Late Diagnosis: Feeling Cheated

@dawny i was in the los angeles public system, theyre the best at treating kids like cattle

I absolutely feel cheated. My mom told me "you're not an adhd kid because you're not super hyper" but then would turn around and say "you talk a lot and fast and don't stop to breathe and you fidget too much and you can't stop moving and you move too fast and you're everywhere" like hello!! That's hyperactivity!! That's a sign that I should have seen a doctor!!

It all depends on your school system to! I went to a City school system I was not diagnosed but the signs were clearly there. I wasn’t diagnosed until after I graduated college

I seriously go back and forth. I used to have this feeling during high school that I could probably kick ass if I applied myself (high standardized test scores in elementary school while being homeschooled were off the charts). I felt like I was being a rebel by not applying myself. I wonder now what I was avoiding, why didn't I just try? Being a female with non hyperactive type affected me in different ways that went by unnoticed. Somewhere along the line I lost all self confidence and thus threw in the towel.

Even now that I’m diagnosed my parents still don’t believe me. It does make sense from talking in class and not doing good it was just me being lazy.

I so relate to Dhadu. First of all I believe you. You know yourself the best and don’t deserve all the gaslighting. When you are dealing with something that is disabling, putting you in an education system built only for able kids that won’t accommodate you FORCES you to cheat your way through bc it robs you of an actual education. it is not a personal failure. i relate to what you said your parents and teachers said. i got told the exact same stuff! it makes it worse. they, especially teachers in my opinion, are supposed to know what ADHD looks like. there’s no two ways about it, the system fails us and has no intention of not doing that.

@kendoll you are definitely not alone ❤️❤️ that mindset that people have that gets ingrained into our minds that if you try hard enough you can succeed in life is complete garbage. That's not realistic at all.

The whole “youre lazy, you just need to try harder! You have so much potential!” Thing really stuck with me and defined my life for so long. Its really nice to hear im not alone

Ah I love this question. My doctor still refuses to medicate me for this. My parents are very ambitious and strict so I did decent in school due to the fear of the consequences. When I didn't do well then I was told to try harder. My teachers would even say that I'm really smart but I don't try hard enough. My parents put me in all the advanced classes and AP classes. I literally cheated my way through school because I was scared of my parents and still just barely passed. I was also told I was lazy and after a while of saying I wasn't I gave up. I myself believed I was lazy and useless and didn't try hard enough. All my symptoms I believed were normal. Because of all of this Noone believed me when I said I had all the symptoms even when I listed out the symptoms I had and gave the list to my doctor, she said you made it up and just gaslighted me. Also she said even if I had adhd I'm an adult and she can't do anything about it. I feel like I wish I was diagnosed as a child and who knows what I could have accomplished in life. I think about that often, but I mean I can't change the past either so..life goes on and I can still do something with myself in the future.

Yes as a female so so so much. I would have done so much better in school and not have been accused of being a liar, getting punished, or getting gaslit as much. I mourn the lack of trauma from it I deserved that the boys got bc they hit, and screamed, and were destructive. All the signs were there in me, but you have to be willing to take that in. I feel robbed.

We were diagnosed with ADHD did back then they called it MPD OCD odd PTSD so much stuff and they never helped us with anything so now here we are as an adult dissociate in all the damn time speaking with ourselves in public and getting ourselves in trouble and one of our headmates seems to like to write us out to mental health workers who don't believe that we have it even though we've got all of these alters we've got 24 people in our head speaking to us daily we've had the kiddos forever they just show their faces because they can't talk many people don't have you know the ability to talk in our system was the ones that can are very mouthy and are getting us in trouble and we can't even ask for help because the only thing the therapist wanted to do was shove us in a psych ward or throw us into some form of a volunteer work which neither one of those things would help us at all as we also have social phobias

It honestly makes me mad. The pats on the back I would get for the good grades and getting things done all while I’m suffocating. I was struggling, falling, and the moment I slipped out of my perfect state, I got backlash. Everything was so much harder and I didn’t understand why. I wasn’t allowed to ask for help because I shouldn’t need it. Now I’m full of self doubt, anxiety, depression, and perfectionism that prevents me from the life I wanted. This isn’t who I wanted to be. This isn’t who I was told I could be if I just tried harder. Now I’m stuck mourning so much just to learn how to breathe on my own again. I wish everyone the best ❤️

I relate to this so much. I wasn't diagnosed until this year, at 25. Like you, I was good at school and ambitious, and appeared to be really well adjusted. Like I literally had therapists tell me not to come back because "there's nothing wrong with you". I made it through college, but only through sheer stubbornness. And I did so much damage to my mental and physical health throughout. I've been thinking a lot about how much easier things would've been had I been diagnosed sooner. How much less stressed out I could've been, how much better I could've been taking care of myself. It pisses me off. I try to be grateful that I'm diagnosed now and that I'm coping much better since getting on meds. But it's hard not to think about what could've been.

We were diagnosed at an early age for that and we still didn't get the help