The rise of ADHD has been everywhere the past few years, as more and more women reckon with the reality of being diagnosed with ADHD in your 30s and 40s. In the new TVNZ documentary, ADHD: Not Just Hyper, comedian Maria Williams joins her brother Guy Williams as they look into the reality of living with ADHD and the different ways it can affect your life. She talks to Capsule about going undiagnosed for so long, the gendered reaction to ADHD and how being told you’re ‘a bit much’ can chip away at your confidence over time.
“I think growing up, I always felt like something was wrong,” says Maria Williams, comedian and one of the faces of the new TVNZ Documentary, ADHD: Not Just Hyper. “I don’t like the term ‘wrong,’ but that’s how I felt when I was a kid. I was a vivacious, enthusiastic kid who was also very, very anxious.”
The rise of ADHD has been inescapable the past few years. It’s on social media, it’s in the news. And it’s becoming particularly relevant for women who, like Maria, always felt they were a little bit ‘other’ but didn’t fit the hyperactive stereotype that we associate with ADHD – which tends to be a young boy.
Maria’s journey to an ADHD diagnosis is no doubt highly relatable to many readers out there. In her twenties, there were diagnoses of anxiety and depression but none of those felt to Maria like they were hitting the nail on the head.
There was just an ever-present awareness, she says, that she “struggled at life” but with no concrete reason to back it up. “I’ve had no huge trauma; nothing really has gone wrong ever. I didn’t grow up in poverty and I’ve had no huge barriers in my life. And yet, I just felt like everything was difficult.”
During the pandemic, she shifted to Auckland and it was her first experience with traffic delays. That was when that ever-present hum of ‘something’s wrong’ got stronger, when she started having meltdowns due to the traffic queues.
Maria started googling “ADHD in women” and found that not only did she have all the symptoms, but she was experiencing them in quite an extreme way. An eventual diagnosis was something of “a double-edged sword,” she says. As well as relief, she says, “it’s hard not to feel anger or sadness at how much easier your life could have been, if you’d known.”
Even once her school days were over and Maria was retraining as a teacher and then working in schools, it still wasn’t identified in her. “I got to my 30s without knowing much about ADHD, and the fact that I was a teacher, and through both my training and then teaching experience, I still didn’t learn anything about ADHD at any point.”
The gender aspect of ADHD has been part of this new wave of understanding, as we learn that while ADHD can be quite clear to diagnosis in young boys, girls can slip under the radar for a lot longer. But in the documentary ADHD: Not Just Hyper, we see a very clear gender split when Maria is joined by her brother, well-known comedian Guy Williams, as he investigates whether or not he has ADHD as well.
“I was a performer kid, and our other brother was a performer, and Guy never was – and then he was suddenly on TV,” she says. “I always accused him of having stolen my personality for his on-screen persona, but now we’ve come to realise we’re two sides of the same coin,” she laughs.
The siblings have an enviably close relationships and share a very similar sense of humour, making their bond one of the highlights of the documentary. But it also highlights how ADHD is treated in young people – everything that made Maria seen as ‘difficult,’ was something that only increased Guy’s appeal.
“I’d always been discouraged – I was the girl who was too loud, too bossy. My leadership skills were liked to an extent, until someone found it bossy. I saw Guy being loud and bossy, with the same personality that I had had to suppress a lot, and people applauding him for it. And I think that I held a lot of jealousy about that.”
The constant labelling of ‘being too much’ started to chip away not only at Maria’s self-confidence, but also her sense of self overall. “It feels like a real demonstration of the gendered situation – because he’s kind of ridden his ADHD to glory, in a way,” she laughs. “Whereas I feel like I’ve been trying to work life out, struggling a bit.”
A battle with long covid that turned into chronic fatigue means that Maria is still working through the tools that help with her ADHD at this stage, but she is hopeful that the documentary – and the wider discussion – will help people feel less alone in their experiences of the world. “One thing I’ve reflected on is that I have known – or known of – people who have died from mental health conditions, and I have wondered how many of them could have been ADHD.”
If you feel like a having ADHD is something that might be relevant to you, Maria suggests reading up on it – particularly on how it affects women. “Obviously there’s a scale of ADHD – from ‘oh, I find paperwork a bit hard’ through to ‘I cannot get through life’ at the other end. That’s the thing that feels both deeply personal and really urgent.”
ADHD: Not Just Hyper is available from 7.30pm on Monday 16 December
For more information on ADHD – whether for yourself or for a family member – visit here
