Female Speaker: Melydia Clewell is a News Assignment Manager for WTVC in Tennessee. She is always been a hard worker, but even as a child she knew something about her inability to concentrate and focus just wasn’t right.
Melydia Clewell: Well, looking back I was terrible on tests. I have a fairly high queue, but when I came time to sit down at the desk and do the multiple choices I would freeze.
Female Speaker: But it wasn’t until she was an adult that her condition was actually diagnosed. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD, a disorder that can be difficult to identify.
David Pomeroy: It doesn’t have all was an exact same appearance in everybody. Everybody’s ADD is unique.
Female Speaker: The problem is the symptoms of ADHD in adults can be very subtle and confused with other health conditions like depression or effects from head traumas. Symptoms include attention difficulties, inability to focus, restlessness, unstable mood, disorganization, a short temper, reduced stress tolerance, and impulsivity.
Melydia Clewell: I would began to clean the house and I would open a drawer, clean out the drawer, there will be something in the drawer say down, oh I need to take this to Wal-Mart and get this developed, and then the pictures would be great and I think you know I really need to scrap book these and I -- my scrap book stock and then the phone would ring and someone would want to go to remove the and I like okay, I’m going to movie. I’d be gone and my husband walk in and that drawer would be open with all the stuffs spelled out, the scrap booking stuff to be all over the house and the last time he didn’t talk to me. I was kind of spend that I cleaning.
Joseph Biederman: People sometimes saying that ADHD is not really a real diagnosis that, it’s is a way that people particularly, adult explain a --
Female Speaker: It’s estimated that 5% to 10% of children across the world have ADHD. And then about 80% or the cases it’s hereditary condition. Often the most obvious clue that adults have ADHD is their children have it.
Joseph Biederman: But we are interviewing the parents and the siblings of our children that came to treatment in and I was very clear that the size of a number of the parents of the children that we saw in our clinic had the same condition.
Oscar Bukstein: Regardless of age the diagnosis of ADHD is accomplished through history. There are no -- per say that make the diagnosis.
Female Speaker: Melydia’s correct diagnosis came after the condition threatened to her marriage.
Melydia Clewell: My husband basically said to me if you don’t go and do some help I will divorce you because I was so irritable and impulsive. I couldn’t lain in my tongue and I thought I would -- head and it was on my mouth before I time to say stop don’t say that.
Female Speaker: Once diagnosed adult ADHD like the childhood version can be effectively treated, but it me take a while for mental health professionals to find the proper marriage of therapies that work best for individual patients. A combination of medicine and psychotherapy maybe what's alternately needed to bring the condition under control. It took both time and patients for Melydia’s ADHD to be properly diagnosed and treated. But today she is in control of her life.
Female Speaker: You are using ADHD as an excuse -- and I think that’s wrong. I don’t see it as an excuse, I see it as an explanation for why I’m plunge to do the things I do, and then it’s up to me to change that behavior manner.
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