Last week I wrote about a study that purported to show a “frightening mortality gap” between people with ADHD and everybody else that mostly disappears once researchers accounted for the anxiety and depression that so often come from miserable Hunters trying to fit into this Farmer’s world.
Now a new study out of Istanbul proves the same thing, only with the arrow of causation running in the other direction.
One of Turkey’s largest psychiatric hospitals did a study where they screened 170 adult women who’d come for help with depression or anxiety. The team gave them the standard depression and anxiety psychological inventories, then had them fill out a childhood ADHD questionnaire (that wasn’t labeled as such), followed by a structured interview with a psychiatrist.
The results, published in the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, found that 33 of the 170 women, nearly one in five, met the full criteria for adult ADHD and about half of those with ADHD had never been diagnosed.
The women with ADHD had stories Hunters easily recognize; more trouble with school discipline, more job changes, more relatives with ADHD. They all scored higher on the hyperfocus scale, something largely unique to us Hunters.
And, troublingly, they all reported current feelings of failure and even present-tense thoughts of suicide. This, of course, is what happens to Hunters expected to behave like good Farmers, particularly in a patriarchal society where women are expected to organize the household and “serve their men.”
I remember speaking to conferences on ADHD back in the 1990s when the vast majority of parents who showed up were mothers with recently-diagnosed sons, trying to figure out what was happening and how to deal with it.
I also remember, vividly, how many of them told me after my lectures that they came to the same shocking revelation that I had when my son was diagnosed: “That’s me, too!”
Back in the 1990s, women were rarely diagnosed, which is why the work of my friend Sari Solden and her book on women and ADHD was so ground-breaking. Instead of ADHD, they were given largely pejorative labels like disorganized, depressed, or high-strung.