ADHD and Autism Therapy for Women in Calgary

On the outside: organized-ish, employed, personable, fine. On the inside: a browser with a hundred tabs, elaborate systems held together with adrenaline and shame. In childhood, boys are referred and diagnosed with ADHD at several times the rate of girls; in adult samples the gap narrows sharply. An enormous number of women are therefore identified late, or never, because the presentation is quieter and the compensating starts early. Stephen Hinshaw's Berkeley Girls with ADHD Longitudinal Study, which followed girls with childhood ADHD for two decades, found the impairment does not fade with age. It changes shape.

 

A parallel literature on autism describes "camouflaging," and studies find autistic women tend to camouflage more than men, with higher camouflaging predicting later diagnosis. You were literally too good at hiding it. Not broken. Never broken. Just built differently, and finally, read correctly.