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It seemed to be a children’s affliction at first, but during the past few years more and more adults are being diagnosed with ADHD. Many towns even organise a monthly ADHD café where fellow-sufferers can meet up. According to psychiatrist Sandra Kooij we ‘are catching up’. Are more and more people in their thirties getting ADHD or could it be such-and-such a fashionable disease.
At first, one presumed that it was a development disorder, which children would grow out of, but a few years ago doctors have ascertained that about half of the children was still affected by the illness. The news about ADHD spread like wildfire and the internet is flooded with documented websites and weblogs of experienced experts.
Kooij is in charge of the treatment department at PsyQ, a psychomedic institution in Den Haag, in the Netherlands. She is not surprised at the growth rate of the waiting lists for her clinic. According to her we are ‘catching up’. The latest estimates show that about 2 percent of the adults is suffering from ADHD. Kooij thinks this percentage is actually much higher. ‘In my practice, nine out of ten ADHD children remain disfunctional even after the age of eighteen.’ That some of them are no longer diagnosed as ADHDers later on, is because ADHD symptoms are determined for children between four and sixteen years old. DSM IV, an American manual which is also being used in the Netherlands to provide a diagnose, describes actions like ‘climbing treas often’, according to Kooij. ‘We still need separate criteria for adults.’
The main symptoms of ADHD are attention and concentration disorders, impulsivity and hyperactiviy. ADHDers have great trouble aiming or keeping their focus. As a result, they act chaotically, they are no good at planning or organising, have little sense of time and are always late. Since they are distracted all the time, it takes them very long to perform tasks and hence their performances are much worse than they are actually capable of. ADHD children often score lower grades at school than could be expected according to their intelligence and ADHD adults are often under-employed compared to their talents.
Kooij researched 54 patients from her clinic. It turned out that over 40 percent had had over 9 different jobs or functions. Except that these people were soon tired of their job, they often had conflicts at work. Almost forty percent had been fired and almost thirty percent had been made redundant at least four times.
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