Beware the hooks! AuDHD and ADHD’s influence on thought

Spongebob: Ep. Hooky

How many other people with AuDHD or ADHD have felt themselves unable to let go of a stream of thought? It happens to me frequently. I feel like a dog with a chew toy, I just cannot let go, even after a good mangling.

I never even realized this is what I was doing until I’d been “consistently” on my meds. At this point, I have to conclude my academic curiosities and my enjoyment of a good critique or debate are a result of these hooks that just won’t let go of a topic. The irony of these hooks is that they don’t seem to align with an attention deficit at all, quite the opposite. I might argue that “attention deficit” is really what it looks like to somebody who has noticed but not accepted they are boring me to tears.

The upside to these naturally occurring hooks is that I can get quite deep into some interesting topics and experience the satisfaction gained from new perspectives and a deeper conceptual understanding. However, the downside is no joke. These hooks can get into streams of thought that are not productive, fed and exacerbated by anxiety and depression. Those with AuDHD and ADHD have often been noted to have a creative bent due to lateral thinking and an intimidating imagination, but if that machinery is hijacked by anxiety, my mind is then in that place for the foreseeable future.

Before I was diagnosed, I always used to say things like, “I have a lot on my mind,” or, “I wish I had an off button” when talking about the difficulty of quieting my thoughts towards the end of a day. I don’t know how many times I have tried to guide a thought process to a natural full stop with the hopes of freeing my mind from this burden, but it never seems to work. Given that often what I am doing is trying to make predictions and come up with contingency plans for different eventualities, I can sometimes accept that I simply cannot know and therefore should put the thought process on hold until I know more. I can also accept that my mind likes to spear ideas with hooks, reminding me that this is in my nature, which can perhaps help keep the emotional response in check (if my alexithymia hasn’t blinded me completely). So far, though, the best solution seems to be distraction – spear something else.   

I have also noticed my hooks can be sensitive to communications from others, which result in something being said (written), and I’m unable to gauge meaning or intention (the Au in AuDHD). My response, and I don’t have much say in this, is to sink my hooks into the message and figure out both what it meant and what it means in the context of understanding my future. I usually have to remind myself that I am going to over-think it, there might not be much meaning or intent, and even if there is, it’s just one opinion. Although, to save myself from any mental acrobatics that might ruin my evening, I tend to avoid communications towards the end of the day and tackle them in the morning – I know avoidance isn’t a great solution, but I’m still waiting for the day when everyone gets their communication out the way in the morning, so they can then shut up for the rest of the day.

The Milestone in Mental Health

My stake in the mental healthcare discussion is similar to everyone else’s. After half a lifetime of experiences that never quite made sense, things started to click and I was late-diagnosed with ADHD, although I think I’m more AuDHD. Mental healthcare is now a staple of popular media, millions of Internet users discuss it every day, and there has been a rise in activism to push for changes in the shared aspects of our world to accommodate for everyone. This might be a fire that needs to rage if we are to achieve the stubbornest of all civic goals, systemic change, but are we missing something more fundamental?

In this age of constant fighting, where everyone at a moment’s notice has to be prepared to cling-on to their rights, one can’t help thinking we’ve reached a moment in time for a much needed paradigm shift in terms of how we see each other. The wealth gap is eye-wateringly askew, willful planetary destruction coupled with climate change threatens our survival, and governments have inverted, to now be run by naïve ideologues obsessed with stripping all meaningful public services. It’s not surprising this is also the age that the contrived service of “AI” has been foistered on everyone as its core principle is to remove the person from exercising skillsets, although talking points mask this by marketing it as the removal of chores/inconveniences/thought; purveyors of lobotomies once promised the same thing. Chores and inconveniences are still needed to build us as humans – to remove them will make us less human and incapable of the oversight we are supposed to provide over the AI slop produced in our place.

From the outside, it looks like we are living in a fundamentally antihuman era.

With this background, it is not surprising that mental health is on everyone’s lips. One of our strongest pillars for maintaining control of our mental health is to believe that we have a future and it will be better than what we endure in the present. Maintaining this belief starts to become untenable if our standard of living drops and the world seems to be slipping into chaos.

In addition to these environmental factors, everyone remains at the mercy of their biology, something compounded in the US by struggles with health insurance companies. Our brain health can still be undermined by strokes, aneurysms and embolisms, cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, etc. These maladies can impact memory, mood, and personality, if not directly then consequently. A decline in brain health impacts how a person can interact with the world around them and how they have traditionally thought about everything they do and everything they are.

Mental health is a concept premised on the idea that should something be wrong with our minds, we should seek to correct them back to a healthy state of normal. A problem with this idea is that the passage of time, combined with the impact of aging, means returning to a prior state is impossible and the concept of normal quickly becomes a mirage. Normal is a state of mind, once held, that provides a sense of peace and security. When it comes to how we see our health, normal is the security blanket we all crave, and we are sometimes prepared to pay for with defiance. Normal also stops us from recognizing and appreciating difference.

When it comes to brain health, unfortunately there isn’t a lot of utility in talking about what should be. What should be is the question behind systems of morality, law, and justice, so as a line of questioning it is natural for people to think this way. If a brain develops a tumor, the resultant tumor was due to the complexities of human biology, and the oncologist is tasked with removing the tumor and preventing recurrence. They can rightly assume this is a state of brain health that should result in the best outcome for the patient, but should bes are human judgments and attempts at wish fulfillment over complexities that can only be minimally influenced.

Neuroscience has also shown us that common mental health disorders are indicative of unique pathologies, literally meaning that the brains of autists and those with classical personality disorders pursued their own unique development that differs from those without these conditions. Changes are often found in gray and white matter volumes, white matter conductivity (resting and during activity), and gyrification (the amount of folding in the neocortex). But again, these complex and enduring pathologies are not changing course from some ideal, they just are. Human.

To be human and living in the world means we are all united by the same risks to our mental health, even if our desire to see ourselves as normal and healthy prevent us from empathizing with those vocal about their struggle. Disorder and disease are not outside forces looking to infiltrate our bodies, they reflect how our bodies have developed within the complex rubric of gene-environment interaction and how our bodies are responding to life around them; they are all part of what it is to be human, even though our knowledge and technologies have allowed us some influence in these areas to better understand how we can live.

This means that the quest for a compassionate society might not be best served by a multitude of advocacy groups, all competing with their own interests, and quick to be ignored by those who cannot currently identify or use it to turn a profit. An understanding and acceptance of our human nature, as it rightfully applies to all, might be the milestone we need to move forward.

Seeking a mental health diagnosis in your 40s

To be diagnosed later in life with something that has been with you since childhood is a strange feeling.

I was always the kid with asthma, meaning I had bright and shiny inhalers in my pocket. Other kids would recognize that that was my difference, but I got used to it, and assumed as a young child that was the only medical condition that would ever define me. The novelty of having inhalers soon wore off, however, and I was left annoyed that all having asthma really meant was putting restrictions on me that other kids didn’t have to endure. Many years later, because I’m a special kind of idiot, I was determined to smoke to reclaim some autonomy and put my finger up at the world for always telling me what to do.

The teens also saw the arrival of a new nemesis.

Cystic acne. I never knew the name for this at the time, only the mortifying feeling of waking up with massive painful swellings on my face or chest and knowing that it would draw attention to me in public spaces and I was going to be stuck with these swellings for at least a few weeks (which is about a year in teenager time).

Fortunately, as I stepped boldly but naively into adulthood, the severity of my asthma decreased, and the acne, slowly but surely decided not to come back. But there was something else there that refused to budge.

Depression, anxiety, and meltdowns from being sensorily overwhelmed had been there since my early teens and seemed to be getting worse. I naturally assumed they were a part of adolescence and it never occurred to me that the difficulties I was having in school were due to (at least one) mental health challenge. The extreme fatigue, the problems I had focusing, the need for solitude and sensory deprivation, and how rooms full of other students and teachers always felt too much. I came to believe that I just sucked at life and it didn’t matter how hard I tried, things just never seemed to get better.

My first year in college was one of the lowest of my life.

I would find myself awake at 3am in such agony at my own existence. Nothing I seemed to do mattered and it seemed to be well beyond my own ability to fix myself. It might have been a sign of the times, but it never even occurred to me that I might have mental health issues. I hated what I was studying, I hated that I could not seem to connect with anyone, I hated myself for feeling the suffocating depression that I was convinced clung to me like a wet blanket precisely because I was too useless to rescue myself.

Eventually, my experiences at college did come to my aid.

I took it upon myself to change subjects and I fell in love with the act of learning. There is always something to learn and learning itself is an act of transition, giving you more and more access to conceptual worlds that previously would have remained boring and unengaging. I decided to learn to write and moved into a more essay-oriented field, and I now got to read about so many amazing people that influenced the world in unique and captivating ways. Finally, learning and seeking new experiences picked me up and gave me a fighting chance.

Fast forward through a history of many jobs, neglected responsibilities, a lengthened stay in academia, and an accumulating arsenal of coping mechanisms and I arrived in my forties, committed to a diagnostic evaluation for ADHD.

Anyone who has been through this will appreciate the irony of this assessment. You are asked about your ability to sit still, focus, and complete lengthy but boring administrative tasks, while it is incumbent upon you to sit still, focus, and complete a lengthy but boring administrative task. Indeed, the required activity and not the actual assessment itself feels like the actual test.

Still, the task was completed, I was interviewed by a charming psychologist, and a week later a report confirmed what I had perhaps known all along. Yet there is a peace in no longer needing to doubt myself. The “off button” I crave for overactive thoughts could at least now be applied to understanding this facet of my mental health. The explanatory power of a mental health diagnosis is also profound. I have numerous memories of difficult or painful times, which I had not been able to understand. There are times I could not understand why I felt so bad or why certain people had become inexplicably annoyed or angry with me.

Before I was diagnosed, it was common for me to use certain metaphors to describe my experience. For example, when I felt overwhelmed, it felt like my mind had been unrolled and stuck on a spike. Or after a busy meeting with quite a few attendants, it felt like my mind was a smoldering ash heap. The acts of reading and writing have always been soothing for me, because working through sentences makes me feel like my mind is being stitched back together. This next metaphor is a bit labored, but nonetheless true – joining a meeting, asserting myself into the conversation and recruiting my voice to contribute feels like running from the back of an aircraft hangar while I’m tethered to a piece of bungee cord trying to get out through the main door to join the storm outside.

If you have not been diagnosed, and describing your life using these kinds of metaphors has been common, it may very well be something to pursue.

Under the light of my diagnosis, these memories have now started to lose their sting and even though moving forward is not always easy, I at least can do it with greater understanding.

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