YOUNG GIRLS AND THEIR TIRED BRAINS

REBECCA HELENE HOFFMANN

Girls receive their ADHD diagnosis 11.5 years later than boys with ADHD do. One of the reasons they go unnoticed is, that they don’t express hyperactivity like boys with ADHD do. The girls quickly learn how to adapt to social rules by mirroring their friends, because survival lies in knowing the rules of the game. They strive to fit in, and therefore the diagnosis becomes difficult to see with the naked eye. If the girls don’t manage to blend in, they are considered rude or ill-mannered.

Imagine you have a disability, but you don’t know it. Or you know that you have a functional impairment in the brain, but you have no idea, how to behave in a society with a hidden disability, which can almost feel like a declaration of failure. This is the starting point for Julie, Marie, Sarah, Isabella and Cecilie. On the outside, you see five completely ordinary young girls, but they all have ADHD, a diagnosis that challenges them every day.

“I see it as one way the brain can be. Brains are very different. Therefore, ADHD symptoms are also different, and no two

ADHD diagnoses are the same. Therefore, it is difficult to detect the disorder, because the patterns can be so individual”, says Lisa Thygesen, psychotherapist specializing in ADHD in adults, and diagnosed with ADHD herself.

When you have ADHD, you have “a tired brain”, and this is due to irregular distribution and regulation of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. This means that an ADHD brain has a worse starting point than a neurotypical brain. ADHD is a neuropsychiatric disorder that can have consequences for the quality of life, as the disorder causes disturbances in the person’s attention and activity. ADHD is an abbreviation for “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”. There are both degrees of severity and variants of the disorder. The type of ADHD is determined on the basis of how prominent the symptoms of attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity and impulsivity are for the individual. The diagnosis ADD is given when the attention deficit is predominant, and here hyperactivity and impulsivity will be present to a lesser extent or not at all.

Once upon a time, Julie’s big dream was to become a forensic pathologist, but today the dream is completely different. Instead, it is design technologist. Julie is 21 years old and starting her third sabbatical. Before that, she took an STX on the biotech line. After some hard years at school, she was now ready to go out into the world with a red student cap and a grade point average of 11.3. In elementary school, she was the diligent student in the class, who was always in a good mood and had the energy to help her classmates. Outwardly, she seemed to be enjoying herself, but as soon as she closed the door behind her at home, she crawled into her bed and closed in on herself. Julie’s head couldn’t take it anymore, and now she was again in a big deficit after a single day of school.

“My girlfriends call me a living encyclopedia. I have always loved to learn.

It gives me so many points in the energy account, to be able to seek out, and gain more knowledge. If I discover new things, or things I know nothing about, I do my best to educate myself in the field. But it is also the side of myself that I like to show off. But another side of me is the one who closes the door to my room, the one who needs a time-out from life outside. The one who has to respect how tired she really is. I’m not one to shoot around and run up and down the walls. But my head is overwhelmed all the time. I’m more worried about when I’ll get back up if I finally lay down and rest. Having all the motivation in the world to learn and learn and learn, and an ADHD brain that can’t manage sensory input in any way, is bound to go wrong at some point. My brain will crash.”

After taking sick leave from her biology studies due to stress, Marie starts seeing her doctor. During this time, a nurse suspects that Marie might have ADHD. Therefore, she asks Marie to take a test. That test will be the first step towards the ADHD diagnosis, that Marie was given last summer. Marie is 26 years old and studies biology at Aarhus University, and she has moderate ADHD. As a 25-year-old, this was both an eye-opener and a sadness.

“Getting clarity and getting an answer to what is going on in my head means that I can now complete my bachelor’s degree. Well extended by a year and a half, but now it is at least possible. I can now get medication and tools to stop the neverending cycle of highs and lows. At times I will still feel burnt out, but not to the same extent as before.”

“Getting to read the syllabus at the university is a big challenge on a daily basis. I feel that I have to fight a lot so that my thoughts don’t take me to new places. When my eyes move down over the text, a single illustration can take my focus away. Although my eyes are still reading the letters on the paper, they don’t settle because my mind has already wandered somewhere else, and I have to start over at the top of the page again. The idea of reading a text is in a way straightforward. You have to go from a to b. You have to go from the first word to the last word on the page. But with my brain, it can feel like I have to go down hundreds of different side roads before I get to b.”

Sarah Rand

Sarah has had her ADHD diagnosis since the age of four and thus it has been a familiar companion throughout her childhood. It has sometimes been her best friend and other times her worst enemy. Today, Sarah is 24 years old and studies culture, Christianity and communication at the Diakonhøjskole in Aarhus. On the side, she runs Tulipa Studio, which is a project that lies very close to heart. A project that started back in 2021 when Sarah went down with stress. Here both Sarah’s head and body gave up.

“My ADHD means that I live very much in the present moment. My ups and downs are so intense that I can’t focus on anything else. When I’m happy, I’m in the clouds, and when I’m sad, I’m down in the dumps. But my thoughts only get real space when I stop up completely. Often more than I want to. Here my thoughts run away with me and can become eerily dark. That’s probably also why I fill up my calendar completely, so I can escape those thoughts. As you can probably hear, I almost have to fight to maintain the balance between emotions, thoughts, things I “should” do and all the fun stuff. A constant trade-off, which definitely tilts for me. It’s more a question of how much?”

Isabella Mai

Over the past 6 years, Isabella has had to give up and start over several times in the attempt to get a high school education. Today, she studies individual subjects at Aarhus HF and VUC, because this is where she can reach her dream of becoming a social worker. On a grey November day last year, Isabella was diagnosed with ADD. In the past, she has suffered from anxiety and been misdiagnosed with schizotypal mental disorder and adjustment reaction. But it wasn’t until the ADD-diagnosis was made that the weight lifted off her shoulders. At the age of 23, Isabella could breathe a sigh of relief, because now it all made sense.

“My undiagnosed ADD has stood in the way of me becoming the best version of myself. It has stood in the way of me being able to flourish. Instead, it has planted a fundamental idea that I am inadequate in many aspects of life. But with clarity about the way my brain works, or how it sometimes doesn’t work, I can better understand myself and respect my limitations. I can now get the medication that makes my thoughts and actions run parallel to each other. My symptoms have lessened after I got an explanation. I am happy with my ADD-diagnosis and I am relieved to have that knowledge today. Instead of a constant search and yearning to have the same starting point as others, I now know that I will never have that. But that’s okay because I find another foundation to work from.”

In high school, Cecilie survived by being “the funny one”, because her studies was not going well. She compensated socially so that the others in the class did not notice. Cecilie is a girl with big arm movements and enjoys life at a high pace, and she is certainly not afraid to speak her mind. Throughout her life, it has often been “all or nothing” for her. She doesn’t approach things with half-hearted energy. Therefore, it became difficult at school to manage both her studies and social life. Today, 25-year-old Cecilie is studying dentistry at the University of Copenhagen, but now with a fresh ADHD diagnosis behind her.

“Shortly after I started studying dentistry, I realized that I was extremely challenged, and a lot more than others around me. I couldn’t go through with this. I drowned the pressure and disappointment in parties, naively hoping for the best. But when a friend tipped me off about a podcast “Sorry, I’m interrupting”, and then the penny dropped. I was devastated and cried but now I could put a finger on it”.

“In the middle of the second semester I went on sick leave and was diagnosed with ADHD. In my journal, my psychiatrist wrote: “Rating scale for ADHD: “Patient scores very high on all symptoms”. So there was no doubt, I had ADHD, and I had it to a severe degree. The conclusion read as follows: “The patient has a chronic and lifelong ADHD disorder, which will probably require lifelong medical treatment to ensure a good level of functioning”.