Huw was a hoarder and it was when acting in a play about an elderly hoarder that someone suggested he get in touch with a hoarder’s group. Some of those members were going to a psychiatrist’s lecture on ‘ADHD’ and Huw identified fully with the symptoms as described. He went to his GP and pushed for a referral to get diagnosed.
Huw said he found it hard to track conversations as his mind flitted in other directions and he would forget the topic of conversation: ‘I will try and remember things or assume I will remember things, and I don’t.’ He had difficulty too in following due process in a task, and was unable to read a book from cover to cover. He used his phone to try and keep organised and google sheets as a reminder function to do things like take his medications on time. Creating general to-do lists helped keep himself on track.
In school Huw got the constant message that he was underachieving. He was always late and remembered constantly trying to think up excuses to explain why. Even now he usually arrives too early as a way of compensating, but always had the sense that he was and would be unreliable. He was constantly fearful of forgetting things: the right props when on stage or the right paperwork for his guide work.
While Huw acknowledged that sleep is supposed to help ‘ADHD’, he found that he was extremely sluggish when he woke up and for much of the day: ‘Most people are feeling tired when they go to bed. I’m just starting to come alive.’
Interpersonally Huw had observed of himself that he seemed to miss cues:
Because I can sense emotion, you know, generally. I can sense lots of things. I can definitely sense if there’s anger or fear or sadness or joy. But it’s kind of like interaction-type cues maybe I miss.’
‘I always think I’m not reliable’ – the insecurity of self.
For the previous thirty years, Huw had told himself that all the difficulties he experienced were accounted for by the neglect he had experienced in his childhood and his abuse of alcohol. Being diagnosed with ‘ADHD’ relieved something in him:
‘I’m looking at myself in a completely different way than how I looked at me before. There’s nothing, no effort I could make, no extra thing I can do if I tried hard enough, to change some of the things about me. And that’s quite a shock.’
‘I didn’t have to take responsibility for becoming something that I couldn’t become, which is what I’d been trying to do for most of my life.’
Huw also felt that the childhood neglect accounted for why he had very low poor self- confidence and would always defer to those who had more strongly stated views. But
he wanted to see some positives in having ‘ADHD’:
‘ADHD can be quite a good thing to have if you’re in the right circumstances. If you’ve got a good supporting network and you’re doing the right job, it can be a wonderful gift. But if you haven’t got those things, it’s hard to get them. And then, it’s a hobble. You know, it’s a handicap.’
He had a yearning to be more connected with people but noticed in interactions that he would get bored, or go off and do something else:
‘So something I might be learning by staying with you, and being present to our communication, doesn’t happen and I’m off thinking about something else and pretending to be there. I’ve got to make it look as if I’ve been here all the time.’
This sense of pretending meant that Huw had spent much of his life feeling like a fraud: ‘My acting is more of an alibi than a career. I can hide my disability behind
acting. The reason why I’m not working is because it’s very difficult to get work as an actor. And the reason why I’m so eccentric is because I’m an actor – all actors are eccentric. And you know, all sorts of things can be excused.’
‘Believing it [his ‘ADHD’ as a disability] has taken a long time. Well, it’s just very convenient, isn’t it? Am I just making this up so that I can be lazy, you know?’
‘I’m thinking, ‘I’m a scrounger, you know, giving myself a hard time thinking about it. But I’ve come to terms with that. You know, having a disability really helps with that.’
‘I’ve been in a kind of coping, surviving mode, rather than, you know, growing and achieving.’
Analytical commentary
Huw lived in a worried future of catastrophic thinking and self-doubt. This could be alleviated by getting out of his flat, being with others and in nature. The damage to his self- image, self-esteem and self-worth were significant. His own estimate of causative agents was firmly aligned in his mind with family neglect and the family injunctions that applauded excessive drinking that were a part of his growing up. Many adults with ADHD feel like imposters and struggle to hide their inadequacies from family and co-workers (Nadeau, 2002). Research suggests that individuals who have an insecure attachment style endorse feelings of the imposter phenomenon and also have experienced more fear of rejection or abandonment in intimate relationships, thus feeling unstable and possibly unworthy (Alvarado, 2015).
Huw’s hoarding feeds into this profile of developmental trauma and attachment challenges as hoarders report a significantly greater number of different types of trauma, more frequent traumatic experiences and problems with emotional attachments (Hartl et al., 2005). The inattentive symptoms of ‘ADHD’, rather than the more commonly associated OCD, significantly predict severity of clutter, difficulty discarding and acquiring (Tolin and Villavicencio, 2011).
Huw’s participation in the research process was his way of making up for the deficits that dogged his sense of failure and inadequacy. He was ‘giving back’ the best way he could to make up for being a ‘scrounger’, taking something for nothing from the state as a declared disabled person. The relief this brought was enormous – he no longer had to ‘try harder’ somehow. Yet the future seemed short and the challenge to find purpose and relationship, given his occupational and social impairments, sometimes too overwhelming, sending him into a dark place of suicidal ideation. He craved connection but despaired quietly of having
the tools to manage relationship in any sustained way.