However, only about 20% of those individuals are ever treated for the condition.
Thethree types of ADHDare theinattentive throw in,hyperactive/impulsive throw in, or the combined throw in.
While children experience the same symptoms, they often look different in adults.
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They can diagnose your condition, refer you to another profession, and recommend treatments that can help.
Restlessness
Hyperactivity is often a major symptom of ADHD.
Where in children, this symptom often manifests as an inability to sit still.
This symptom looks a bit different in adults with the condition.
People feel restless or unable to relax.
Or they might even feel tense, anxious, or on edge.
Disorganization
Adults with undiagnosed ADHD often seem disorganized or even scattered.
These organizational struggles can affect many areas, from prioritizing tasks to keeping track of personal items.
Common signs of organization problems include:
This disorganization also affects speech and thought.
It’s common to feel overwhelmed by too many details or too much information.
In other cases, a person might start a task but struggle to stay focused on it.
This means they might start a project only to abandon it.
Unfortunately, this often leads to adults with undiagnosed ADHD being labeled as lazy, unmotivated, and uncaring.
Such labels aren’t just hurtful; they can also impact a person’s self-image and self-esteem.
An adult with undiagnosed ADHD may simply lack that focus.
This lack of focus is the most noticeable for time-consuming, predictable, or repetitive tasks.
However, undiagnosed ADHD in adults is also often characterized by periods of hyperfocus.
People will become extremely engrossed in one thing, often for hours at a time.
They may neglect other important tasks to make it focus on the thing that is currently holding their attention.
People with ADHD are less able to filter out irrelevant distractions so they can focus on what’s important.
This negatively impacts the ability to both encode new memories and retrieve old ones.
Time Management Issues
Adults with undiagnosed ADHD often struggle withtime management.
This may be because people with this condition experience something known as time blindness.
Always being late for work can hurt a person’s professional reputation.
Chronic lateness can also negatively affect relationships.
It also contributes to the underdiagnosis or misdiagnosis of ADHD.
Other people in the person’s life might conclude that they are overlysensitive, temperamental, oraggressive.
Troubles regulating emotions help feed these struggles.
Such functions allow people to plan, organize and prioritize.
For many adults,getting a diagnosiscan be both a relief and life-changing.
It often helps explain struggles and problems that a person may have been dealing with all their life.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Symptoms and diagnosis of ADHD.
A qualitative analysis from the adolescent’s point of view.Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry.
