Depression and anxiety disorders occur with ADHD at significant rates.
While figures vary across studies, it’s estimated that about half of adults with ADHD have anxiety. I suspect the number is higher than that. Especially in women.
What explains these high comorbidity rates?
Many factors may explain the overlap, and one of them I can’t stress enough: ADHD does not happen in a vacuum, and its effects are far more impairing when the condition goes
undiagnosed,
untreated, or
improperly treated.
Undiagnosed and/or untreated ADHD makes children, teens, and adults who are otherwise bright and competent feel severely inadequate.
It’s not difficult to see how.
-
impulsivity
-
emotional instability
-
poor planning
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and lack of execution skills
can compromise one’s ability to find success in school, work, relationships, and other parts of life.
Ongoing challenges, and failures, especially when the root cause is neither identified nor treated, makes these individuals feel like failures — like they aren’t trying hard enough. Self-esteem, as a result, plummets.
Other emotions — like anger, resentment, and feelings of worthlessness — often come up as a result of experiencing challenges related to undiagnosed and/or untreated ADHD.
Living with ADHD and depression, of course, creates its own set of challenges.
ADHD does not disappear with age for most people, and the longer ADHD goes undiagnosed, the more problems it potentially creates as life’s demands and responsibilities evolve in complexity.
This may explain why females with ADHD — who tend to be diagnosed later than males — are more than twice as likely to develop depression compared to females without ADHD.
Hyperactivity and impulsivity — obvious signs of ADHD — are not so common in girls and women, which may explain why clinicians miss or misdiagnose their ADHD.
What we often see now is women getting diagnosed while in college, or later.
Depression also appears to take a greater toll on women with ADHD, as depression has an earlier age of onset, lasts longer, comes with more severe symptoms, and a greater likelihood of requiring psychiatric hospitalization in this group compared to women without ADHD.
When I was diagnosed, I first went in for anxiety and depression. The pressures of motherhood and a demanding career finally got to be too much. I looked up the symptoms of anxiety, and found
that it could be a symptom of ADHD, and was completely mindblown. It began my journey of discovery, and realization of why things happened how they did my entire life.
I can tell you story after story of women who did not know they had ADHD, and who had succumbed to the belief that they were failures and would never accomplish anything. I was one of them.
If this is you, reach out to me. I want to hear your story.
[email protected]
https://instagram.com/jenconleyadhd/
