ADHD, black women, and masking: Debbie's story.

ADHD, black women, and masking.

An earlier diagnosis would have helped Debbie, and she talks of the black community and women masking:

My name is Debbie and I have ADHD.
Being a young black girl in my household … let’s talk about ADHD in a Nigerian household. I don’t think there’s any way that, like my parents wouldn’t have known. Even when I told my parents, obviously it was quite new. They were like, “oh, okay” & there’s a real lack of research & looking at the correlation between ADHD, Black women, masking & ADHD & the black community or like black women, where there’s such a rise in black women being diagnosed with ADHD because there’s been so much masking over so many years.

There’s still so much education that needs to be done on ADHD itself. From as young as I can remember, I’ve always thought there was something wrong with me. Feeling different from my peers.

And I’ve had that from primary school, secondary school, 6th form, Uni, everything.

I definitely think if I’d had my diagnosis at school, everything would have been different.

Early Intervention of ADHD. I masked everything & it’s well known that women with ADHD are really good at hiding things.

I could never understand how people would hear things. Like, they’d hear it once and they just get it. I didn’t work the same way and for me, it always took longer. The process is always longer. The whole term of “don’t work hard, work smart”.

I don’t know what “working smart” looks like.

For me, I have to work harder & longer to be able to just be on par. Working harder than neurotypical people with neurotypical people. In my head, I’d say really bad things about myself. You’re just stupid, or like, you don’t get it, or why can’t you get it ? Negative self-talk and just really, really struggle with the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to get things.

A lot of the time I got in trouble for laughing. It was always like, getting in trouble: oh, “you’re laughing” or “you’re distracting the class”. “You’re talking too much”, you need to like, getting sent out.

I think another thing as well, basically, like, PE was like my favourite lesson because I just & obviously playtime…

Excess Energy

Because I got to just move about and stuff, and I just felt like I always had this excess energy and I was like, what is this? I just need to get it out. And as I got older, that excess energy that I had, I was like,vright, I just need to go for a walk to get this out of my system. So in terms of looking out for the signs of ADHD, signs in young children, in younger children, I think:

Do they always have to ask for your instructions again?
Are they struggling to complete one task and go to another task and just constantly switching in between?

I think, again, with ADHD, it’s a spectrum because people who don’t have ADHD, they will experience these kind of things. But when you’ve got ADHD, you’re experiencing it all the time. Even like the term “Deficit Disorder”, how terminology impacts me it’s all like really negative in the term ADHD, which I don’t really like, it’s just…we’re just…we’re wired differently.

That’s all it is.
We’re just Wired Differently

We’re just wired differently.

It doesn’t mean we can’t do the same task or the same thing as someone else, we’ll get there in a different way, and someone getting there in a different way can also … that could open up something new that people didn’t know, & that could be really amazing.

Find out more about recognising the symptoms of ADHD in children

Find out more about masking.