I’ve been researching ADD, and it is seeming more and more likely that the problems I am facing now are from having ADD underneath it all. Aparantly ADD goes unnoticed and undiagnosed in most girls because their symptoms are completely different to boys, and ADD/ADHD is thought of as a boy’s disease.

Teachers and parents don’t worry about the girl’s lack of organisation or focus/concentration, because generally they are amiable and don’t have early learning difficulties. Girls with ADD and a high intelligence are often well behaved and hard working. It’s as they get older that the concentration and organisation difficulties become a problem.

Indications that a teenage girl has ADD is poor concentration, slipping grades, talking in class, sexual promiscuity, drug/drink experimentation, drug/drink dependancy, eating disorders, being over-impulsive with food and spending etc, being in their own world and being viewed as either “spacey” or a “party girl”.

I can pretty much state that I have all of those things.

ADD would explain why I could never concentrate, why it got worse, why I now have manic depression and EDNOS. It would explain everything. It would make my parents see that I tried to focus and it didn’t work…I would have something to blame. My intelligence is high, and yet my grades have never been amazing. I was always expected to ‘do better’. Always told to ‘focus’ and ’screw my head on’.

I lose things all the time, and the amount of times I have got into trouble for it are uncountable.

I went to my dad as soon as I read about it and saw that it’s possible I have it, and he wasn’t interested. I called my mum, and she thought I was being hypochondriac-ish. They never listen. I don’t think that they can bear the thought that I’ve had a disease my whole life and them never notice it. But then, the depression they didn’t notice the full extent until I flipped out on them.

I need to talk to the doctor about this, even just to be told I don’t have it. It could just be manic depression symptoms being mixed up, but it would explain why when everyone else was learning their timestables, I was colouring in my hiker…(we had a multiplication mountain, and everyone had a cardboard hiker, and whereas everyone got high up, I stayed at the bottom, because I was more interested in making the hiker look good). It would explain why I was a bit behind socially, how I still don’t quite catch things as quick as everyone else.

It would explain why I had to be taught the difference between black and white people, why I was playing imaginary games until it was really socially unnacceptable…everything would make sense. They aren’t even listening.