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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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Keep it up with these posts, if I share enough of them with my clearly very painfully obviously super adhd girlfriend I might eventually convince her to go see a therapist and seek a diagnosis someday
Call her doctor, make an appointment, save it in her calendar, remind her in the lead up, drive her there, get the referral. Walk her to the post box to send it off, sit next to her to phone the intake office to confirm they got the referral, set appointments on her phone for every 6 months to sit with her and call to check the cancellation list until you get an appointment. Drive her to that appointment.
If she has ADHD, the steps involved in getting a diagnosis are bigger than Mt Everest, she will need a neurotypical Sherpa.
Oh I fully plan to, I'm not super neurotypical myself but I manage fine. There's extenuating circumstances involving family insurance that means she probably can't do it for another year or so but once that's over I'm gonna drag her to all of that stuff.
Agh, they usually say "The patient needs to be the one to make the appointment." >:(
But, yeah OP, if you are right there with her every step of the way, she can do it, and I bet that would be very helpful, like bowling with guard rails! She can feel the empowerment of doing the work, but you're there to bump away the possibility of falling off into failure. :)
I should have been more specific. Find a time when she's not doing anything urgent, tell her it's time to call the doctor, pick up her phone and dial the doctor, put them on speaker and put the phone down next to you while you body double your partner as they gone through the motions of locking in the appointment.
While on the phone your partner can also give third party authorisation. It's the first thing I do when I meet a new provider, I give third party authorisation to my partner and mother so they can make appointments on my behalf (they can't get results for me, but they can schedule things for me)
I hope she does. I don't think I'm ADHD but my partner was just diagnosed a few months ago. Now that we think about it it's not a surprise at all lol
It feels really nice to have more understanding and more context for both of us.
I think it will help too. She resists by saying "well what will it really change?" but it can and will change quite a lot if she understands how her brain works and can build some support structures to help with it. She really doesn't want to be medicated either which I totally get.
Totally agree, and get that. I wouldn't want medication necessarily either. You don't have to medicate at all! In fact maybe just knowing and working with it would be a good first test.
My ADHD doctor told me:
"Medication tends to be Plan Z. We do everything we can with working with your lifestyle, your habits, your thought patterns, and then consider the lowest effective dose if we need to." I liked that approach. I didn't want medication either.
Understanding how you work differently than others expect is extremely powerful.
However, eventually after MUCH STRUGGLE... I'm taking a puny 5mg generic Adderall daily...and it makes the monkey-radio stop switching channels in my brain for a minute.
A lot of people describe it like getting glasses when they didn't think they needed them. "Wait... you're supposed to be able to see all those leaves from this far?!?! WOW!"
I guess just make sure you're seeing a psychologist first, because psychiatrists are basically all ' bout 'dem pills lol.