Aging Out Loud: Rethinking ADHD in Later Life with Dr. Kathleen Nadeau
What happens to ADHD when the scaffolds of career and parenting fade, and we’re left navigating a world that’s quieter, slower… and far less structured?
This week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast, Pete and Nikki are joined by one of the most influential voices in ADHD research and advocacy: Dr. Kathleen Nadeau. An internationally recognized expert and the author of 14 books on ADHD, Kathleen is the founder and director of the Chesapeake Center—one of the largest private ADHD specialty clinics in the U.S. Her career has been defined by breaking new ground for underserved ADHD populations, and today she turns our attention to one of the most overlooked groups of all: older adults.
Drawing on extensive research—including interviews with more than 150 individuals for her groundbreaking book Still Distracted After All These Years: Help and Support for Older Adults with ADHD—Kathleen guides us through the realities of aging with ADHD. She brings nuance, humor, and urgency to topics like isolation, structure loss, hormonal shifts, executive dysfunction, and the ADHD tax that shows up in the fine print of Social Security forms and medical claims. We discuss how declining circadian rhythms and deep sleep disruption may connect ADHD to increased dementia risk, and why the U.S. is still lagging behind global standards in using hormone replacement therapy to support cognitive health in aging women with ADHD.
But this conversation isn’t about despair—it’s about reinvention, resilience, and the power of community. Kathleen shares powerful stories of support groups that thrive beyond professional guidance and offers practical strategies for maintaining purpose and mental clarity well into our later years.
If you or someone you love is navigating ADHD after 50, this is the episode that finally speaks to that experience—with candor, compassion, and hard-won insight.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh, hi, Nikki. A happy, happy fine podcast day to you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
we're starting a new series today. The series is technically ADHD and body. We're talking about how the body changes as a result of ADHD and considerations we might want to have. But I'm telling you this first episode is a subject ... I feel like I've been banging the drum on this since I turned 50, and I'm very excited to be able to have this conversation today. We're going to talk about ADHD and aging and questions have already been pouring in. I'm very excited to get to it.
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Okay, today we are joined by one of the pioneers in the field of ADHD research and advocacy, Dr. Kathleen Nadeau. As the founder and clinical director of the Chesapeake Center, Dr. Nadeau has spent decades in the forefront of understanding and supporting individuals with ADHD across the lifespan. She's authored groundbreaking books, spoken internationally, and perhaps and most relevant to today's conversation, has turned her sharp attention to the often overlooked experience of older adults with ADHD.
From the shifting landscapes of retirement to the challenges of aging bodies and changing identities, she is here to guide us through what it means to live and thrive with ADHD into our later years.
Kathleen, welcome to The ADHD Podcast.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Thank you. And again, I just so appreciate you asking me to talk about this. We really need to give this topic so much more attention.
Pete Wright:
Let's go ahead and dig right in. How does ADHD evolve as we age? What are some of the ways that it tends to present in older adults?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Well, it's really the very same disorder throughout our adulthood, but our circumstances change of course. And so what we're really talking about is that interaction between circumstances and brain. And I spend so much of my time, I think a lot of the best way to treat ADHD is to what I call plant yourself in the right garden. That if you're in an ADHD-friendly family environment, work environment, friend environment, you're going to blossom and thrive. And an awful lot of us don't have that good fortune.
So the same thing applies when we are older adults. And I think one of the analogies I would use is I currently started a pro bono support group. I live and work in the Washington, D.C. Area, and so many people have lost their jobs or about to lose their jobs. So I started a pro bono job loss group, and I said, our first job in this job loss group is to rename the group. There's nothing sadder than a job loss group.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, no kidding.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And so at the end of the first meeting, it was actually funny. Everybody was in a much better mood and we decided we were going to call ourselves the Problem Solvers.
Nikki Kinzer:
I like it.
Pete Wright:
That's a good pivot.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
That's right, exactly. And so what happens, these folks that have lost their job are home alone, whether they're married or not. If their spouse is going to work, their kids are going to school or they may be single, trying to do what they know they need to do and really floundering. I mean, looking for a job, rewriting your resume, all that stuff is just so intimidating and there's no structure and there's no support.
And that's what I worry about with older adults. Older adults are more likely to be single. I mean, many, many older adults are single simply either they're divorced or they've lost their spouse, but the percentage is higher among older adults with ADHD. The divorce rate is higher. And what I worry about is the rates of depression go up because of social isolation, because guess what? I am an older adult with ADHD, and I am very fortunate to not be living alone yet at this point in my life, although I'm younger than my husband and statistically, I'm very likely to be living alone at some point in the foreseeable future.
But when we have ADHD and we're isolated, our brains just don't function very well. There's no structure to our day. There's no time to do anything. And we get depressed and increasingly dysfunctional. And one of the things I find people doing is losing their circadian rhythm and their time sense. There's no reason to get up in the morning. There's no particular reason to go to bed at night. ADHDs are inveterate night owls to begin with. I've been one since earliest childhood.
And so when you're not working and you don't have to get up at 7:00 or so in the morning, you can stay up til 3:00 and you could sleep till 10:00 or 11:00. And meals, all the structure of life that really helps us stay on track evaporates. And so isolated older adults with ADHD are really struggling and we're not doing much to address that and teach people what they need to do.
Pete Wright:
I had not considered that, I mean, even a little bit, the loss of the circadian routine, but I am a case example for it. If I didn't have the structure of my wife and family, I would absolutely fall into that trap. And I wonder, I mean not just I originally was going to go down the road of retirement, the challenges of transitioning from likely having a significant scaffold to support ADHD behavior to having no need for a scaffold or no perceived need for a scaffold also accelerates that. And I'm wondering how you build or rebuild a sense of structure during this shift to isolation, to retirement. What's your mental model for this change?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Well, what the heck do you do about it? Some of you may have heard of, I think it's the fastest growing community in the United States, a place called The Villages in Central Florida.
Pete Wright:
Oh, that sounds like a cult.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
It is immense and it's growing. I have visited people there. It's growing so rapidly. I mean, you just see the bulldozers and cranes everywhere.
Pete Wright:
It's like a senior facility, like an elder living facility?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Oddly enough, it started out as a trailer park. I mean a dumpy, dumpy trailer park in nowhere Central Florida. And it was there because it was cheap. I mean, people want to live on the coast. And the son of the man that had the trailer park was a good businessman and realized we've got something going here so they just build modest, affordable two-bedroom villa homes. And the key to The Villages is they have so many activities.
I mean, they practically publish a phone book once a month of every athletic activity, and anybody can start anything and they'll publish it in the book. And so you suddenly have a built-in community and you just flip through the directory and you can see people that are interested in stained-glass art or your religious group or you name it.
So I think one of the things about The Villages is you don't have to make anything happen. It's just there and it's free. It's ...
Nikki Kinzer:
And you have the community. Yeah, you're not isolated anymore.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Huge community. And I think that's why it's growing so rapidly. It's affordable. It's not a fancy condo on the coast. And it's organized. It's amazingly organized. They have village squares, they call it, with live music every night, and they do line dancing because most of the people are single. They've lost their spouse so they can still dance because they're doing line dancing.
It's a brilliant concept, and they didn't create it for people with ADHD, but I can guarantee you they've got a lot of people with ADHD down there, including a family member of mine.
Pete Wright:
Making this transition is my mom doesn't have ADHD, but we lost my dad three years ago and she's been, I think ... I should say she's never been diagnosed with ADHD. But the transition to living alone and living life alone, it causes certain behaviors to emerge. What is your sense of late diagnosis?
We talk about adult diagnosis with ADHD, but what about later adults being diagnosed with ADHD as a result of these transitions? Does that go up? Does the predominance of late diagnosis go up or by then, is it just you're living your life?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Well, that's a good question, and I don't think there's a one answer fits all. I frequently get emails from somebody saying, I'm 68 years old and I was just diagnosed and thank you so much for your book. But I would say more people are, "I've been this way all my life, why does it matter now?" And my very own husband, when I told him, about five years ago, that I was going to write this book, those words came out of his, "Why does it matter if you have ADHD when you're retired? I mean, you don't really have to do anything." And I think that's a common misperception.
I mean, first of all, we have to do a lot. I mean, just the complication of managing our money and living on a limited budget and health problems and insurance claims forms and just the self-maintenance. And I'm a healthy almost 79-year-old, but I have a lot of medical appointments. Stack of bills and where you go. And also, unless you live in one of these planned communities, your life is going to be utterly empty unless you plan and initiate things. And I think people just ... There's almost an inherent ageism. What does anything matter when you're that old? Just sit in your chair and wait for your demise.
Pete Wright:
Well, I mean, Kathleen, honestly, there is ... So I'm 53 and I have this old age fantasy where I get to hyperfocus on something that I want to just let go of myself into without the perils of shame and woe that come from not doing something else. And so frankly, the idea of retirement is a massive fantasy for me right now because it feels like I'm finally, after all these years, let off the hook of the current daily weight experience of pressure of ADHD.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And I completely understand what you're saying, but I did a lot of surveys. I personally individually interviewed 150 adults for my book. And it was a fascinating trip and it took me a couple of years to do it. And I learned so much along the way. And I think I'm really the only person that has done that in-depth exploration of ADHD in older age. And I had people fill out questionnaires. What are the most difficult aspects for you in living with ADHD as an older adult?
One of the things that was very commonly reported is tremendous disappointment in themselves that they had dreamed of I'm going to write that book, I'm going to organize the 10,000 family photos and do whatever it was. And they're not doing it. That having all the time in the world is, if anything, a curse because there's no particular time to do it. There's no particular drive to do it.
Nikki Kinzer:
There's always tomorrow.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
There's always tomorrow. And doing those things takes a lot of executive functioning skills. And our executive functioning skills work a lot better when we have a structure. I mean, you're much more likely to write that memoir if you go to your local senior center where they have a group where everyone's writing their memoir and you go every week and read what you've written and it gives you that structure and support and deadline and people get it done.
And so those dreams are, I think, rarely brought to fruition. And that's not to say never. I mean, there's some people who do feel let off the leash and finally, I'm going to climb every 14er in the Rockies.
Pete Wright:
Just further cementing the universal truth that our fantasies are never what they cracked up to be. I get it. I hear you and I get it. And I guess at 53, I'm okay keeping it as a fantasy. That's fine.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Oh, it's a great fantasy and it can come to fruition, but you need to be smart about it. One of the things that I realize, I have ADHD and I've written a lot of books. I like to write. Most of my books have been co-authored. And the reason for that is if I'm writing a book with somebody else, there's built-in structure. I'm going to write chapter 1 and send it to you. You're going to write chapter 2 and send it to me and you keep plugging away.
And the book I wrote on older adults, it was me, myself and I, and it took me more than twice as long as the other books. I mean, I'm in the middle of a book right now with two co-authors, longtime colleagues of mine, and it's just chugging along. And even though I'm very busy, we have monthly meetings, we send drafts of chapters and it's no big deal. But believe me, if I were writing this book by myself, it'd be-
Nikki Kinzer:
It would, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, there's something to that.
Pete Wright:
The systems, I want to just talk briefly about the systems that we have for dealing with aging. I said briefly, I don't know if this is going to be brief. It may be depressing and long-winded, but I'm thinking about the systems we have in place to navigate our aging and how ADHD works with or in conflict with these systems.
I'm talking about the healthcare system, Medicare, social security, the kinds of things that we deal with that I think cause a lot of aging people who aren't quite there yet a great deal of anxiety. How am I going to navigate this? How am I going to be able to focus enough to make sure that I am taking care of myself without the structure? What's your sense and experience?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
I think that some people are incredibly vulnerable. I mean, I worked with a woman who had been a federal employee and she had a modest retirement from her federal employment, but she was also divorced from her husband and been married to him for many years. And of course she had social security and she had never figured out how to apply. And her ex-husband had remarried and she just wrongly assumed, well, I guess she gets his social security, not me, which was incorrect. And I really had to walk her through painstakingly the process of applying. And she had missed many, many thousands of dollars by not applying. I think people just get overwhelmed by the details and the paperwork.
Pete Wright:
We are sometimes cavalier about the ADHD tax, right? The cost we pay when we buy something that we don't want to keep, but never return. But at this point talking about social security becomes the ultimate ADHD tax that becomes your living wage.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
That's right.
Pete Wright:
For many people.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
That's absolutely right. And it's complicated out there. I mean, I have a very smart husband who's a retired scientist, and we started looking at bank accounts and deductions and all of a sudden, he's saying, are we paying double for our Medicaid? Because I think I'm paying and you think you're paying. And we may be.
And we're two very highly educated people who need to look into this. And it's painful when you're by yourself. And if you're lucky you have a son or a daughter that takes over that role. But I find, especially in older adults with ADHD, they're very likely to have children with ADHD who aren't good at that stuff either.
Pete Wright:
All right, let's transition to some body stuff. This is where it gets good. Let's talk about hormonal changes, especially though not exclusive to post menopause, also in men who experience a decrease in testosterone as they age. How do these hormonal changes interact with our ADHD symptoms? What do we need to be paying attention to?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Well, the hormonal shifts are much, much more impactful for women than for men. And what has not been paid attention to much at all by the US medical system is when all the flurry of negative attention about hormone replacement therapy came out several decades ago about how dangerous it was. What they had found was a slight, mind you, a slight increase in cancer rates. And they weren't even considering the huge impact that female hormones have on brain functioning. We weren't even considering it. And what we now know is our estrogen levels hugely impact our cognition and our mood. So we're more anxious, we're more depressed, we're more fuzzy headed and forgetful when our estrogen levels are lower. And that was never taken into account. And not surprisingly, the research was done by men.
Pete Wright:
You're welcome, everybody.
Nikki Kinzer:
Go figure.
Pete Wright:
You're welcome.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Well, there is that, and in ways I'm not sure where we're going to land because we've been so ambivalent in the US about hormone replacement therapy that when I've been on panels that included ADHD specialists in the UK and in Europe, they much more casually started hormone replacement treatment as just a standard part of treating ADHD in women. And we have not done that here.
And my longtime writing partner and I, Patty Quinn, she's a physician, we kept saying, I think we're talking to the wrong people. The gynecologists don't know anything about ADHD and the psychiatrists don't know anything about hormones, and who do we bang the drum in front of that this is a huge treatment issue. And so they're way ahead of us in the UK. And an interesting survey was done just as when everybody hold the presses, get off your hormone replacement, danger, danger.
They did a survey of female physicians, postmenopausal, age 50 and beyond female physicians in the UK health system. It is very easy to survey anything in the UK health system because it's a unified system, asking them do you personally take hormone replacement therapy? And almost every one of them did. And here were all these women just suffering terribly with anxiety and depression and all the joke-
Pete Wright:
Memory loss.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
... fuzzy headed.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's horrible. As someone who's lived it, it's horrible. And I can tell you I am on hormonal replacement therapy and I am so glad. I feel so much better than I did prior to talking to my doctor. And I take other supplements and things like that, but it's a horrible place to be and I don't have ADHD and it was horrible.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Exactly.
Nikki Kinzer:
So I can't imagine what it's like to have ADHD and have your memory honestly just go away. The moods and everything you're talking about, oh, yeah. It's not a happy place.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
I am so delighted to report that on May the 5th, in a few days, we will have the first hormone replacement therapy expert join our staff. We've got eight psychiatrists, seven of them don't know a blessed thing about hormones. It's not in their training. One of them was just recently trained but hasn't really started practicing. And we are hiring somebody that's done it for 20 years. And I am so excited that it's going to be an integral part of our treatment.
But the issue with menopause, I mean, you're just barely entering into older adulthood. I mean, my three kids are in their 50s and they would certainly say, "I am not in my older adulthood."
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
So I think the issues compound as we get older. And I imagine you're aware of the study that was the results of which were just released about a month ago done in the UK that really thoroughly documented that the lifespan of adults with ADHD is almost a decade shorter than for adults without ADHD. That's an astonishing and alarming figure.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, it is.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And I've been writing about it. It's not that ADHD kills us, it's the lifestyle that we lead because of our ADHD that leads to that early death. I wrote several articles recently about healthy brain, healthy lifestyle really needs to be at the heart of ADHD treatment. Stimulant medication just addresses a few symptoms of ADHD. It doesn't do anything about these unhealthy habits that we turn to. And those unhealthy habits mean one is sleep.
I'm giving a lecture at the NIH in a couple of weeks on sleep issues in ADHD. Our brains are wired differently. Our circadian rhythms are different. Our natural cycle is to go to sleep later and get up later. And the world doesn't let us do that. Well, guess what that leads to? Our brains are cleansed of neurotoxins. The proteins that we all know are so famously associated with Alzheimer's and that cleansing process, the glymphatic system of the brain only functions when we're in deep sleep. And if we never get to deep sleep, the plaque continues to accumulate.
And as far as I know, I'm the only one talking about this, but I don't think I will be for long. That really nails the association between ADHD and dementia. That because of our sleep problems that we've had since we were children, that our brains are not cleansing themselves of those toxins. And bingo, we have a greater chance for Alzheimer's.
Pete Wright:
That's pretty grim.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
But it doesn't have to be that way. And I am living proof of the fact it doesn't have to be that way. And when I think back of the way I ate and lived when I was a busy, busy professional with young kids and frantic schedule, I did not exercise. I lived on about five hours sleep. I was just grateful if there was food in the refrigerator. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to what food it was.
Survival. You're just grateful and you're ordering a pizza at the last minute because you forgot to thaw the chicken this morning and you're just in survival mode. And I don't know if either one of you have heard of Dale Bredesen. Dale Bredesen ...
Pete Wright:
That's new to me.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
... wrote the book The End of Alzheimer's, which I think was a little bit of hype, but I'm sure that was the publisher's idea.
Pete Wright:
It's a bold title though.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Bold. But he has a whole protocol for people that are showing very early signs of dementia and basically putting them on a regimen to change sleep habits, dietary habits, exercise habits, emphasizing the importance of social connection, the importance of stress management. And he's got lots and lots of research that shows that those things can not only be halted, but turned around. And I came across Dale Bredesen's name maybe a dozen years ago. I was doing research for something I was writing at the time, and I came across an article called Reversal of Cognitive Decline. And I had never heard of reversing cognitive decline. And he wrote about his pilot project.
He had an aging institute out at UCLA, and he got 10 previously high IQ people who were in various early stages of dementia. And he put them on this protocol for sleep and diet, nutritional supplements. Took all sorts of blood tests to see you're low in this, you're low in that. Exercise. Stress management. They had coaches. They had lifestyle coaches. And he wrote, believe you me, they were not perfect. They did not go home and do exactly what I told them to do, but they did enough of it that the cognitive decline was halted and reversed. And some of these people had had to retire early because they just couldn't hack it. And they had degrees, they had responsible jobs that they just couldn't manage. And that was an amazing, amazing article. And I showed it to my husband, the scientist, and he said, bad science. Bad science. Because he said, you don't know what's doing what. There are too many co-factors.
But anyway, all these years later, Dale Bredesen has an institute and you can sign up for it online. You can take digitized cognitive tests once a month to see how you're doing. It's real. And I think exactly the same thing pertains to ADHD, that we need to establish some kind of a support system. Everybody knows that you should get good sleep and exercise and eat healthy, and people go yawn. Yeah, I read that in the ladies magazine, but we don't have any way to help people actually do it and [inaudible 00:31:29] are losing a decade.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, I think there's this other piece of it too. How do you reflect on ADHDers aging and the relationship to their ability and willingness to advocate for themselves and their needs? I only see the patterns of older adults who are saying, oh, I'm having a senior moment. I don't know if that's a senior moment. That sounds to me like an ADHD moment that I've been having for years. And I'm wondering how that feeling of, oh, I'm just exhausted leads to a decline in our ability to actually advocate for what we need.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And most people that are older now didn't know anything about ADHD, were not taught what they need, much less how to advocate for it. So they're starting from zero. I mean, I worked with a kiddo, somebody I became very fond of, started working with her when she was seven, and I just saw her and her mom intermittently. Does she need a tutor? Should she change schools, whatever? And so I worked with her from 7 to 17 intermittently and at age 17, she's applying to top schools.
Her mother has really spent a fortune that she could ill-afford getting her into schools that supported her. And she is querying the colleges that she's applying to. I want to make sure you have what I need before I decide. Boy, was she so steeped in self-advocacy. And she was doing it very politely, but I'm not going to apply unless I'm sure you can offer me what I need. And she ended up going to Wellesley.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
He was a good student, but older ...
Pete Wright:
There's our generational kind of shift.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
You got it.
Pete Wright:
Maybe we just don't know the answer to this question yet until we get some Gen X and millennials who are seriously in the middle of it.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'd like to circle back to what you were saying, Kathleen, around they know what to do. They know these things are important. We read about it all the time, but they don't necessarily always know or have the tools to do it or the support. How can we help people that are listening figure out how to do this for themselves?
We know sleep is important, and boy, I'd love to have you come back and talk about that because bringing that connection between sleep and dementia, that's ...
Pete Wright:
Huge.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's important for awareness.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
It's really important.
Nikki Kinzer:
So what would you say? What are some things that we can give listeners today that would help support them?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
We need to find an affordable way to provide support. I mean, most of us can't afford to have a healthy lifestyle codes. I mean, that is a privilege that maybe you can do for a few weeks to get you started, but then what? And so I'm a real believer in online support groups and a shout-out to ADDA, the Attention Deficit Disorder Association, which focuses on the needs of adults with ADHD. CHADD is more focused on kids with ADHD and they have all kinds of online support groups that I'm a real believer in.
I think that having the chance to interact regularly with other people that are struggling with exactly the same thing normalizes it, encourages you, we're here for each other. We were talking about that in a support group that I began just yesterday for the job loss group. And we were talking about that very thing, okay, you're going to talk to me in a group once a week, but that's not going to be enough to get you in a functional daily direction of finding a job. I need to find a job. So how can we support each other?
And one of the things that I'm a real fan of is finding a focus partner, and we connect people at our clinic all the time that you two and we'll introduce them and often they're in a group. Now you are able to connect online. And I have had people that connect on a daily basis to support each other. How I'm trying to make these changes and oh, I was so exhausted and I succumbed to the fast food last night [inaudible 00:36:19] on track.
But we need that encouragement and support and to not apologize that it's ongoing. I mean, people without ADHD, you know the statistics about weight loss. I mean the chances of sustained weight loss are minuscule because our society sadly is orchestrated to make us eat in an unhealthy way. I mean, do you know about the SAD diet? Have you heard about the SAD diet? SAD?
Pete Wright:
I think I live that diet.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
SAD stands for the Standard American Diet.
Pete Wright:
Yes, that's right.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And research started coming out more than 20 years ago from Australia that the SAD diet, they dubbed us, the SAD Diet in Australia, was associated with ADHD.
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And it's not ... I mean, everybody likes fast food and junk food and pizza and blah, blah. But I think there's something else going on when you are an adult with ADHD, and that is that your days are exhausting and stressful. And I'm supposed to go to the grocery, plan a meal, cook it, clean up after it. I mean, it just sounds like a mountain to climb every night. And so it doesn't happen.
I would say that for women with ADHD, because they tend to be the primary parents, they tend to be the primary grandparents, the primary caretakers on top of whatever else they're doing, the almost universal word they use to describe themselves is I am overwhelmed.
I've literally never had a man come in my office and say, I am overwhelmed. They might be frustrated or discouraged, but overwhelmed just because of all the converging demands that are still particularly on women.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, I agree.
Pete Wright:
As we're getting-
Nikki Kinzer:
He probably doesn't because Pete's like, "Well, I don't know, but..."
Pete Wright:
I don't know what you're talking about. No.
Excuse me while I-
Nikki Kinzer:
I see you with my clients too so, that's why, and I live it myself.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
I'll tell you a funny story about that that I just absolutely loved. There is a book called The Unmade Bed, and it was written by a guy. He and his wife lived in New York and he was a writer, journalist. She was in television and she got this big job offer in Toronto and they decided to take it. And so he had to leave his job and they had two kiddos and she took this big TV job and he was to stay home and be the primary parent. And he said, I'm happy to do it, but I'm not going to do it the way you would do it. And that's the title of his ... The Unmade Bed.
He said, I can't think of anything more ridiculous than making the bed. You're just going to get right back into it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right back into it.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And so ...
Nikki Kinzer:
Great.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
... he was not overwhelmed because he did not place on himself all of the ridiculous standards. And that gets back to Dear Pope Francis, don't worry so much about your messy house. I love that. Of all the advice he's giving, don't worry.
Nikki Kinzer:
Don't worry about it.
Pete Wright:
So good.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, this was great.
Pete Wright:
Just in terms of reflection, I think so much about the idea of purpose and what we live for. And I'd like to know how you see this idea of reinventing oneself in later life play out with people with ADHD. What does that look like? How does it differ from a neuronormative perspective when you get to a point where you're asking yourself, okay, now what do I live for? I've retired. I'm alone. How do I reinvent myself?
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And I think it's much, much harder for people with ADHD because of the well-known social challenges that so many of us face our entire lives. Neurotypical people, they'll belong to a church group or they play bridge, or they're in a book group, or they play golf on Wednesdays, or they are plugged into groups of people like themselves. And so many people with ADHD grow up. All they know is I'm not like them and they may not understand. There's a whole lot of people like you, you just haven't formed your own tribe.
Nikki Kinzer:
Found them yet.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
You haven't formed your own tribe. And at the beginning of COVID, my clinic started about 10 pro bono support groups for different demographics, for moms, for kids, for teens. And I facilitated one for older adults. And it evolved into a group of women because guys weren't comfortable sitting around talking with a bunch of women online about their daily lives. So they politely backed out of the group process. And do you know, it's five years later and that group still exists.
Pete Wright:
Outstanding.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
And it still exists because it was the first time those women, and they came from all over the country and heard about our group, had been in a group of women like themselves. And I facilitated the group only for a year. And then I said, I really hope you guys continue because you've got something special here. And they organized their own Zoom account and paid for it jointly. They're still meeting.
It's a small group. It's about six women at this point. And they said in the first year, this is the highlight of my week. I look forward to, I'm going to go online and I'm going to be with women that understand me and are not judging me. And very interestingly, every single one of those women had some amazing creative talent that they drag out of the closet, show and tell, look at what I made, look at what I did.
Pete Wright:
Unbelievable.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's great.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Yeah. So that's-
Nikki Kinzer:
The power of community.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
... the power of community, and I really think I'm more and more convinced that that is the most powerful way to help people is to help them in a group and problem solve in a group. And what I haven't discovered is how to bring men into that process. I think the group needs to be led by a man so that it feels like a guy thing, but I really think that I see people learning from one another, supporting each other, encouraging each other.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Beautiful.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Yeah, and it doesn't have to be a professional group. I mean, I'm a psychologist, but that group's still going and there's no psychologist in it.
Pete Wright:
Right. Yeah, we are-
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you so much.
Pete Wright:
They grow beyond.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's right.
Pete Wright:
Kathleen, that's wonderful. The book's Still Distracted After All These Years: Help and Support for Older Adults with ADHD. You won't have to read long to get the whole catalog of people writing about ADHD and aging. And thank you for your contribution to this space. May it just grow and thrive because we need it.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau:
Thank you so much for inviting me. I've really enjoyed it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
And thank you, everybody, for downloading and listening to this show. Thank you for your time and your attention.
Don't forget, if you have something to contribute to this conversation, we're heading over to the Show Talk channel in the Discord server. You can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast.
On behalf of Kathleen Nadeau and Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
