Grief After an ADHD Diagnosis: Relief, Anger and What Follows

On the day I read the diagnosis report I did not know what I would feel. The first thing that came was relief. At last there was an explanation, and its name was not laziness.

A few days later something completely different came. This knowledge could have been had for twenty-three years. That sentence entered my mind once and did not leave for weeks.

If you also received your diagnosis in adulthood and cannot put a name to what came after the relief, this article is about that.

Why the relief lasts such a short time

The relief comes from the explanation itself. For years you carry the question "why can everyone do it and I cannot," and one day that question has an answer.

But that answer does not explain only today. It also works backwards. And the moment it works backwards, a bill appears: all those years went by without that explanation.

For me there was, I think, about a week between these two stages. The relief was real, it was short, and anger came after it.

The diagnosis does not change the past. It changes the way the past is read, and that is sometimes the heavier job.

This order is expected

The qualitative study by Young and colleagues (2008) with patients diagnosed in adulthood shows that mixed and often contradictory feelings are experienced in the period after diagnosis: relief, anger, a sense of loss and these intertwined.

The study by Schrevel and colleagues (2016) shows another dimension. After the diagnosis, questions about identity arise: it can take a long time to tell what is ADHD and what is the person themselves. The title of the study itself carries this question: "Do I need to become someone else?"

So what you feel stands there not as a sign that the process has gone wrong but as a known stage. Learning this helped me a great deal, because for a while I had found my own reaction abnormal too.

What is being grieved

This grief does not form in a void. It rests on concrete losses:

• Support that was not received. The accommodations that could have been made at school were not made, because nobody knew such a need existed.
• Wrong explanations. For years you were described as lazy, messy or careless. The real point is this: after a while you believed it too. How that label settles in I described separately in the article on the label of not using your potential.
• Decisions that were never made. Programs dropped, jobs that could not be sustained, relationships that ended without being understood.
• The extra energy spent. The invisible effort spent to get the same result as everyone else.

On my list the item that hurt most was the fourth. My grade average was not low, and I was not the child who turned the class upside down. Someone looking from outside might say "what have you lost?" What I lost was not the result, it was the price I paid to get that result. Every assignment being left to the last night, every morning beginning with making up for something, a feeling of never being able to catch up that never faded.

The anger wants to go somewhere

The anger within grief usually has an address: family, teachers, the grown-ups who years ago said "there's nothing wrong with her, she's just a bit messy."

This anger does not seem irrational to me. But left on its own it does not get anywhere either. What worked for me was turning it into a question: who could have known what, with what information, in that period?

The answer usually turns out to be this: in those years nobody read the picture of a quiet, compliant child who managed her grades as ADHD. This does not justify what happened. But when you shift the anger from people to the system, it becomes easier to carry.

Getting through this period

Really give grief time. It is very common to begin installing apps, building systems and fixing yourself the day after the diagnosis. I did so too, and it did not work. Skipping the emotional part does not remove it, it only puts it in the queue.

Reread your own history. What helped me most in this period was writing. Taking a particular memory and reading it once more with the new knowledge changes the weight of that memory. When the sentence "I was lazy" turns into "I tried to get by without help," something loosens.

Talk to people who have gone the same way. The accounts of adults diagnosed late resemble one another surprisingly. What the glossary calls peer support had a greater effect in this period, at least for me, than any piece of advice.

You are not obliged to tell everyone right away. Sharing the diagnosis is a separate decision and its timing belongs to you. I dealt with that decision separately in the article on whom to tell about your diagnosis.

Do not attribute everything to ADHD, and do not refuse to attribute anything to it either. In the first months every behavior settles under the diagnosis: being late, getting angry, being bored. This blur, which the glossary calls identity confusion, is usually temporary. Over time the distinction becomes clear.

A common mistake: turning grief into a task list

This was my own mistake, which is why I am writing it. In the first weeks after the diagnosis I put all my energy into the idea "now I will build the right system." A new notebook, a new app, a new plan.

This was a kind of avoidance. Because building a system gives the feeling of doing something, and being sad does not. None of the systems I built held in that period, because something unspoken lay underneath.

The following order seems more right to me: first understand what happened, then accept what you feel, and only last decide what to do.

Grief and depression are not the same thing. Sadness is expected in the period after a diagnosis. But if there is a slump lasting weeks, an inability to enjoy anything or hopelessness, this may be a separate picture and requires a separate assessment. I dealt with the distinction in the article on ADHD and depression. If you have thoughts of harming yourself, call 112 without waiting; there is also the ALO 183 line for referral.

The relief side is real too

I have to say that this period is not made up only of loss, or I would be doing it an injustice. The relief of diagnosis is experienced very strongly by most people and leaves something lasting:

• Learning that the sentence you told yourself for years was wrong.
• Knowing that the things you struggle with have a reason, that is, understanding that the effort was not imagined.
• Finally being able to ask for help from the right place.

The European consensus statement (Kooij et al., 2019) counts psychoeducation after diagnosis as one of the first steps of treatment. In other words, understanding what it is is not decoration around the treatment, it is the treatment. When I read this I remember thinking, "I am not wasting time."

Where it arrives

In me the anger did not disappear entirely. It lessened and gave way to something else: I am no longer angry at the girl in the past, I see that she was trying to get by with the knowledge she had.

I say this not because I read it somewhere but from my own experience: the end of this period does not have to be something as big as forgiving the past. One day you notice that you have said the sentence "if only I had known this" and that the rest of it did not come. That is all.

If you are curious about the diagnostic process itself, I described it step by step in the article on how adult ADHD is diagnosed.

I also wrote about letting go in the diary: After a leaf.