doing.