Living With Severe ADHD and “Brain Fog”

Adults, just like children, have very different experiences when it comes to dealing with ADHD. Here are the stories of two people that face it every day with very different results.

Eliana’s is not the sometimes-loses-track-of-her-keys kind of ADD, and not the “oh, isn’t that over-diagnosed?” kind either. My younger sister describes the condition as a “brain fog” that comes and goes over the course of a day.

Defining ADHD ADHD isn’t really one thing – there’s no ADHD spot in the brain, and the disability doesn’t look the same in every person.

The thing you have to know about Eliana is that she is smart as hell.

Make an argument that she disagrees with and she’ll peel it open, reach inside, and find the flaw at its center. Ask her for an opinion on the rare subject she hasn’t studied, and she’ll come back hours or days later with a fully-formed, deeply-sourced theory of the case.

But her symptoms make it difficult for her to engage with the world in the way people expect. “People will be talking to me, and I’ll stop hearing what they’re saying,” she said.

Eliana stopped taking medication by the time she got to high school, and sought out other ways to cope.

Her doctor is pushing her toward a common treatment for severe ADHD that doesn’t involve medication: cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. The goal is to get patients to confront situations that trigger their symptoms, and slowly retrain their brains to respond more productively.

ADHD isn’t always this debilitating.

Nate Bartlett, a video producer in Chicago (who was, full disclosure, briefly my boss in 2015), says he’s been able to successfully manage his case of ADHD case with coping strategies and medicine.

Nate managed his symptoms without medication until college, where he struggled to find places in which he could focus on his studies. Even the library was too distracting, he said — he’d find himself scanning book titles rather than preparing for a test. So, for the first time, he got a prescription for Adderall, an amphetamine and stimulant that can help people with ADHD regulate their attention.

“I remember thinking [after my diagnosis], ‘Oh, I wish I’d done this a few years ago,’” he said.