ADHD and me the journey begins‪.‬ Conversations with Kerry

This podcast discusses how I decided to get tested for ADHD, my diagnosis and initial experiences.
Transcript thanks to Alicia:
Welcome to conversations with Kerry: a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, queries, questions, or feedback, you can find me as @khoath on Twitter, or email me, kerry@gotss.net. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Welcome to the podcast. This episode is entitled ADHD and Me.

Story time:
I have recently been diagnosed with adult ADHD, and it was quite an interesting journey to get to this conclusion, so I’m going to cover a little bit of that, in the hope that it may be useful and instructional to others.

Now, as a child, I was always reasonably intelligent, and I did reasonably well at school. But I discovered that I really had a problem with procrastination, and getting me to do homework was like pulling teeth. It never seemed to get done. I always found other interesting and more wonderful things to do. And some would say that’s true of any child, but as the years progressed, I discovered that procrastination was a huge problem for me. I would put off important things even if those things were going to pay me lots of money, even if those things were extremely important, even if those things would negatively impact me if left to chance. And I also noticed that I was having trouble focusing on tasks that I wanted to do. I could hyper focus, I could sometimes get into projects and complete them, but I would always jump from project to project and rarely complete anything.

So it was late last year on YouTube I was watching a humorous video about adult ADHD. And they basically have a comic asking you a whole series of questions, and getting you to mark off the behaviors that you experience. And I realized that the actual examples would occur to sighted people more than blind people. But I decided to try this quiz, and see what I actually scored. And I scored quite highly, which got me thinking. And I wondered over the years how many things at my job I had delegated to other people, and how many things in my job that I hadn’t actually done, and how efficient was I at working. And I came to the conclusion, not very. And I got to thinking that there may be a reason for all of this sort of behavior.

So I started to research, and I discovered that a lot of these traits were, in fact, typical of people with ADHD, although ADHD symptoms could occur in other mental conditions, such as bipolar and schizophrenia. So I decided that this required further investigation. And I spoke to some people on the Internet, and got some personal stories, and decided to go to my general practitioner, and get a referral to a psychiatrist. And I got the referral to the psychiatrist, and booked an appointment only to find out that the appointment was going to be 473 dollars. But I was pretty sure that there was stuff going on, so I decided to put the money aside and go to the appointment.

And I went to see the psychiatrist, who was an older fellow. And he asked me lots of questions about my family. Did I live with my family? How closed was I to my parents? Did I experience abuse? Was I depressed, anxious? Had I had psychosis? A whole range of questions. And I discovered through some research that the reason they ask about psychosis is because some people do experience psychosis when they take dexamphetamines or similar stimulant medication. There are a number of non-stimulant medications for ADHD, but the first line of defense is usually stimulant medications because they work for 70 to 80 percent of people that they are prescribed for.

Now when I was seeing the psych, he asked me if I had any of my old school reports, and that if I did, could I please bring them in to the next appointment, and that he would see me in seven weeks’ time. I have to say that was a little demoralizing. So first appointment down