If you follow ADHD news, you might’ve heard that diagnosis rates in women nearly doubled during the pandemic. Danielle Elliot was one of them, receiving her diagnosis just before she turned 37. Danielle is also a science and health journalist. So, she did the thing that many reporters are inclined to do — she began investigating this big, new thing in her life and how it fit into the world around her. As she dug in deeper, she landed on two big questions relating to the pandemic diagnosis boom: Why women? And why now? Her answers culminated in a new podcast from Understood.org called “Climbing the Walls.” It’s a six-episode series and the first installment is out now. This week on “Hyperfocus,” Danielle visits the show to talk about her ADHD experience and what it’s like reporting a story where you’re one of the characters.
Join health and science journalist Danielle Elliot as she investigates the rise of women recently diagnosed with ADHD. Listen to Climbing the Walls now.
If you follow ADHD news, you might’ve heard that diagnosis rates in women nearly doubled during the pandemic. Danielle Elliot was one of them, receiving her diagnosis just before she turned 37.
Danielle is also a science and health journalist. So, she did the thing that many reporters are inclined to do — she began investigating this big, new thing in her life and how it fit into the world around her.
As she dug in deeper, she landed on two big questions relating to the pandemic diagnosis boom: Why women? And why now? Her answers culminated in a new podcast from Understood.org called Climbing the Walls. It’s a six-episode series, and the first installment is out now.
This week on Hyperfocus, Danielle visits the show to talk about her ADHD experience and what it’s like reporting a story where you’re one of the characters.
Related resources
Timestamps
(1:25) The origins of Danielle’s story
(7:50) Surprises during the reporting process
(12:05) What it felt like to get a diagnosis
(22:14) Danielle’s big takeaways from making the show
For a transcript and more resources, visit the Hyperfocus page on Understood.
We’d love to hear from you. Email us at hyperfocus@understood.org.
Rae: During the pandemic, ADHD diagnosis rates in women nearly doubled. For people like me who followed this kind of thing, it was a huge deal and one where we couldn't really pinpoint why it was happening. There were a bunch of different reasons, but none seemed all-encompassing. There was a fair amount of news coverage at the time, but most of it was pretty surface-level. Someone needed to go deep, and eventually someone very cool raised their hand for the challenge.
Danielle Elliot is a health and science journalist based in New York. And since last year, she's been working with some of my colleagues at Understood.org on a new investigative podcast that digs into the reasons behind this rise in ADHD diagnosis and uncovers what going undiagnosed for so long has cost women. It's called "Climbing the Walls" and it's a limited series told across six episodes. The first is out now.
Now that Danielle has done all this reporting and immersed herself in the ADHD world, I wanted to talk to her about what led her to make the series and what it was like to be living the story you're trying to tell. This week on "Hyperfocus," Danielle Elliott shares her journey from a big question to a new podcast.
Danielle: I had started working on a book proposal about ADHD, but it was interesting because the response from a lot of editors was "We've already had so many proposals about ADHD in women, but the process of publishing a book takes a year to two years, so it's gonna be behind the news cycle."
Rae: Yeah, I feel like this is like a... Tell me if you agree with this. This to me is like the ADHD thing in life, both in like your personal life and also as like, as a sort of like the disorder itself. It's like, it's never the right moment. Like you're always a little behind or a little ahead in everything all the time.
Danielle: And everything always. Like it was almost like when I got diagnosed, I was like, "Oh, that's, like, that makes sense.
Rae: Oh, I see.
Danielle: I think I feel like three years behind still in a lot of things.
Rae: Oh gosh, and like, I mean, in both little and very big ways.
Danielle: In little and very, very big ways, yeah.
Rae: Yeah, it's kind of like the story of your life if you have ADHD. But I'm interested in that in part because like, when you hear about like ADHD as a cultural moment, right? Like, it is for sure happening. And I've like kind of watched this come and go over the years, like in different ways. Like women with ADHD feels like the "now" thing to me. But you know, ADHD people talking about it, people freaking out about it, people, you know denouncing it or wanting to do more for it or whatever it is. Like it's a pretty easy thing to like slot into the discourse. You know what I mean?
Danielle: Yeah.
Rae: As somebody who has it, I'd be interested to hear how you feel about this. Like, it's not a moment for us. It's our whole lives. It's like, OK, maybe people either like didn't care before and then cared a lot and then they stop caring, or whatever it is. But like you're like still there being yourself. So, what's that been like? Like studying it from this sort of like cultural moment perspective, but also living with it.
Danielle: Well, it's been interesting because I think that what seemed different to me about the moment with women was like, when I first started hearing ADHD was on the rise, it was like yeah, we go through this every five years.
Rae: Yeah.
Danielle: Like I grew up in the nineties and early two thousands, right? Like I have seen the new cycle cover ADHD, but this one just felt different because of the sheer amount. Like it just seemed like truly every woman in my age range was saying it. And so, I wanted to understand if there was something different happening now, if there are other elements of our culture that were contributing to this or is it exclusively ADHD.
And I think reporting on it was a really interesting process because there were moments where I started to doubt the rates of diagnosis. And then there were moments where I thought, "Oh, we haven't even slightly begun to diagnose the true number of people who have this." And then, you know, others where you're like, "Oh, if we continue to live the way we live in 2024, 2025, like 100 of the population will have ADHD 100 years from now." Which is not a scientifically-backed statement at all. That is completely just me saying things, but.
Rae: Well, this is something that I'm interested in that, like, comes up a lot, right? Which is, and you and I have talked about this through, like learning about the show, which is not everyone has ADHD. And a lot of people who get diagnosed with ADHD don't have ADHD.
Danielle: Yeah.
Rae: It's a diagnosis that is, like kind of given, like sometimes too cavalierly. Like you said, like a lot people who got diagnosed actually are experiencing something else, and a lot the, like perfect nightmare conditions of our current way of living, make that feel really real. Like, you know, we're overscheduled, we are overstressed, there's a billion screens. Like I go on the subway and there's screens like in my car, flickering on and off.
Danielle: Your brain is never at a state of rest. Like our brains are just never in a state of rest anymore, except maybe when you're actually sleeping, and a lot of people are not sleeping enough.
Rae: Yeah, and if you have ADHD, you sleep even less.
Danielle: Yeah.
Rae: But that thing, the idea that like the conditions of life are not suited to the way that the human brain works, which is definitely true, to me, the interesting piece of that is, that still doesn't mean that everybody who's experiencing that has ADHD.
Danielle: No. Well, they are, like one of the experts I speak to in the podcast talks about what he calls environmentally induced ADHD. And I think as the environmentally, as the environment people live in becomes less and less conducive with brain function, a lot of people are exhibiting symptoms that look very similar to ADHD. Like their brains are functioning in a way that an ADHD brain functions. For many of them, if the environment can be shifted and changed, their brain will go back to functioning in a typical way, whereas the neurotypical brain is functioning how it functions.
Rae: Yeah, I think that to me is the thing that people miss now. It's like, yeah, once the conditions change, like everybody gets distracted, everybody gets overwhelmed, everybody loses things, right? But for us, you could take away all of that and we would still have ADHD. Like it's not a response.
Danielle: But it sort of becomes, right, it's not a response. But it's like the question that kept coming up for me in the reporting was sort of like, it's was pretty tough to escape the environment that produces the symptoms of ADHD now.
Rae: It's interesting to me that all that stuff gets kind of attributed or like lumped in with being ADHD when in reality it's something with a very different name. But it is something that like since it bears resemblance to this real disorder, it kind of like becomes like a, melange is not the word, but you know. There is a word for it, but it can feel like discounting for the, like if you have the disorder in a way, you know?
Danielle: Yeah, I think it really can, and I think it's sort of like a, I've wondered if the relatability of ADHD descriptions now has made some people start to think, well, if everyone has it, I don't really need to be treated for it. You know, so like, it like makes me question overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis.
Rae: I mean, this might be my own like kind of irritation in it, but like, I feel like it's less like, should I be treated for it, and more like, well, I should just be better, right? Like everybody struggles with this.
Danielle: Oh, a 1,000 percent.
Rae: I should just do a better job. Like I should try harder. I should just be better.
Danielle: And I'm guilty of that myself.
Rae: You talk to a lot of people for this show and people coming from different backgrounds and researchers and people who have lived experience and your own experience, like what were some of the things that kind of, I don't know, surprised you is the right word, but like, what were you like, "Wow, that's something I wasn't really expecting."
Danielle: I think the most surprising conversation I had was with someone who studies the evolutionary benefits and he said that, um, where we're getting things wrong, this is his opinion, right? So this is one researcher's opinion, but he said when we talk about these evolutionary benefits, we tend to look for the ways they're beneficial to individuals. And the thing that people are missing about ADHD is that it's beneficial on a communal level, and that might not be great for the individual.
Like it's so, and when he first said it to me, I was like, "Are you telling me my brain took one for the team?" And he's like, "Yeah, kind of." Because the entire group that, like he said humans evolved in groups. Groups need risk takers. They need people who are willing to do things differently just like regardless of the consequences, who are just motivated to do that for whatever reason. And that's the only way cultures advance.
So, it was just really interesting to me to hear him say like the whole group learns when someone does something risky, and they either learn you shouldn't do that or you should do that. And it's like, whether you're talking about like, I mean, when we're talking about hunter gatherer times, thousands of tens of thousands of years ago, you're taking about like "Somebody ate that berry and that's how we know we can eat strawberries." Like somebody did this, but it's probably a person with ADHD who did that.
And then in plenty of those cases, they probably ate a poisonous berry that didn't like, their risk-taking didn't personally benefit them, but it benefited the rest of the group because then the group knew "Don't eat that berry. You could die." It's like such a simplistic, it's like my favorite conversation that I had in the whole thing.
Rae: The community canaries.
Danielle: Yeah, kind of like we're just like...
Rae: Like, I'll go down this hole to see if there's gas down here just because I want to see. I'm just, it looks interesting.
Danielle: Just cause I wanna see. I'm curious, there's a hole? Let me see what's down it. Like somebody's brain had to work that way to learn things.
Rae: I kind of love that.
Danielle: Oh, I love it.
Rae: But it's true. It doesn't really benefit you as an individual at all.
Danielle: Yeah. So, he's like, now that it's been like, like rebranded as a superpower, he's like, "It's missing the point." He's, like, "Communities need people with ADHD." At least they used to, he was like, "I'm not saying there's benefits now. I don't know that it confers benefits now."
Rae: I mean, this is a genuine question I have for you, but like, you know, you write and you're a creative person and you often hear ADHD being called, like, very conducive to creativity, right? Like that's one of the things about it. And I think in a lot of ways that can be true, like that risk taking, that interest, that like, well, let's see what happens if I do this. But also, I don't think that necessarily ends it up being a super, I just like...
Danielle: I mean, I can see ways that, um, ADHD has really benefited me personally, but only because I was able to, I was privileged enough to not be like, I didn't have a ton of student debt coming out of college. I didn't have financial reasons why taking risks was potentially going to really...I had a safety net, is ultimately what I'm trying to say.
And, so I was able to quit my first three jobs within six months of taking them. It's not a good move. That's really not a good thing, but I'm kind of like, my ADHD is the only reason I was able to keep pursuing different things until I found a way that works that I really like. Like right now, I don't think that my career would exist as it does without ADHD, but there was a lot of like depression and worrying and fear that I would never have another job in the midst of the last 20 years.
It's easy to look back and be like, now, yeah, my career seems to be working out. Also, it's working out right now because I have projects I'm working on. Six months from now, you might, like I might say, "I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever work again."
Rae: Getting diagnosed with ADHD can bring up a lot of different emotions. And what I gathered when I met Danielle for the first time quite a while ago was that that was the case for her too. She didn't want to have ADHD at all. Part of my job now is talking about my own diagnosis, which for me, was a huge relief when it came. I cried in the doctor's office, not because I was sad, but because I finally had a name for the thing that had dogged me for so long.
But it's not the same for everyone. And when Danielle got her diagnosis in her thirties, she was almost immediately diving headlong into reporting about it. But now having listened to the podcast, I know Danielle shares a lot of her own story, and I wanted to know how she got from bucking a diagnosis to deeply researching it to becoming this sort of public voice on behalf of women with ADHD.
When I met you at first, you were just sort of like figuring out your diagnosis. You'd mentioned almost that you weren't sure if you really wanted it in some ways, that it was like you'd gotten it and then you weren't sure kind of what to do with it once it was in your hands. Like, was there a personal motivation for jumping into this that was, you know, not so motivating that it was the only motivation, but something that was like important to you? Like, I want to know more.
Danielle: I think like right immediately following the diagnosis, I did dig in pretty deep, but I didn't like the stuff that I found. Like, like almost like I found a lot of the negative descriptions and like the negative outcomes. And like, it sort of started to feel like, "Oh, ADHD does explain a lot of the ways in which I have not lived up to what I would have liked to have done."
And it's really, really frustrating to think that I went to therapy for years, that I tried every approach to dating, like I'd, I'm like, when I think of all the things I tried, without knowing that there was this fairly simple answer that is treatable, I was just, I almost so mad that I wanted to reject it and believe that actually no, like I just had to keep trying harder.
So, there was a rejection period, I would say, of the diagnosis. And I should say that you can probably see the roots of it in conversations with my mom. Like when I, tell her anything about it, she's like, "There's nothing wrong with you. Like you're not broken." Like she's very much like, "No, I don't believe...like you did well in school." Like she says a lot of the almost cliche things at this point that are said about girls, but it's more so her coming from this point of like, "I don't want you to think you're broken. Because if you think you've broken, you might think you can't overcome things."
So, I hear in that initial reaction, I can kind of see like, you know, the environment I grew up in, right? Like how neurodivergence was talked about, or just the stigma that was around it, and not wanting a stigma to be associated with us.
Rae: It's hard to have a narration of what it means to be neurodivergent from someone who's seeing it only from the negative, and then to read the stuff that is, like, sensibly negative, you know? That is a serious thing.
Danielle: Well, it was when I read "ADHD 2.0," Ned Hollowell and John Ratey's most recent book, where they talk about, they don't say everything's a superpower, but they talk bout pairs of opposites and kind of like, I think a good example, one that really helped me was that creative people, you can understand that they ruminate a lot and that rumination is potentially described as creativity applied to the past. And I ruminate kind of horrendously. And I think since reading that, I've been able to recognize when I'm doing it.
And like, they give you some tools in that book for essentially changing the channel in your brain so that you're not ruminating anymore. And like some of the tools are so simple, but as I was reading that book, it was like, oh, I can do things about this. And like I don't have to spend money every week to see an ADHD coach, which I think ADHD coaches are incredibly beneficial for a lot of people. But for me, it's like financial insecurity will always be the thing that stresses me out more than thinking I'm living with untreated ADHD.
Rae: Yeah, I think that's the way for a lot of people.
Danielle: So, anyway, I think it was just like the acceptance kind of came when I saw other framings of ADHD traits.
Rae: So, it's initially hard to just see the kind of downsides that it sounds like you saw yourself in.
Danielle: Yeah. I mean, my takeaway from my initial stuff was like, "Oh, my relationships haven't worked out because they don't work out for people with ADHD" and like things that I've wanted to fix about myself, quote unquote. Like you can read every book you want on relationship theory. I'm not going to. Like, I kind of had this, like my read on it was like, I think the three things I remember the most were like, "ADHD is really hard on careers, relationships, and parenting." And I was like, I can completely see the ways it negatively impacted my career.
As much as I love where I am now, it would have been interesting, I think, to have a brain that likes a straight path. Like, I just don't know what that's like. And like to not, I have never stayed happy in anything, whether it's a relationship, like, I don't know how to sustain interest in anything beyond when I really do the math, it's like for four months, I'm really interested, I can last a year. anything beyond a year, the second year, I'm miserable. And it's a really sad way to like do that math.
And I don't think that's true of everyone with ADHD, but when I first got that diagnosis, it was like, oh yeah, no, I can see how it affected my career. It's tough to change anything now. It's like, you're almost 40. You're not gonna restart your career. I can say how it affected relationships. I was diagnosed right before my 37th birthday. So, I was sort of like, it's pretty late. Like, it would have been nice to know this at 30, is how I felt.
Because it's like, if there are ways to approach dating with ADHD that are slightly, or just things to be aware of, it wouldn't have been nice to them when you're in like the heart of your dating like period, I guess you could say.
Rae: Yeah.
Danielle: And then with parenting, it was still a thing that I wanted to do. And it was like, "Oh great. Now you're telling me that's going to be really hard too," like I just don't want to hear any of it.
Rae: It's hard to hear it too, especially to be like "Oh if I had known this, maybe there is something that I could have done."
Danielle: Could have done, yeah.
Rae: Yeah, which is why that late diagnosis piece for women is so insidious.
In the show, you talk to a lot of other women with ADHD. Like you talk to Sari and Emily and Terry, like all of these people who specialize in it, but just women at the camp, for example, who have it — In one of the episodes on the show, Danielle goes to a camp for women with ADHD. And that experience of being like among your people, like people who just get it, that thing where you like, "You don't have to apologize all the time or explain why you want to do it tomorrow or why you're like moving your leg or whatever it is that like, you know."
Danielle: Or taking your shoes off in the middle of a room or whatever.
Rae: Whatever. Whatever your neurodiversion thing that you do, that masking thing can just drop. Like, what did it feel like doing that from like a reporter's sense, like sitting down with people and being like, "We are from the same place."
Danielle: I felt sort of invasive, to be honest, at first, because I was like, everyone is here, because it's a camp for families, and it's really designed, it's like the kids have ADHD and the parents are there to learn about ADHD, but it turns out that in the last few years, all of the parents who are coming to the camp for the first time have recently found out that they have ADHD also.
And for a lot of them, I think it was just really, I don't think they would describe their typical lives, like day-to-day lives as unsafe, But I think that all like I kept hearing over and over from women, "I've never felt so safe and so free to be myself as I do knowing that I'm in a room full of people who understand what's going on." And it's funny, Sari actually describes the same thing from a conference in the 90s, that it was the first time she was in a room full of adults who all knew that the others had ADHD. And so, they could fully be themselves. They didn't have to try to pretend to be quote-unquote normal.
And for me, at the camp, there were like, the first two days, my interviews with women were sort of hesitant because I didn't want to be interrupting this experience that they were having. But then, as we talked more and more, and they started to realize I also had it, it just became this like, it was like I was one of them, but also not. But it just, the camp was really amazing. And I think most of the credit for that is just the, it's just a product of being in the same room as other people, like being surrounded by people who you know get.
Rae: Part of what I'm wondering is like, when you see all these people with this comfortable shorthand and you got the chance as a woman with ADHD to be in a room full of people who were open about their ADHD and talking, and of course you were in like the reporter's role, but like in those conversations with the people you spoke to for the show, did you ever have that moment of like..ahhh?
Danielle: I'd say most of the women I spoke to at camp, but especially there's one woman who I speak to who'd only been diagnosed a couple of weeks before she came to camp.
Rae: Oh, wow.
Danielle: And she was meant to be at camp with her husband and two children to learn ways. She spoke very eloquently, and she said that they wanted to learn how to have more harmony in their home with two children with ADHD. And then a couple of weeks before camp, she was diagnosed. And I related to truly every word that came out of her mouth. It was just like, "Oh."
And she was talking about how she felt like she was already a better mother because she could now look at her kids and be like, she's like, I've always looked at my kids and thought, "Oh no, you do things the way I do them. Like, I don't know what to do." But she never, it was only once she was diagnosed that she's, like, "Oh, that's why I see that in my kids."
Like, there's like an understanding, but I related to almost everything she said. And also, just like her anger at the expectations that are placed on women in the world. We talked a lot about that because she was only just starting to piece it all together.
Rae: I've spent a lot of my life working in media and reporting on mental health. And being in that space, I learned that it is a super rare opportunity to get to do what Danielle did, to spend months going deep on a topic as niche as women diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic. So, before I let her go, I needed to ask a couple of big questions.
Did you learn anything about your own ADHD or like about being a person with ADHD that you didn't know before you started the show?
Danielle: That's such a great question. Um...maybe that I haven't tamed some of the ADHD pieces that I like to think I have. Like I think, I don't know if that's true in the context of reporting this show. That's a good question. Is there anything I learned? I think it's just that over the last year, I've realized that ADHD continues to have more of a role in my life than I realize.
Yeah, I think I also learned that this wasn't necessarily a learning from the course of reporting, but it happened in the course of reporting. It was just like, some of the bigger things. Like I might never actually, and I think this is an ADHD thing, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think decisiveness is really not one of our, like it's not a thing that we're good at. And I don't think we're particularly decisive people. And I started to realize that I just have to make, you just have make a decision and go with it. You can't always consider all options. And like, you can't keep all doors open. So, you ultimately have to just pick one.
And I just think that's just something that in the course of speaking to all the experts and everyone, it's like, yes, you can let life like keep unraveling, not in the sense of going poorly, but I just mean like, let it go in whatever direction it's going to go in, or you can direct it.
And I think I've gotten better at trying to actually direct it and like make intentional decisions. Not just like assuming things will fall into place cause they rarely do for anyone, but they especially don't with ADHD. And like as much as we can make the most of what doesn't fall into place. I do still think that there are certain things that you're like, "No, I want this to happen. So, I'm gonna have to make it happen."
Rae: I feel like that's the thing about understanding ADHD. It's why it's worth knowing the stuff that we know about our brains, because then you can actually apply it. Like it has a function. My final question is just like, what do you hope that people take away from this? Like, this is a really cool thing that you've put an enormous amount of work into. If somebody comes to the podcast and they haven't heard "Climbing the Walls," they're just coming in cold, like, what do you hope people take away?
Danielle: I hope it minimizes their doubt about the diagnosis of women in their lives, and I hope it helps them understand that we don't fully understand ADHD yet. And that the next time diagnosis rates rise, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's just because people want to get their hands on medications, that there's a very real chance that it's because there's an increased understanding of this disorder.
Rae: Yeah.
Danielle: I guess that's really, cause I think, yeah, ultimately I wanted to understand and I hope that on the most basic level, I hope after listening to this podcast, they understand why so many women are being diagnosed and that it's not as simple as any of the individual answers that a lot of people often give.
Rae: Yeah.
Danielle: It's not as simple as we didn't understand how it affected girls and women. It's not a simple as TikTok told a lot of people they have ADHD, and they believed it. There's a lot of layers to why, and I think I often see it simplified into one or two sentences that don't even slightly capture the full picture.
Rae: I love that. Danielle, thank you so much. This was awesome.
Danielle: Yeah, this was fun.
Rae: The first episode of "Climbing the Walls" is out now. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/understoodO-R-G.
"Hyperfocus" is made by me, Rae Jacobson, and Cody Nelson. Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions, and Justin D. Wright mixes the show. Samiah Adams is our supervising producer, Briana Berry is our production director, and Neil Drumming is our editorial director.
If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org. This show is brought to you by Understood. org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick.
Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give.