On Taking Charge of Adult ADHD

Over the past few months my therapist has mentioned more than once that she thinks I may have ADHD, and it’s seeming increasingly clear that she’s right. I’ve met plenty of people with ADHD and carried a foggy sense of what it is, but I don’t think I really got it. Barkley’s book is a primer, designed for someone who knows nothing about the condition, and its tone is remarkably light. It’s divided into steps — diagnosis, medication, strategies — and Barkley’s view is that medication is the single most important tool for bringing ADHD under control, with everything else there to supplement it; somewhere near the start, if I remember right, he says the later strategies may not work at all without it. In his account, ADHD is essentially a disorder of two things, time blindness and executive function, and the chapter on the many facets of executive function was especially enlightening, because I have a genuinely hard time with it.

The end of the book covers how ADHD shows up across different parts of life and how it might be better managed. I think mine went invisible for years, since I’ve long been a hard worker and intelligent enough — though even so I had trouble turning in assignments in high school. Where I really see it is at work, where it’s the most unbearable, intolerable challenge of my existence, and I’ve seen it in my relationship too, especially early on, though there I managed to bring it under control in a way I haven’t elsewhere. All told, this is a good primer, but it sacrifices depth. For anyone wondering whether they have ADHD it might be a good first step, and it’s illuminating — I just wish it were more.