A breakup, an intense reaction, and the ADHD questions surrounding it all (Danielle Elliot’s story)

Danielle Elliot was considering breaking up with her partner...and then he broke up with her first. Danielle had a “big, out of character” reaction: By 4am that night she was packed and ready to leave. The whole experience left her feeling unsettled. Why had she reacted that way? That sparked a deep dive into rejection sensitivity and ADHD.

Danielle is a health and science journalist who’s now asking a bigger question: Why are so many women being diagnosed with ADHD — and why now?

She explores this in Understood.org’s new limited-series podcast, Climbing the Walls. Listen to Danielle’s personal story here — then check out Climbing the Walls on your podcast platform of choice. 

We love hearing from our listeners! Email us at adhdaha@understood.org, or record a message for us here. 

• Listen to the Climbing the Walls podcast

• ADHD and rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD)

• ADHD breakups: Impulsive texts and overthinking regrets, from Sorry, I Missed This

(01:26) Danielle’s pandemic diagnosis after a strong reaction to a break up

(08:26) Danielle’s need to travel

(12:15) Danielle’s relationship with relationships, and rejection

(16:02) Hosting Understood.org’s Climbing the Walls podcast

Danielle: I just remember not expressing anger towards her individually, but towards kind of the entire field. But I was like, how did we miss this? How did we mess this not just in me, but in an entire generation of women? This is not right.

Laura: This is "ADHD Aha!," a podcast where people share the moment when it finally clicked that they have ADHD. My name is Laura Key. I head up our editorial team here at Understood.org, and as someone who's had my own ADHD "aha" moment, I'll be your host.

I am here today in person with documentarian and science journalist Danielle Elliot. Danielle, your work has been featured on HBO, NBC, The New York Times, ESPN. I know there's a long list. I don't have my computer in front of me, so I can't go on and on and but so excited to have you here today. Danielle is also the host and the journalist behind Understood's brand-new podcast called "Climbing the Walls." We're very excited we're going to talk about that. Welcome, Danielle. Thanks for being in person with me today.

Danielle: Thank you, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Laura: Can I offer you a fidget?

Danielle: I'm like already looking at them, like can I grab one?

Laura: It's like a tray of hors d'oeuvres that we have here on our fancy new "ADHD Aha!" set.

All right, Danielle, so on "Climbing the Walls," you talk a little bit about yourself. Today on "ADHD Aha!" we're going to talk about you. How does that make you feel?

Danielle: Great. Yeah, no.

Laura: I'm not convinced.

Danielle: The thing in my head right now is yeah, how often I tend to overshare and how much I'm going to try not to do that.

Laura: That's all I do on the show. I overshare. You're in good company.

Danielle: Yeah, I feel like "Climbing the Walls" is a giant overshare, so we'll just keep going.

Laura: Let's talk about your diagnosis. When were you diagnosed with ADHD?

Danielle: It was the end of February of 2022.

Laura: Pandemic diagnosis.

Danielle: Yeah.

Laura: What was happening? Why did you seek out an evaluation?

Danielle: So, I guess it was four or five months earlier, I had gone through a breakup, and it was the night of the breakup, I just had this really visceral reaction to a very normal conversation, and that surprised me. And I kept thinking about it for another, I guess, two months. I just felt like I had this very strong reaction, and I tried to figure out what it was, and I finally narrowed in on rejection. And then I started searching "extreme reactions to rejection," and something popped up about rejection sensitivity and rejection sensitive dysphoria.

Laura: Yeah, RSD.

Danielle: As I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is actually a thing. This was not just one really strong reaction." And in that article that I was reading, there was a line about rejection sensitivity often being a part of ADHD. It was sort of like, "Wait a minute, is this, like, do I have ADHD?" And then I started looking more into ADHD. I talked to my therapist, and it just went from there.

Laura: Yeah, and now here you are.

Danielle: Here I am.

Laura: Tell me about the relationship and what was going on.

Danielle: I would say for the last few months of the relationship, I think we were both, I think the nicest way to say it is like navigating our way out of it, but…

Laura: Nice, I've been there.

Danielle: Yeah, that's probably the best way to put it. It was a conversation that I think we both knew was coming. I had been away on a work trip for a week, and during that week, I had been looking at other apartments. I pointed out the apartment to him that I was like, "I'm thinking about moving in there." And in my head it was, "We don't have to break up, but I could move into my own apartment."

Which is...and I apparently, I know this now, as we drove by it, his thought was like, "Oh, OK, good. I don't have to feel bad about the thing I'm about to say to her tonight." So, then it was just like, when we got home, I remember being completely exhausted and I've often wondered if this played into my reaction, but it was as we were starting to fall asleep that he initiated a conversation that was like "I've been thinking this week and I feel like I'm holding you back." He said it very nicely, but I just had this reaction that was just, it felt out of character.

Like, I kind of don't remember the specific details of everything that was said. My reaction was very much like, "This is it. We're not going back from here." And I was taking frames off the walls, like all of my stuff was packed by like four o'clock in the morning.

Laura: Oh, wow.

Danielle: Yeah, and there wasn't like screaming, but it was just like the feeling in my body was even like, like I feel like I was the meanest I've ever been. He tells me that I'm, like we're friends now.

Laura: OK.

Danielle: We've talked about it since, he's like, "I think you're a little hard on yourself about how it went." But it was just such a visceral reaction. And the thing I finally came down to was like, yeah, it was a thing I had also been thinking about doing but didn't, and it felt like such a strong rejection in the moment. I think I like got straight out of bed and got in the chair across the room, that kind of thing. And then I was like a kid curled up in a ball in a weird way, too.

Laura: Yeah. I mean, breakups are really hard.

Danielle: Well, the breakup was for the best.

Laura: Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you.

Danielle: That's why I couldn't understand why I was still feeling so weird about it. I was feeling weird about how I acted.

Laura: You telling that story, I hear you that it was a big deal, and this visceral reaction has led you down this path of exploration. I've been in some breakups. That doesn't sound that bad to me.

Danielle: I think I, in hindsight, was able to see how successfully I've avoided rejection my entire life, that I was sort of like, oh, this is the thing I've been avoiding, and this really does, yeah, this is not fun.

Laura: OK, yeah. So, not an unusually flared-up up dramatic breakup scenario, but for you in the context of your life.

Danielle: I mean I can tell you that like three or four, I don't know when I saw him again, because I went straight, I like I remember my passport was being renewed, and it came back three days later, and two days after that, I was in Mexico City.

Laura: OK.

Danielle: And I stayed for a month, and then I went to Belize, I was like, I'm out here. But I know that whenever I saw them again, I remember him telling me that I should get my anger checked. So, I think I was mean that day.

Laura: Oh, OK.

Danielle: It was like, but he now said I don't know if that was more his reaction, cause he now is like, "No, I don't think you were actually that bad that night."

Laura: Yeah. In the moment, it felt bad. I mean, he was probably feeling, feeling the feelings as well.

Danielle: And I don't think we'd gotten in a single fight our entire relationship. And that was probably more so me bottling some things up and like masking throughout the relationship, but it definitely caught him off guard.

Laura: So, you probably, you tell me, you felt like you went from zero to 100.

Danielle: Yes.

Laura: But in reality, maybe it was 99 to 100, and you had been kind of holding it in.

Danielle: I mean, there were other moments in our relationship, and I know now that this is a very ADHD thing, but I regulated by completely shutting down. And in this moment, I didn't shut down. I just let it all out. I think it had felt to me a few times, like if I said what I really thought, the relationship would end, and in this movement, it was already over, so I could say whatever I wanted, because I was no longer risking anything.

Laura: I mean, I've kind of been a little bit cheeky in my responses to you, but I do, I hear you, like, it's really painful. I've, just some of the situations that I've been in have been, I look back and like, I do one of these, like, "Ugh, I don't even want to think about it" because I'm so ashamed of the way that I, it's mortifying, I'm like, "I was so childish, I was petulant. What was I doing with my body? Why did I raise my voice like that? Why did I flail?"

Danielle: Yeah.

Laura: Almost like going from the rejection to what some people call raging, which is an unfortunate term, but it packs a lot of punch as a word.

Danielle: In an interesting way, I think the relationship itself helped me recognize my ADHD. Once I knew how ADHD shows up in relationships, and I started looking back, because it's like, I think you can think that you've started to regulate your emotions and you've grown up and you're in your mid-thirties. And then I just started to realize that there were a lot of situations I had never been in because I hadn't been in a relationship, I hadn't been living with a partner.

Laura: Yeah.

Danielle: And seeing how I acted in those, I was like, I'm not as mature as I thought I was.

Laura: Well, you didn't have the experience with those situations because you'd been bouncing around.

Danielle: Yeah, and I've been avoiding those situations my whole life.

Laura: Yeah. Bouncing around in, sounds like you travel a lot. And then I know from the show that you talked about that that was the first serious relationship you'd had or?

Danielle: Yeah. I joked that it was the longest relationship I've had, but I've been in longer breakups.

Laura: I get that.

Danielle: Like I've like been in situationships that lasted a lot longer.

Laura: Situationships, yeah.

Danielle: That's probably the best thing to call them.

Laura: So, tell me about the feeling that you get when you are on the go. Talk to me about this need to travel. It's something that you've mentioned a few times on "Climbing the Walls."

Danielle: Yeah.

Laura: Tell me what that feels like, and does it work out the way that you hope it will work out?

Danielle: I think it always did work out a certain way. And then it shifted actually shortly after finding out I had ADHD. I remember I got the diagnosis and then I was sort of aware that I should be finding an apartment, but a friend of mine was going to Peru for a month. It's like, "Oh, great. Apartments in Peru are 600 bucks a month and the flight's 200. My rent here would be 3,000 a month, you know, I did the math and was like, "Of course I'm going to Peru for a month. I don't have an apartment yet. I'll just do this first."

I remember specifically not telling my therapist I was going because she would have a reaction. Because I had just gotten back from this like Mexico and Belize, and then I like stayed home long enough to get diagnosed and then immediately went to Peru. And I think I had to go to Aspen for work for a week so I went straight from Aspen to Peru and when I did get there I was on a telehealth appointment with my therapist and she just was like it's the first time I saw her seem completely just like exasperated with me and she was just like "Danielle what Where are you running from?"

How dare you? I don't think, and I thought about it and I was like, I mean, my immediate reaction was, "I don't think I'm running from anything." And then I thought about it a little more, and it's like, I feel like I'm running towards something, and like the thing that I think with traveling that I always feel like running towards is stimulation. I guess if I was going to put it in ADHD terms.

Laura: Yeah.

Danielle: It's like when you get to a new place, I never look things up before I go. I leave my phone and I just walk outside and then just figure out a day. And I think we don't get that anymore at home. Everything's so planned or it's just like, I don't know, I guess you could call it the sense of discovery. Like it just doesn't exist for me at home in the same way anymore. So, I think that's what I get out of traveling is just like completely new surroundings, no idea what I'm doing, and being forced to figure it all out.

Laura: The novelty.

Danielle: The novelty, yeah.

Laura: Do you think you would have discovered that you had ADHD sooner had you not been able to travel for your career in your life?

Danielle: I don't know if I would have discovered it sooner, because even like 2013, I was in grad school and my advisor always joked like that I had shiny ball syndrome. And I remember one of my professors saying that I was always doing two things at once, even in class, but that she'd started to notice that I seemed to focus better if I was doing two things. So, she stopped asking me to stop, like even if I was just like looking at things on an iPad or whatnot.

Laura: Yeah.

Danielle: I think people have actually been telling me I have ADHD my whole life without even knowing that's what they were telling me.

Laura: Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Danielle: I think that's where I'm going with that statement.

Laura: I'm just thinking about, like, if you can't scratch that itch of novelty through travel, would you have tried something else, or would it have bubbled over and, like it would I've...yeah yeah.

Danielle: It's such a good question. Yeah, because I switched, it was like, like traveling, but I've also, I've been in New York since 2008, and I switched departments every single year, so I just make my life about constant change in almost every possible way.

Laura: Hold on, I dropped my fidget.

Danielle: For better or worse. Yeah, yeah.

Laura: I can't go on without my fidget. Yeah. Do you want a different one, by the way?

Danielle: I'm kind of liking this one.

Laura: Yeah, this is a good one, the squishy one.

Danielle: Yeah, I really like this one, and I don't know that I thought it was a problem. I guess that's the other thing is like, I don't think I ever thought anything was wrong until it was like, "Oh my God, that's how I act in relationships? Like that's who I am, or that's why I react to a breakup? I wanna know if there's ways to be better at this.

Career-wise, I was happy with how things were going. There were definitely a lot of moments where I wished I was capable of working for one company and wanting to stay there. But I would hit, there was one time I had a full-time job for two years, and I hit the one-year mark and was like, really? It was like some sort of itch. And then at the second year I quit because I was like I just can't do this. And I think I've been really lucky that things have lined up every time I do something like that. But things could have gone much worse.

Laura: Listeners of the show know that the very first episode I shared my own ADHD story and the impetus for my discovery and I had ADHD was also a breakup and a very, very dramatic breakup that left me kind of reeling and like I got to figure out what's going on with me and it was a slow path to discovery and I'm still, I'm like one eighth of the way through it. But is it too personal if I ask you, have you been in a serious relationship since then?

Danielle: No, I haven't. I've dated a few people since then, but I'm now, I think, so much, well, I think I had always had questions about how happy I would be in a relationship to begin with. I think I was 34 or 35 when that relationship started, and I was becoming extremely aware that, like, people thought it was weird that I, like even, it was almost like you didn't get as much of a chance with people because they're like, "You've never been in a relationship? I don't want to teach you how to be in..." you know, like there's like a, so I think I was feeling rejection in that sense.

And there is a part of me sometimes that thinks the relationship lasted as long as it did, because I was like, no, I'm gonna have this almost, like, I don't know, I just, it was like no, no no, I'm going to know what it's like to stick it out.

Laura: Yeah, I am going to win at this relationship. Yeah, yeah.

Danielle: Yeah, exactly. Like, and I'm at least going to know what it's like to have been in one for two years, and like see what that's like.

Laura: In one of the episodes of "Climbing the Walls," you share audio from, was it your sister's wedding?

Danielle: Yeah.

Laura: You were the maid of honor, and there was some self-deprecating humor about your relationship experience. I think you referred to yourself as erratic, or I actually wrote it down. See, I have a note card, like refusing to grow up.

Danielle: Yeah, and I think I was kind of internalizing what everyone around me was saying. Like I think everyone was always like, are you ever going to settle down? Are you ever gonna pick one? Are you going to do this? And there was a part of me that was like, I don't even know if it's all me not picking. There's also like I haven't met someone that makes sense to me.

Laura: It's also not a requirement.

Danielle: It's not a requirement. Exactly.

Laura: Talking with you is making me realize that there may be a lot more people with RSD, rejection sensitivity, dysphoria, but they're not experiencing it because they're anticipating it, and they're just avoiding it. Yeah.

Danielle: I mean, for me, it's even like, if I send a pitch, I, even if I get a response from an editor quickly, it usually takes me almost like two or three days to open it because I don't want it to be a rejection. And it's like, sometimes it's an acceptance, but they want to have a conversation. They're like, can you talk later today? And now I've wasted three days, and I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry I didn't get back to you." But it's my fear of, like, I don't mind putting things out there, but I don’t really want to know how anyone reacts to them.

Laura: Good for you, though. I mean, that's I was going to ask you about work too. So, rejection sensitivity as a journalist, let's talk more about that.

Danielle: I think that I'm so much more confident in work than I am in dating, that the sensitivity doesn't get to me as much. I think it's also easier to not take it personally. I don't think there's a journalist in the world who hasn't heard, "Editors are swamped. Like if they don't read your pitch, it has nothing to do with you or your pitch."

Laura: Yeah.

Danielle: And there was also a couple of pieces where like you can keep going back to an editor without seeming desperate in the way that there's so many tropes about women being desperate that, like in dating, you're not going to like keep trying again with the same person.

Laura: Yeah.

Danielle: With an editor, you can try a thousand times, and it might be what gets through. And I'm like, you don't know me from...like, this is fine. It doesn't show up for me in pitching. It shows up for me in publishing. Like, I sort of just want to, like hide under a rock for days after something comes out. And I don't want to know what anyone thinks of it. I don't know what that is, but I think it's like, I think any time I write anything about anyone, I'm sure they're going to call me and, like ream me out. I don't know if any of them have.

Laura: It's never happened before?

Danielle: It's never happened.

Laura: OK.

Danielle: I'm just so sure. So that's probably how it shows up, but then it's already out in the world, so I can't do anything about it.

Laura: Well, now that "Climbing the Walls" is out, you're here. You didn't hide. Congratulations.

Danielle: It's not out yet.

Laura: When this goes up, it will have gone out, yeah.

Danielle: OK, sorry.

Laura: All right, so tell "ADHD Aha!" listeners what is "Climbing the Walls" about.

Danielle: "Climbing the Walls" is my attempt to understand the rise in diagnoses among women, primarily during the pandemic, but it's been ongoing since the pandemic. I guess you could say it's my attempt to go beyond the headlines and the quick summaries of why so many women are being diagnosed with ADHD now.

Laura: And the quick summary being?

Danielle: Oh, we just didn't know how it affects women. And that's just, you know, in episodes one and two, we debunk that right away. I think we've known for a long time. We just weren't necessarily willing to listen.

Laura: When we started talking about this, I was like, "Oh, this is going to be about the pandemic and the rise of TikTok. That's all this is going to be about." And it goes so much deeper than that. It's really, really stunning work. And I'm so excited for everybody to listen to it. What made you want to do this?

Danielle: I really, I think like whenever I do something that's sort of this deeper dive, it's a question that I'm asking. And I think one of the things I love about having this job is that I would just ask that question for another 10 years without actually digging into it. By having this as a job, there's a reason. It comes back to motivation, I guess.

Laura: Yeah, totally.

Danielle: I remember in the first conversation with my therapist, I was rejecting the diagnosis at first because I was like, I don't want to have this. Everything I read is that women who have this struggle in relationships forever, and I don't want to struggle in relationships forever.

Laura: Right, right.

Danielle: Like, this is the thing I wanted to fix about myself, I guess. I just remember saying to her, like, almost like, not expressing anger towards her individually, but towards kind of the entire field, but I was like, how did we miss this? Like, not just in me. I had been seeing her for four years, and when I said I had it, or when I asked her about it, she sat forward so fast, and she was like yes, yes I do, but I can't say that to you, so take the self-assessment. And I was like, how did we miss this? Not just in me, but in an entire generation of women. Like, this is not right.

Laura: As a member of the team here at Understood, and as an editor, and getting to listen as this has been created, it's just, I'm learning so much about myself as a woman with ADHD as I'm listening to these episodes, and I'm curious, what have you learned about yourself through the creation of this show?

Danielle: There's an episode where I'm with a group of women who have ADHD for almost an entire week. And I don't think I realized how universal a lot of the things are that a lot of women with ADHD experience. And that ended up becoming episode five. And in that episode, just the conversations that I had, the conversations I never made it into the show, it was like, I was just hearing people express my inner thoughts for an entire week and it was really interesting to realize like, we all grew up in different circumstances, but also the same in a way.

Hearing them describe their childhood experiences, it all just, I think that's the biggest thing I've learned is that I'm like, this is maybe a strange thing to say, but that I am not all that unique. Like, actually, like so many of the things that I thought were slightly different about me are actually not, once you start talking to other women with ADHD.

Laura: Yeah, I mean, your life surrounding the scenario obviously is extremely unique. But yeah, I understand. I mean with ADHD at Highs, we speak to, I think we're past our 100th episode now.

Danielle: Wow.

Laura: And it's just like, isn't this going to get repetitive? Isn't this gonna get boring? But no, there's so many different ways that ADHD impacts people's lives. But there is that kind of, that universality.

Danielle: Yeah, there's something relatable in the episodes that I've heard. Like it's, I can relate to all of the stories that I have heard on the podcast, too. You know, yeah, a universality is a good way to put it. Yeah.

Laura: Yeah, yeah. You talk to so many experts and obviously to women with ADHD throughout the course of this, it's a six-episode series. What conversation was particularly resonant to you? I know it's hard to choose amongst.

Danielle: Yeah, no, I think it was the conversation with there's a woman in that episode, in episode five, I would say all of the conversations in that one, but especially two conversations in that one. One was with a woman who was only she was coming to this camp for her children. And two weeks before camp, she was diagnosed with ADHD herself, and it came completely out of nowhere.

Laura: Yeah.

Danielle: And that conversation just, it reminded me of, I think sometimes you can think you haven't really learned anything about your ADHD, or it like progressed at all with managing your ADHD. And speaking to someone who was right at the beginning of having been diagnosed reminded me of how much I have learned and how much, I think I have started managing it better.

And then there was a conversation with a woman who was in her seventies. She puts perspective on the diagnosis and on the rise in diagnosis that it just really helped me see it in a, like, yeah, you live in the moment you live in, and you only get to enjoy the amount of progress that has been made up to that moment.

Laura: It's really intimate, this show. It's so impressive to me the way that you tackle these really heady kind of scientific ideas, but then the humanity that's brought in with like, but this is really a huge deal for the women it impacts. Was there any conversation with an expert or anything that you, like a fact that you learned along the way, that just kind of blew your mind that you had no idea before you started the work on this show?

Danielle: When I read Sari's first book, it blew my mind.

Laura: Yeah.

Danielle: So, a lot of what Sari and I talk about in episode two, when I first sort of encountered the information, it blew my mind, and that's what led me to call Sari for the interview.

Laura: And she is, can you explain who she is?

Danielle: Yeah, Sari Solden is a woman who wrote a book in the mid-90s called "Women with Attention Deficit Disorder," and she describes it just to a T, kind of like the feelings and the emotional experience of having ADHD, particularly for women.

Laura: And in the 90s, that's...

Danielle: And in the nineties, that was groundbreaking. It was actually kind of rejected by a lot of the powers that be. So, I think her findings were the most surprising to me. And then the final episode is all about research that's being conducted into female hormones and ADHD. And there's several surprises in that one.

One, just realizing I assumed I didn't know much about hormones and ADHD because I hadn't looked into it. Than in trying to, I think we, I have no idea how many, It was like four or five actual versions of that episode that we wrote then before we finally landed on one that was working. But trying to report on the absence of something is really difficult. And I don't think I've done that very much. We did finally find some research that's being conducted but I think that in a sense, that episode is about the absence of research, which is a tough story to tell. It's a story about something that doesn't exist.

Laura: I mean, just the ground that you cover in six episodes is so phenomenal, right? Because it's a show about the rise of ADHD diagnoses in women, right, and why that happened. But it's also a history of ADHD, which is really interesting in and of itself. You add this gendered layer on top of it. You have personal stories. And then it's really about what's next. What do we actually need? If you could sum up what do we need, what would you say?

Danielle: Personally, I think we need treatments that consider female hormones and how those affect, not only how they affect ADHD symptoms, but also how they affect ADHD medications. And this is true, I don't think not just in ADHD, it's true in, we're starting to realize it's true in many other things. We're seeing it with Alzheimer's, we're most likely going to start seeing it with dementia, but we need treatments that are actually individualized to each person.

And I don't wanna say that are gendered, because I don't think that's the exact right way to say it. But women and men do not experience any illnesses, conditions, any mental health differences in the same way because they don't have the same bodies. There's a study coming out of the risk lab with Dr. Martel that looks at young adult women.

The one we talk about in episode six is about adolescent girls because that's the one that exists right now. But Dr. Martel's study is gonna come out, hopefully. I have no idea what's happening with funding. I mean, the episode also gets into funding to exist, and that's a whole ‘nother story.

Laura: And it's a great start. And we need like 10,000 more of these because how many years of catch-up are we doing here, right?

Danielle: Exaclty, yeah.

Laura: So, one of the things that I appreciate about this show is that you tackle it from every angle, every possible angle that say, an ADHD hater might have, like, is it even real? Is it actually different in men and women? Is it being overdiagnosed? Were we, is this like an evolution-related thing? So, maybe it's not all ADHD haters, but like the really, like the questions, the glossy questions, sometimes they're from haters and sometimes they are not. And just done in such a balanced way, and I really appreciate that. What was the most interesting of all those questions to tackle, or the most difficult?

Danielle: I think overdiagnosis was really difficult to tackle and how situational ADHD can be. And I think it's that like ADHD is always there, but it does express itself differently in different...and I'm saying situational instead of environmental because I think environmental gets confusing. But like, situation or environment that you're in. I think that was the hardest one for me to tackle. Cause I think a lot of things have changed in the world in the last hundred or 200 years, and I don't think our brains have fully adapted.

Laura: Yeah. Yeah.

Danielle: And I just, I had a really hard time grappling with, is this something about the way the world is now? There's a book called, I believe the book's called "Neurodivergent Mind." I just kept wanting to throw the book across the room because it's essentially like the conditions we live in compound symptoms in a way that is leading to, like, ADHD as a diagnosis is when it's impairing your life.

And I think that a lot of people have lived with ADHD for a really long time, but it didn't impair their lives. So, I think that was the biggest thing for me to grapple with was like, what is happening in the world that's causing a lot of this?

Laura: And it's a particularly hard one to grapple with because you, in this world that we live in, if you start talking about things as a trait that could be a favorable trait and then balance that with like, but this is a like, there's deficits here, this is a disorder. It's like, you don't want to go so rosy that people don't take it seriously, right? Or that it's not something that needs to be reckoned with.

Because my take is that, my take that you spoon-fed to me in the best possible way is that we need this research. We need to learn more about what's going on because it does impact people's lives, women's lives in unique and really difficult ways. So, it's hard to tackle that and to give it credence, give credence to the like, there are positive things here.

Danielle: Yeah, and I think it's almost the advantages, disadvantages, conversation, or deficits, and positive sides.

Laura: Strengths.

Danielle: Yeah, and strengths, thank you. Conversation becomes such a black and white conversations, and things can co-exist.

Laura: Yeah, right.

Danielle: Like there can be situations in which it's advantageous and situations in it's a deficit. Yeah, so I think that there's still a little bit of black and White thinking around that. So, that was a lot to grapple with too.

Laura: You balanced that nuance really nicely in the show. You know, ADHD diagnoses and women rising. Overall, this is a positive thing that there's more awareness about what's going on. And I'm just so grateful to what you've been doing. I mean, this is, how long have you been working on the show?

Danielle: I think I first met with, Neil Drumming is the editor on the show.

Laura: Shout out, Neil.

Danielle: And I think we've...yeah, definitely shout out Neil. The show is only as good as it is because of him. I think we first met and talked about it maybe exactly a year ago.

Laura: Well, I'm so glad that you two found each other and that you're here doing the show. I'm proud of "ADHD Aha!" and what we do on this show. It's much easier to make a conversation show than it is to do what you're doing. So, I just want to express that to the people who are listening or watching right now that like this is different. This is a very deep, very thoughtful, not that "ADHD Aha!" isn't thoughtful, but a body of work that is a long time in the making because it needed to be a long in the the making because we had to get it right, and wanted it to be high quality.

So, I'm so excited for everybody to hear it. It's out now. You have to, everybody, go check it out, "Climbing the Walls." Would you want to talk about where the title of the show comes from before we sign off?

Danielle: Oh yeah. The title of the show comes from an interview with a woman named Terry Matlen. She's been treating women with ADHD since the 90s. And during the pandemic, she received more emails than she's ever received with women seeking treatment. And she said, these women were just climbing the walls like they needed help. And yeah, that's where the name of the show came from.

Laura: I just got chills again. I remember when you all landed on the title, I was like, "That's it, that perfect." Danielle, thank you for trusting me with your story. It really is helpful for our listeners to hear about it and to get to know you better because they're gonna get to you on "Climbing the Walls," and so, now they have a little bit more information.

Danielle: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Laura: Yeah, thanks for coming in.

Thanks for listening today. As always, if you want to share your own "aha" moment, email us at adhdaha@understood.org. I'd love to hear from you. And check out the show notes for this episode. We have more resources and links to anything we mentioned in the episode.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org 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/give.

"ADHD Aha!" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli. Say hi, Jessamine!

Jessamine: Hi, everyone.

Laura: And Margie DeSantis.

Margie: Hey, hey.

Laura: Samiah Adams is our supervising producer. Video is produced by Calvin Knie and edited by Alyssa Shea. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also mixes the show. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. From Understood.org, our executive directors are Scott Cocchiere and Seth Melnick. And I'm your host, Laura Key. Thanks so much for listening.