Sen mi, Ben mi, Erişkin DEHB mi? (Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.?)

The original title is Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.? and its subtitle speaks of getting off the roller coaster when someone you love has ADHD. It was published in 2008 by 1201 Alarm Press. The foreword was written by Russell Barkley.

There is a Turkish edition. Psikoaktif Yayıncılık published it in February 2013 under the title Sen mi, Ben mi, Erişkin DEHB mi?. In the subtitle the roller coaster has become an amusement park train. The translation is by Çağlar Özayrancı and the translation editing by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Akif Ersoy. I saw this information on the publisher's own website. I could not verify how easy it is to find currently.

That an academic took on the translation editing gives confidence about the terms. That the Turkish edition runs past four hundred pages should warn the reader from the start.

A journalist's book

Gina Pera is an award-winning journalist; she does not write as a psychiatrist or a psychologist. She came across ADHD in the late 1990s while researching behaviors of her then fiancé that she found incomprehensible. Then for years she moderated support groups and talked with leading researchers and clinicians in the field.

This background can be felt on every page of the book.

The good side is this: Pera collects information like a reporter and tries to separate what she took from experts from her own observations. The book looks less like generalizing one person's experience and more like pursuing that experience and testing it against the field's knowledge.

The challenging side comes from the same place. Pera writes as a partner and sees the person with ADHD largely from the outside.

After the book, Pera wrote the book for clinicians Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy together with Arthur Robin; it was published by Routledge in 2016. So the observations in this first book were later carried into a clinical framework. Knowing this while reading the first book helps you see that what is described is not merely a personal reaction.

Who it speaks to

The book's reader is the partner of the person with ADHD. The subtitle says so openly and the book keeps that promise.

This partner is usually someone who has felt for years that something is wrong but cannot name it. Promises are not kept, bills are not paid, conversations are left half finished, every argument ends in the same place. At the same time they question themselves: is it me, am I too demanding, or is there really something in this relationship?

The question in the title is exactly this. You, me, or an undiagnosed picture that comes between the two of us?

As someone with ADHD, reading the book over this reader's shoulder is a strange experience. You read, in someone else's language, what kind of disappointment and accumulated anger your own behavior creates in another person. On some of the pages I wanted to close the book and put it down.

I did not, because the anger described cannot be called invented. What the partner without ADHD lives through is brushed past in a paragraph or two in most ADHD books. Here it is put at the center.

The funfair train

The metaphor in the subtitle carries the whole emotional tone of the book.

On a roller coaster the order of the dips and climbs changes without your choosing. What the partner living in a relationship with someone with ADHD describes is similar. One day a close, attentive, fun person. The next day someone who does not remember what they promised, who drifts elsewhere in the middle of a conversation, who leaves a bill unopened for months. The partner lives constantly on alert because they do not know which day is coming.

One side of the metaphor I find very accurate. Inconsistency can wear you down more than bad behavior alone. You can take a stand against constant bad behavior. You cannot against inconsistency, because the good days keep hope alive.

I find the other side missing. The person with ADHD on the train is not driving that train either. Most of the time they cannot make sense of their own ups and downs. The book knows this and says it, but the metaphor is drawn from the partner's seat.

Three parts

The book consists of three parts.

Recognizing. The first part describes how ADHD can be noticed in adults, especially from inside a relationship. What ADHD is, why it looks different in everyone, how it leaves traces in money and other areas of daily life are discussed. At the end of this part there are chapters devoted to how to talk with the partner about the possibility of ADHD.

The chapter on money is especially valuable. Money is one of the areas that does the most quiet damage in a relationship, and popular books rarely go there. Pera does not describe it as a character flaw; she treats it as one of the concrete results of difficulty with self-regulation. I talked about the everyday side of the subject separately in the article ADHD and money management.

Treatment and understanding. The second part is about finding effective therapy, therapy approaches suited to ADHD, the role of medication, the link between brain and behavior, and lasting results.

Pera's most important stance in this part is that she takes ADHD seriously as a real and treatable condition. That she devotes separate chapters to the search for therapy is also meaningful. Barkley's emphasis in the foreword on couple therapists points to this: being able to tell an ordinary relationship conflict from the ups and downs ADHD creates. It matches something I repeat often on this site: a well-meaning therapy that does not know ADHD can read the problem as only a communication issue and cost you years.

The medication chapters consider medication together with side effects and lifestyle choices. The book does not replace a physician; the medication decision is made with the physician.

Moving forward. The last part is about coping with denial, healthy-living strategies, and considering lifestyle choices together with medication side effects.

The two faces of denial

The book's most original contribution, I think, is what it says about denial.

A partner with ADHD not accepting the symptoms is usually read as stubbornness or a moral weakness. Pera explains that it has two layers. One layer is truly psychological: for someone who has been labeled lazy, messy, irresponsible for years, accepting a diagnosis can feel like accepting those labels. Shame pushes a person into defending themselves.

The other layer is neurological. The very skill of monitoring and evaluating your own behavior can be affected by ADHD. The person may truly not be seeing the problems they cause.

This layer has a counterpart in research too. In the study by Barkley and colleagues (2002) that followed young people diagnosed with ADHD in childhood into adulthood, the young people rated their own symptoms as markedly milder than their parents reported. So a person's own report about themselves can miss part of the picture.

This distinction was important for me. As someone who could only notice late that something was going wrong in my own life, I know that not noticing is not always an escape.

But there is a risk here too, and the book does not weigh it heavily enough.

The concept of denial can turn into a tool for dismissing a partner's objection from the start. Not everyone who says they do not have ADHD is in denial. Sometimes there really is something else: depression, anxiety, another psychiatric picture, or simply the incompatibility of two people. The one to make this distinction cannot be the partner; a specialist assessment is needed.

That is why the chapters devoted to talking with the partner about the possibility of ADHD should be read carefully. The aim is not to convince the partner of a diagnosis but to make them open to an assessment.

Whose fault

Pera tries to separate behavior from personality, and one purpose of treating ADHD as a disorder is this.

Even so, the book's balance is not set on the side of the partner with ADHD. The one expected to change, to accept, to begin treatment is that person. The contribution of the partner without ADHD is discussed but takes up less space.

I hesitate to write this as a flaw. The book is written to a partner and makes room for that partner's experience, ignored for years. Not every book has to stand at equal distance from both sides.

But the reader with ADHD needs to read it knowing this. They will not find themselves fully here. The book is interested less in what they feel than in what it feels like to live with them.

Comparing it with Melissa Orlov's The ADHD Effect on Marriage makes the difference clear. Orlov looks at the cycles inside the relationship and names the roles of both sides. Pera focuses more on the picture, the treatment and the partner's understanding of this picture. Orlov describes the relationship, Pera describes ADHD.

What is left for the reader with ADHD

I thought about what I took from this book as a reader with ADHD.

First, seeing in their language what kind of mark my own symptoms can leave on someone else's life. This is an angle I could not see looking from inside myself.

Second, thinking of treatment as a responsibility toward the people in my life too. This idea felt heavy at first. Then I noticed it had a lightening side: if the problem has a name and a form that can be worked on, guilt can attach to something too.

Third, the limit. Understanding a partner's anger does not mean deserving every expression of that anger. The book does not say this as clearly as I would like; the reader has to draw this line themselves.

Where it has aged

The expression A.D.D. in the title tells the age of the book at first glance. Today this term is not used clinically.

Because it was written in 2008, it belongs to before the DSM-5 published in 2013. The DSM-5 changed the diagnostic threshold for adults and the age by which symptoms must have started. What the book says about diagnostic criteria is not up to date in this respect.

The medication chapters should be read similarly. In the following years the options and guidelines changed. Which medications are available in Türkiye is also different from the picture in America. It is more right to use this section for preparing questions to take to the physician than to read it like a current guide.

Even so, the backbone of the book, that is, the understanding of ADHD as a largely hereditary self-regulation condition, agrees with today's research. The review by Faraone and Larsson (2019) gives heritability as about 74 percent. Pera's call not to read a partner's behavior as a lack of willpower matches this finding.

How to read it

It is a long book and I think trying to read it from beginning to end is unnecessary. The recognition chapters of the first part, the denial chapter and the chapters devoted to talking with the partner are the heart of the book. The treatment part can be used as a reference.

My advice as a reader with ADHD: do not read this book as a list of accusations. Read it to understand why the person across from you is so tired. Take notes where you are uncomfortable; those notes can be material for the conversation you will have with your partner.

For a reader without ADHD: the book will give you a language. Use that language together with your partner, do not turn it into a weapon against them. Especially do not use the concept of denial as a trump card.

For whom

For someone who suspects their partner has ADHD or whose partner has just been diagnosed. For this person it is one of the most comprehensive books in the field.

Also for the adult with ADHD who has been diagnosed and really wants to understand what their partner is going through. But it takes patience and a somewhat thick skin.

I would not recommend it to someone whose concern is not a relationship, who is trying to understand their own ADHD. For them other books are a better starting point. For a more general framework on ADHD and relationships, see the article ADHD and relationships.