How to Understand Adult ADHD

Understanding adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is crucial to getting proper treatment and to make living with a person who has adult ADHD easier. While some symptoms can be helped with medication, living with ADHD is frequently learning to cope with the difficulties in managing life that the disorder brings. Read on to learn how to understand adult ADHD.

Instructions

• 1

  Know that adult ADHD stems from a chemical imbalance in the management system of the brain, making screening out everything except what you are trying to focus on very difficult. It is not a simple lack of willpower or laziness. Adult ADHD affects people of all levels of intelligence.

• 2

  Recognize the symptoms of adult ADHD, which include restlessness, talking excessively, interrupting, poor memory and trouble focusing on tasks. Understanding these symptoms as part of ADHD can help family members to be more sympathetic and help the patient to find ways to better organize their lives.

• 3

  Understand that depression and anxiety can sometimes come from trying to cope with ADHD, or can be from a separate, unrelated cause. This can make the person withdrawn and antisocial, or in others makes them overly social with a fear of being alone.

• 4

  Find that about 60 percent of people who were diagnosed with ADHD as a child still suffer with symptoms of the disorder in adulthood. Some people aren't diagnosed with ADHD until adulthood, but report that these are symptoms they've experienced as long as they can remember. In school they were usually under-performers and had frequent disciplinary problems.

• 5

  Learn that most people display symptoms associated with ADHD from time to time, but only people for whom this creates problems in daily living warrant a diagnosis of ADHD.