Rae Jacobson

Yeah, I think that's the way for a lot of people.

So it was initially like hard to just see like the kind of like downsides that it sounds like you saw yourself in.

Now that Danielle has done all this reporting and immersed herself in the ADHD world, I wanted to talk to her about what led her to make the series and what it was like to be living the story you're trying to tell. This week on Hyperfocus, Danielle Elliott shares her journey from a big question to a new podcast.

It's hard to hear it too, especially to be like, oh, if I had known this, maybe there is something that I could have done.

Yeah. Which is why that late diagnosis piece for women is so insidious. In the show, you talk to a lot of other women with ADHD. You talk to Sari and Emily and Terry, all of these people who specialize in it, but just women at the camp, for example, who have it. In one of the episodes on the show, Danielle goes to a camp for women with ADHD.

And that experience of being among your people, people who just get it, that thing where you don't have to apologize all the time or explain why you want to do it tomorrow or why you're moving your leg or whatever it is. Yeah.

Whatever. Whatever your neurodivergent thing that you do, that masking thing can just drop. Like, what did it feel like doing that from, like, a reporter's sense? Like, sitting down with people and being like, we are from the same place.

Part of what I'm wondering is like when you say you see all these people with this comfortable shorthand and you got the chance as a woman with ADHD to be in a room full of people who were open about their ADHD and talking. And of course, you're in like the reporter's role. But like in those conversations with the people you spoke to for the show, did you ever have that moment of like, ah.

Oh, wow.

I've spent a lot of my life working in media and reporting on mental health. And being in that space, I learned that it is a super rare opportunity to get to do what Danielle did, to spend months going deep on a topic as niche as women diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic. So before I let her go, I needed to ask a couple of big questions.

Did you learn anything about your own ADHD or like about being a person with ADHD that you didn't know before you started the show? That's such a great question.

Yeah. I feel like that's the thing about understanding ADHD. It's why it's worth knowing the stuff that we know about our brains, because then you can actually apply it. Like it has a function. My final question is just like, what do you hope that people take away from this? Like this is a really cool thing that you've put an enormous amount of work into.

If somebody comes to the podcast and they haven't heard Climbing the Walls, they're just coming in cold, like what do you hope people take away?

Yeah, I feel like this is like, tell me if you agree with this. This to me is like the ADHD thing in life, both in like your personal life and also as like, as a, sort of like the disorder itself, is like it's never the right moment. Like you're always a little behind or a little ahead in everything all the time.

Yeah.

I love that. Danielle, thank you so much. This was awesome.

The first episode of Climbing the Walls is out now. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash understood O-R-G. Hyperfocus is made by me, Ray Jacobson, and Cody Nelson. Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions and Justin D. Wright mixes the show. Samaya Adams is our supervising producer. Brianna Berry is our production director.

And Neil Drumming is our editorial director. If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus at understood.org. This show is brought to you by understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Koshear, and Seth Melnick.

Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org slash give.

Oh, I see.

And like, I mean – In both little and very big ways.

It's kind of like story of your life if you have ADHD. But I'm interested in that in part because like when you hear about like ADHD as a cultural moment, right? Like it is for sure happening. And I've like kind of watched this come and go over years like in different ways. Like women in ADHD feels like the now thing to me.

But, you know, ADHD, people talking about it, people freaking out about it, people, you know, denouncing it or – wanting to do more for it or whatever it is. Like it's, it's a pretty easy thing to like slot into the discourse. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And as somebody who has it, and I'd be interested to hear how you feel about this. Like, it's not a moment for us. It's our whole lives.

Like, it's like, okay, maybe people either like didn't care before and then cared a lot and then they stopped caring or whatever it is. But like, you're like still there being yourself. So what's that been like, like studying it from this sort of like cultural moment perspective, but also like, Living with it.

Well, this is something that I'm interested in that like comes up a lot, right? Which is, and you and I have talked about this through like learning about the show, which is not everyone has ADHD. And a lot of people who get diagnosed with ADHD don't have ADHD.

It's a diagnosis that is like kind of given like sometimes too cavalierly. Like you said, like a lot of people who get diagnosed actually are experiencing something else. And a lot of the like perfect nightmare conditions of our current way of living make that feel really real. Like, you know, we're overscheduled. We're overstressed. There's a billion screens.

Like I go on the subway and there's just screens like in my car flickering on and off.

And if you have ADHD, you sleep even less. But that thing, the idea that like the conditions of life are not suited to the way that the human brain works, which is definitely true. To me, the interesting piece of that is that still doesn't mean that everybody who's experiencing that has ADHD. Right.

Yeah. I think that to me is the thing that people miss in that where it's like, yeah, once the conditions change, like everybody gets distracted. Everybody gets overwhelmed. Everybody loses things. Right. But for us, you could take away all of that and we would still have ADHD. Yeah.

It's interesting to me that all that stuff gets kind of attributed or like lumped in with being ADHD when in reality it's something with a very different name, but it is something that like, since it bears resemblance to this real disorder, it kind of like becomes like a, like a melange is not the word, but you know,

There is a word for it, but it can feel like discounting if you have the disorder in a way, you know?

I think... I mean, this might be my own like kind of irritation in it, but like I feel like it's less like should I be treated for it and more like, well, I should just be better, right? Like everybody struggles with this. I should just do a better job. Like I should just try harder. I should just be better.

During the pandemic, ADHD diagnosis rates in women nearly doubled. For people like me who follow this kind of thing, it was a huge deal, and one where we couldn't really pinpoint why it was happening. There were a bunch of different reasons, but none seemed all-encompassing. There was a fair amount of news coverage at the time, but most of it was pretty surface level.

you talked to a lot of people for this show and people coming from different backgrounds and researchers and people who have lived experience and your own experience. Like what were some of the things that kind of, I don't know, surprised you is the right word, but like, what were you like, wow, that's something I wasn't really expecting.

I mean, this is a genuine question I have for you, but like, you know, you write and you're a creative person and you often hear ADHD being called like, you know, very conducive to creativity, right? Like that's one of the things about it. And I think in a lot of ways that can be true, like that risk-taking, that interest, that like, well, let's see what happens if I do this.

But also I don't think that necessarily ends it up being a super, I just like,

Someone needed to go deep, and eventually, someone very cool raised their hand for the challenge. Danielle Elliott is a health and science journalist based in New York.

Getting diagnosed with ADHD can bring up a lot of different emotions. And what I gathered when I met Danielle for the first time quite a while ago was that that was the case for her too. She didn't want to have ADHD at all. Part of my job now is talking about my own diagnosis, which for me was a huge relief when it came.

I cried in the doctor's office, not because I was sad, but because I finally had a name for the thing that had dogged me for so long. But it's not the same for everyone. And when Danielle got her diagnosis in her 30s, she was almost immediately diving headlong into reporting about it. But now, having listened to the podcast, I know Danielle shares a lot of her own story.

And I wanted to know how she got from bucking a diagnosis to deeply researching it to becoming this sort of public voice on behalf of women with ADHD. When I met you at first, you were just sort of like figuring out your diagnosis.

You'd mentioned almost that you weren't sure if you really wanted it in some ways that it was like you'd gotten it and then you weren't sure kind of what to do with it once it was in your hands. Like, was there a personal motivation for jumping into this that was not so motivating that it was the only motivation, but something that was like important to you? Like, I want to know more.

And since last year, she's been working with some of my colleagues at understood.org on a new investigative podcast that digs into the reasons behind this rise in ADHD diagnosis and uncovers what going undiagnosed for so long has cost women. It's called Climbing the Walls, and it's a limited series told across six episodes. The first is out now.

It's hard to have like a narration of like what it means to be neurodivergent from someone who's seeing it only from the negative and then to read the stuff that is like ostensibly negative, you know, that is a serious thing.