How does psychotherapy work with a diagnosis of ADHD? Well, there’s an important difference that needs to be acknowledged, between what a diagnosis means medically and what it means in mental health.
In medicine, a diagnosis typically indicates the cause or origin of a condition has been identified. However, in mental health, a diagnosis primarily signifies that a conventional term is being used to describe aspects of your experience. A set of characteristics about how you behave and feel that fits with the criteria of what has come to be labelled ADHD. It doesn’t mean that the diagnosis has identified an actual “thing,” or problem, or less still a cure.
ADHD is really just a description of an aspect of who you are as a human being. The word “diagnosis” can sound like it’s found a cause, but unfortunately, that’s not true.
So when it comes to therapy for ADHD (or OCD, BPD… etc.), you have to realize that the therapist isn’t going to say “I know how to fix that.” Really, that diagnosis is just a shorthand for a set of ways of being. Even, it will be quite particular to you; it won’t be a universal set shared by everyone else with that diagnosis. It will be a very personal set of characteristics about how you experience life and how you get through the day.
So it’s not fundamentally different from you showing up and saying anything else about yourself. I’m high energy, or I’m often down, or I feel lonely – these are descriptions of some part of your experience. And what we do in therapy is look at why you’re like that, and that “why” might have many different impacts, including some things that sound and are identifiable as ADHD symptoms.
The diagnosis doesn’t tell us the cure. It’s just part of a bigger portrait of you, and that’s how we use it.
Image credit: Hiki App
