Depression and ADHD: What is the Connection?

To kick off mental health awareness month, I wanted to share a story about my friend. Check out the interview to learn about how she recognized ADHD through depression.

1. What does mental health mean to you?

I think it is really important to make sure that it is something that we’re taking care of. Mental health is sort of like the wellness of your mind and like having a healthy mind, because you are your mind. You have to take care of it just as much as you take care of your body.

2. Are there any experiences that you have where your mental health has positively affected your life? Or negatively affected your life?

I think sometimes it’s a little more difficult to answer whether it positively affects your life because it’s sort of a thing that like if you’re mentally healthy, then like things are gonna be like going good, they’re gonna be going like normal - the way they should be, so it’s harder to notice. It’s a lot easier to notice when your mental health is negatively affecting your life. And sometimes even that is hard, sometimes you won’t realize that, because you have some sort of underlying issue or because you’re not as … because you’ve “let yourself go” so to speak, that you’re not like being 100% the person that you should be. When I was in high school I struggled a lot with undiagnosed ADHD, so what that looked like for me was I wasn’t really able to find the motivation or the focus to finish my assignments on time, or at all, sometimes. So I would end up not doing as well as I could have, even though, I guess from a book/intellectual perspective, I should have been a straight A student, but I was more like a C student.

3. When did you discover that you have ADHD? And how did you discover that?

Mostly through talking to therapists. I had sort of like self-diagnosed myself with depression and when I went to talk to someone about it, they mentioned that what I was going through sounded more like ADHD and that depression was more like a side effect of the way that ADHD was negatively affecting my life.

4. What made you decide to go talk to a therapist?

I took some time off of school after my first two years of college, just because … like it wasn’t ever going to work for me and when I decided to go back to school I realized that I needed to talk to someone or else the same thing that held me back before was going to keep holding me back, so I needed to try to fix it.

5. Do you think after talking to a therapist and finding out that you have ADHD, has that helped you in studies and what you were trying to address before?

I think it has actually. Even before I started medicating or anything, I was able to do more research and read articles and stuff about ADHD and realize, “Oh this is why I experience certain things”, and even just knowing the reason why you’re feeling a certain way can help you sort of manage that feeling. One example is, something people don’t know happens when you have ADHD is you get something called RSD. It’s rejection sensitive dysphoria, so when you experience a perceived rejection, not necessarily like someone’s actually saying “I reject you” or “I don’t wanna be with you” but if you notice someone’s not as enthusiastic around you as usual or something, then it can feel like a full on rejection and you can sort of go into a little bit of a depression from it. Like nothing actually happened but because you perceived a rejection, your entire mental mood goes really down for the rest of the day. But if you know that it’s happening, if you know the reason for it, you can be like, “This person isn’t rejecting me. They’re just having a bad day”, or, “They just didn’t say something with the same level of enthusiasm. That’s not something to be this upset about”, and you can sort of help yourself manage it even without medication or anything. ... Just knowing that helps a lot.

6. Are there any ways that you practice positive mental health?

Um not as much as I should. The most I do is trying to eat healthy. But it does just as much for your body as your mind so like …

I don’t know, I’m actually not very good at taking care of my mental health.

It’s a process. It’s sort of like anything, like when you start a new diet or when you make a resolution to exercise, it’s easy to do it for a couple of days and then you sort of lose momentum and you stop.

7. Were you ever, have you ever experienced any stigma against having ADHD?

I haven’t, mostly because I think most of the stigma around ADHD sort of surrounds the “elementary school boy who can’t sit still”. For one thing, people don’t even know what it looks like in girls because a lot of the symptoms present differently but once you get to be an adult, people like just don’t care, it’s not something to stigmatize.

- Ingrid