Equal Opportunity Inattentiveness
By now, I think most people realize that girls can have ADHD too. It’s not a gender-linked condition; diagnosis rates should actually be closer to 50-50, though some say 3:1 (but that makes no sense to me and I haven’t seen those authors cite research articles – which I’m also not bothering to do because I’d inevitably get distracted and never finish writing this. Take my word, I could cite the crap out of the research articles, but then your eyes would roll back in your head and… Oh, right. Blog post.)
But they’re not. Those prone to citing statistics say that 50% – 75% of girls with ADHD go undiagnosed. On average, girls are diagnosed 5 years later than boys, usually when they start struggling with schoolwork in middle school. Sadly, despite the equal opportunity nature of ADHD, most of the information available is still more pertinent to boys than girls and to men than women, so a few female-focused resources are listed at the end of this post.
Back to the focus of this post: the boys get all the attention, and there’s an easy explanation for that. Boys and girls display symptoms of ADHD differently. Most people think they understand what ADHD looks like, since disruptive behavior is a primary (though not entirely reliable) indicator. For boys.
Girls, however, cause fewer problems in the classroom. They’re usually more inattentive than hyperactive, but as many child development studies suggest, they also tend to be more socially sensitive than boys, even at a young age. They realize that the kind of behavior that hyperactive, impulsive boys display is not acceptable. So they work hard – very, very hard – to compensate.
Space Cadets by kissabug, CC BY-NC-ND.
Instead, girls with ADHD tend to appear immature or lacking in academic ability. The “space cadet” stereotype can be relatively accurate for a girl with ADHD. It’s not because she’s truly vacant; she just can’t pay attention, no matter how hard she tries. Girls with ADHD often struggle to fit in with peers – or they may seem excessively talkative, dreamy, bossy, forgetful – and on and on.
Girls with ADHD tend to dread school, have low self-esteem, and show signs of anxiety or depression from internalizing their symptoms. They can appear to be “drama queens” and compared to their peers may seem moodier, more emotional, and easily moved to tears. Those with stronger hyperactive tendencies (a very small minority) may be typical tomboys, often getting embroiled in impulsive escapades which are increasingly dangerous in adolescence. And of course, they have a hard time paying attention and finishing tasks.
And that’s basically the story of my youth. I was continually accused of dawdling, never finishing anything, and being terminally forgetful. I was a complete tomboy and could never understand the boring, gossipy, backstabbing girls with their stifling social hierarchy. As I got older, my self-esteem suffered; anxiety and depression escalated, so I was on antidepressants by age 13 – and my folks were not quick to medicate. I got into all kinds of impulsive trouble (arrested in middle school, for example) and overemotional? Yeah, you could say that. At no point before college was I able to fit into the social scene.
But no one saw these symptoms in me, or saw them as symptoms. I was “precocious” and managed to compensate well enough that I was a high school valedictorian. Even I didn’t realize I was struggling until my grades started to show it in college. And I was really, really struggling; I had never learned the organization and study skills I desperately needed to kick it up a notch academically. Lucky for me, my mom (a special ed teacher) figured it out – but that story has already been told elsewhere. Even today I can’t shake the ingrained belief that I’m a dawdler who never finishes anything. I take extreme measures to ensure otherwise, but no amount of overcompensating or accomplishment makes that go away.
Space Cadet by Mika Hiironniemi, CC BY-NC-ND.
So next time you see a “spacey” little girl twirling her hair, a tomboy running wild and climbing trees, or a perennially disorganized young mother whose life is utter chaos and home is always a wreck, just remember: she may be just as smart as her peers, but working harder than any of them to compensate for an invisible disability.
Besides, with a little help, those young space cadets can go on to become rocket engineers, astrophysicists, or xenobiologists. And don’t you dare tell them they can’t!
Additional Resources:
- http://www.addvance.com/help/women/index.html
- http://www.ncgiadd.org/
- http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Girls-With-AD-HD/dp/0966036654
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32 Comments on “Equal Opportunity Inattentiveness”
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This is such an honest beautiful piece, DeeDee. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Thanks! I think the issue of symptoms displaying differently in women versus men is a concern that we should look at more closely across conditions that have a psychological or neurological foundation.
Reblogged this on Disorderly Chickadee and commented:
Finally, my moment in the sun on Black Box Warnings!
Great post! As a girl with ADHD, I can relate.
When I first read about ADHD in girls in a vignette in a book (around age 32), it made me cry because I finally found something that explained so much of the unpleasantness in my youth.
I can imagine. My childhood was very unpleasant too but I had other issues on top of my ADHD
Reblogged this on A Clown On Fire and commented:
DeeDee Chickadee wrote a great post on ADHD and… girls. Please go and read it. Thank you, DeeDee! This is amazing.
I have an attention deficit problem—I’ve never been diagnosed really—and it seems to be the inattentive type. I have often been accused of daydreaming, never completing projects that I began enthusiastically, not being focused, and of course, being lazy. I’m a dude, and I’m sure some of us guys get the sober version of ADD too.
Your logic—lack of ADD diagnoses in girls because they’re more likely to be inattentive than hyperactive—is spot on. Nice post.
On an unrelated note, in your tagline, why is it ‘ceci’ and not just ‘ce’? Is there a difference?
Bharat,
In “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”…? It’s a subtlety of the language. And in this case, it’s a play on Magritte’s famous painting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePipe.jpg.
Le Clown
Thanks man. I just wikied Magritte. I’m trying to learn French. Hence the questions about ce and ceci!
For sure – there are “primarily inattentive” guys as well, and I bet they go underdiagnosed too, while in my opinion, the “primarily hyperactive” version is too liberally applied because let’s face it, hyperactive behavior is pretty much normal for young kids.
Everyone has attention deficits, but it’s a matter of degrees so clinical evaluation is really the only way to be sure.
This is uncanny, but I fit the bill of the inattentive, awkward, ADHD girl on almost all counts—I have always found myself unable to fit in, and developed a feeling of superiority to cope with it. I oscillate between bouts of low self-esteem and that of entitlement and narcissism. I dawdle; I cry at the drop of a hat. (I was lazy to type out this comment even)
I truly cannot express how much this article hit me today, especially since I’ve never been diagnosed with this condition. As you say, it’s probably because of its relatively passive nature in girls.
Great post!
I’m sorry you’ve had that experience – I can definitely relate. There are a number of different potential causes for some of them, and they overlap a lot. For example, I have both ADHD and Bipolar Disorder II diagnoses, but it took months of careful assessment to verify that I really did have both.
It’s all about degrees – if those experiences add up to symptoms that really impact your daily living, then it may be worth getting evaluated.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply DeeDee
Great post. I do believe that girls get overlooked for ADHD by a huge factor. As a teacher, I wonder if we (teachers) accept more daydreaming out of girls than we do out of boys. A daydreaming girl in class is so much easier to handle than an impulsive, hyperactive boy. I also think that many teachers, myself included, are more accepting of daydreaming from girls than from boys. That is, we are quicker to label daydreaming–which is really just inattention–as a symptom of ADHD if we see it in a boy than if we see it in a girl. Girls are socialized to be more accommodating and we, as people, are socialized to see girls’ behavior in a much more benign light. BTW, my son has ADHD and was diagnosed late in middle school after years of battling teachers over his grades. Yes, I’m still bitter, even though he’s in high school now. Sigh.
I can imagine that for many teachers, classroom management demands (and rising class sizes) would make it easier to pass over the quieter inattentive ADHD kids, of either gender.
You make good points about the impact of socialization. I think there’s an overall maturity gap that also makes it more complicated, because there are some categories in which females mature much faster than males. But that’s based on a very vague memory of something read sometime and barely remembered, so y’know, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet!
I think we learned that in one of my development classes, so you have more than the Internet behind you!
This post made me reflect on a girl named Pamela that was in my grade school class — that was 46 years ago. Pamela was considered a classic “problem child” — disruptive — stabbing other kids with pens, acting out frequently, making herself sick (I recall her vomiting at her desk at times). She needed a lot of attention and our teacher, an older woman, that was always quick to lose her patience was forever hitting her on the back and calling her, “You ornery brat!” I steered clear of Pamela as well as my forever angry teacher who was possibly someone bipolar, not that I can recall her ever being nice to any of us. It was a really bad mix, Pamela and that teacher. When I moved onto the third grade, I had an infinitely more tolerant teacher, and Pamela did not return to my school. Kids that have behavioral problems, as my classmate seemed to have suffered, are so much worse off when in the presence of a short-tempered frequently hysterical adult. Even though I avoided the daily drama in my classroom, I will always remember 2nd Grade as particularly unpleasant. Often, I have wondered what became of Pamela — did she go off the deep end or is she now a head engineer at NASA?
The truth is, there are so many potential sources for that kind of behavior that it’s hard to even guess what is going on from an outsider’s perspective. But an unsympathetic and unaccommodating (now illegal) teacher would certainly make the trauma worse.
I think teachers are more thoroughly trained now in recognizing student problems at a level that’s specific enough to get them started on a path toward diagnosis and treatment – or other intervention, if needed. But there always seem to be kids falling through the cracks, and that’s just sad. There’s no reason it has to be that way.
I cried.
Like several others above me in the comments, I relate (terrifyingly) to the details. What really hit me was your “perennially disorganized young mother whose life is utter chaos and home is always a wreck”. God, how I try to be more like other people. But I just can’t. Although therapy is really helping me deal with the feelings of inadequacy, I can’t help but wonder if ADHD is one of the (many) roots. You, and your writings, here and on your blog, keep bringing me back to this question. You’re a bit of a hero.
It was an excellent post, and I’m grateful you wrote it. Thank you.
You’re welcome, Sara – sorry to make you cry though!
I think one of the things that I’ve learned through this is that I have no idea what those “other people” are like except on a few broad categories. There’s two implications of that. First, I stop making assumptions and judgments about what is normal or acceptable until I see a clear extreme – which is pretty rare.
So I can be more generous to both myself and others with the firm belief that we’re all bearing our own crosses, to borrow a phrase. We are all flawed, but what we need to realize is that we basically have no appropriate basis for comparison because of our own subjectivity.
The way I let go of some of that baggage was practicing objectivity as a research skill – detached and nonjudgmental examination of social behavior – and as I got good at doing that when observing others, I found I could do it for myself if I could center myself enough to kind of invoke that logical mind.
Geez, I sound like a DBT cultist. Shoot me now…
Second, for me, that level of inattentiveness was completely normal because I’d never known anything else; how could I know? Symptoms for bipolar like not sleeping more than 4 hours a night and feeling like a rockstar are clearly not normal, because I’ve seen what happens to other people when they try to keep up with me, and it ain’t pretty. But there’s a lot of shades of gray.
Blah blah blah. Anyway, glad ya liked it.
Yup. The older I get, the more I realize I made a lot of the separation between me and “normal” up in my mind. Not through evidence, just through fear and shitty self esteem.
And at the other end, I normalized a lot of things that were really red flags, like a lack of emotional regulation… and it turns into a cycle. Ah well, undoing the knots and the faulty wiring now. Thanks for the response. I admire your courageousness.
I suspect we all do some of that, but some of us do more of it than others. If that makes any sense.
I’ve always been fairly observant of others, but somehow couldn’t generally turn that around on myself and see how different my behavior really was in some categories. I just figured the life inside my head was normal, or normal enough not to be worth further consideration. The constant noise in my ears, the two-track (minimum) thinking, the pernicious insomnia starting around age 5. I now know these are not normal, but couldn’t have known then.
You neither. There’s no sense in lamenting what can’t be changed. Just move along with the unknotting and rewiring – marvelously satisfying when things start to work again, through whatever means it takes. Character development doesn’t happen overnight, or some such bullshit.
This is a great post. I’m more than certain my daughter has ADD….she is forever in her “own little world” and always needs constant reminding….focus redirection etc.. But, she still manages to do pretty well in school…it just take more energy from me, as her mother. And, that’s ok because I wouldn’t change who she is for the world.
I applaud you for both paying attention and working to support your daughter’s needs by providing structure and help with memory-related issues. Regardless of whether she does or doesn’t have ADD, that kind of attention and effort will doubtless help her succeed. A good support system makes all the difference.
I’d say that my kids probably wished I payed LESS attention…..lol but yes, it is worth it!
A coworker of mine is ADHD and has told me so, but somehow it never clicked until I read this post and realized that she displays pretty much every symptom you listed exactly. Thanks for the insight!
It’s easy to overlook some of these symptoms as “normal” or just personality characteristics/flaws. But together they really do paint a different picture, whether or not we really see what they add up to. Glad this helped light a mental bulb somewhere.
i am 24 and have adhd and wasn’t diagnosed until Feb. ? i can’t remember. but i do remember that i have always had and still do have ‘strong emotions’ and have been known as ‘too sensitive’ and ‘over-reactive’ and ‘reading into things too much’ and ‘over analyzing everything’ and just plain making many situations much worse than the had to be. I always lost friends. they would be my best friends… friends that i couldn’t imagine not having in my life then, after a few months they would cut me out of their lives. i never knew why. i kept telling myself that i didn’t do anything wrong. we would have deep conversations and amazing fun times, and great laughs. what ended all this and resulted in them leaving me and sometimes stabbing me in the back in the process every time? having adhd sucks when trying to make and hold onto friends.
Interesting – I haven’t had problems with interpersonal relationships for a really long time. When I was a kid, I was just an obnoxious smartypants and no one likes those, so it was no surprise that I was not exactly popular.
But I agree, ADHD sucks in general. Especially when you have to deal with people who “don’t believe in it”, as though a medical condition has to be believed in to exist like some kind of nasty brain goblin.
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