ADHD diagnosis in adulthood can be life-changing for women, writer Noelle Faulkner says

Burnt out, anxious and feeling like you’re on a roller coaster you can’t get off: welcome to life with ADHD.

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And if you’re a woman living with the condition, there’s an extra hurdle on top of all that.

Women are more likely to make it all the way to adulthood with no idea they’ve got ADHD — often going decades with no diagnosis — and it’s having a huge impact on their lives.

When writer Noelle Faulkner was growing up, she and her parents had no idea she might have ADHD.

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“I had so many hobbies as a kid. I had a lot of energy, and for lack of a better word I was just distracted all the time,” she said.

Instead of receiving an ADHD diagnosis, Noelle was instead pointed in the direction of drama classes.

She was in her 30s before she got the answers she’d been seeking for decades.

“I was having constant burnout. I’d had so many blood tests, so many misdiagnoses around my mental health,” she said.

“If I’d been diagnosed earlier as a child or even as a teenager, my life would be so different.”

“I think that I wasted so much of my teenage years overwhelmed because that is the key feeling of someone with ADHD.”

Some studies have shown that boys are diagnosed with ADHD at a rate of 2:1 more than girls, while others have shown the rate could be as high as 10:1.

Girls flying under the radar

ADHD is caused by a reduction in the amount of dopamine and noradrenaline in certain areas of the brain and the symptoms that shortage causes go well beyond not being able to sit still.

There are three types of ADHD: Inattentive, hyperactive and combined.

Inattentive ADHD is typically characterised by symptoms like difficulty focusing and getting easily distracted.

Behaviours associated with hyperactive ADHD — like fidgeting and being super talkative — are more well known, but symptoms of each type are often missed in girls according to clinical psychologist Madeline O’Reilly.

“Culturally, there’s less stigma about it in boys and men. I think also they may be more likely to have the hyperactive, impulsive type,” she said.

“So it’s more visible to their family, to their teachers, to the people around them.”

Clinical psychologist Madeline O’Reilly said women she sees have often received their diagnosis after childhood.(

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Ms Faulkner said ADHD symptoms were often just written off in girls.

“A lot of us, if we have hyperactive ADHD, we’re just seen as chatty,” she said.

“If we have the distracted form of ADHD, we’re just seen as dreamers.

“Boys that have a more hyperactive type of ADHD, they’re seen as the naughty little boys… and little girls are just, ‘oh, they’re just dreamers and chatty and they’ll distract others because we’re gossips’.

“All those tropes that come with being a little girl, and I know for me I had both inattentive and hyperactive ADHD, and my mum and my dad were just like, ‘we didn’t even know what to look for.'”

Getting diagnosed as an adult

When Ms Faulkner was finally diagnosed, she said it was life-changing.

“I felt like I had an answer to a question I had been asking for so long,” she said.

“I just felt like someone had finally seen me because it’s not just a matter of the doctor sitting down and going, ‘oh you have ADHD’; you have to go through the diagnosis.

“They have the checklist, they ask you questions… and everything he asked me, my mind just kept blowing.

“It just made it all make perfect sense. It felt such a relief to finally have someone see me and put a name to whatever was going on.”

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Ms O’Reilly said it was common for women to be diagnosed as adults.

“Often a young woman would come in, often I will see them towards the end of high school or maybe one or two years into university, sometimes even later than that,” she said.

“They’re burnt out, they’re really anxious, maybe they’re a bit depressed as well, and they’ve been failing.

“It’s that they’re never feeling in control, rarely feeling like they’re actually managing their day-to-day tasks.

“Sometimes that’s gotten so bad that it’s created depression, but oftentimes they’re sitting at a really anxious point and feeling quite hopeless and quite down on themselves, feeling like their self-esteem really, really needs to be built back up.”

Finding a community

When it comes to building that self-esteem back up, Ms Faulkner said one of the most important things for her had been finding other people with ADHD who understood what she was going through.

“The benefit of finding communities is really important… I have the privilege of having written about it, and then after I wrote about it I had so many friends that I didn’t realise had been diagnosed as kids or diagnosed as adults reach out to me,” she said.

“The stigma needs to be taken away from it, which I think is happening. If you go on Instagram or any social media, it’s being talked about more and more.”

Ms O’Reilly said once someone had received a diagnosis, there were lots of options when it comes to managing ADHD.

“Once we’re clear on what diagnosis we’re dealing with, it’s about the psycho-education around what is ADHD, what is going on in your brain,” she said.

“We can then essentially create a safety net of strategies.”

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An important part of managing the condition could be drawing on the strengths associated with ADHD.

“There are lots of things that people with ADHD usually naturally really, really good at and we want to play to their strengths,” she said.

“Often people are really, really good at imagining things and being quite creative and the problem-solving.

“If there’s an issue, if it’s interesting enough, if it’s curious enough and complicated enough, it will grab their attention and they’ll do really well at solving it.

“So we try to create an environment where their tasks are engaging, are interesting, are challenging and have enough sort of intrinsic motivation to be able to hold their attention.”