Anna Pillay: On ADHD

Anna Pillay and Anika Moa swap ADHD stories - a condition that affects around 5 percent of our population. Anna was 50 years old and had three neuro-diverse children before she was diagnosed.

Anna Pillay was 50 when she was diagnosed with ADHD, Anika was nearly 40 when she received her diagnosis. The two reflect on what having the condition has meant for them.

Watch the video version of the episode here

Anna's life with undiagnosed ADHD

"I found it hard to make friends. I found it hard to relate to people. I had loads of social anxiety. I had a really great childhood, but I had lots of kind of little sad internal feelings going on. I was a bit kind of attention seeking. I was a real little liar, I was a fantasist when I was a little kid. So that was probably quite a sign.

"I cruised through school to a certain level and then I got to a point where I had to really be able to remember things and perform in exams and I just couldn't do it. And so I would panic. I would not do the work and I wouldn't retain the information. Then I would just absolutely freak out. And then I just screwed them all up."

"I just thought that I was a bit shit and a bit of an underachiever. People would be like, 'Oh, you're so bright. How come you're doing this? Why haven't you done this? Why didn't you go to university?'

"From looking at my son and from learning about his autism and from learning about Lola's stuff, that was when it started going, 'Oh, hang on a minute. I wonder, if there's something going on with me'. And then I started reading about ADHD and there were all of these things that I thought were just dumb shit that I did and thought that actually other people seemed to think in the same way. And so that's when I thought, right, I'm going to make an appointment."

What ADHD looks like for Anna

When I was explaining it to the psychiatrist, I said it was like I always have 50 tabs open on my computer in my brain and I can't focus on which one I'm going to do next and I don't know which one to click and I'm noticing all notifications coming at me from everything and then I just freeze."

"I buy ridiculous things in the middle of the night and then I have to phone shops and beg them to cancel my purchase. I ordered 200 individually wrapped things of mints. Like, I was in a shop. And then, like, strange trousers that were one size fits all trousers and I didn't even know what was arriving. 500 individual sachets of coconut sugar arrived one day…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details