My ADHD diagnosis lifted years of shame. Now I see it as my superpower
Sam Thompson hopes sharing his experience of ADHD will help children better understand their own minds - Jeff Gilbert
I get into hot water for calling ADHD my “superpower”, and I do understand why. For plenty of people, it’s a drain rather than a gift. It can be brutally hard – I should know, I’ve lived through some of the worst of it. But I also strongly believe there is beauty in an ADHD brain, and I refuse to apologise for saying so. My aim is to give children hope. They will have many people throughout their lives telling them how hard it is to have ADHD, and they will know that already, so where possible I want to share a positive message.
I think I was part of the last generation of children who were simply written off as “naughty”. Every single report card I received between the ages of eight and 18 said almost exactly the same thing: “Nice enough kid but easily distracted”; “needs to concentrate more”; “has potential but is really disruptive and doesn’t listen”.
Sam Thompson’s school reports all followed a similar theme
When I went for a diagnosis, the psychiatrist assessing me shuffled my report cards like a deck of cards and asked me to pull one out at random. I read it. She told me to pick another. The wording was almost identical, except one was from when I was 12 and the other from when I was 17. She looked at me and said: “How you weren’t diagnosed with ADHD when every report card you ever received said the same thing for a decade, I will never understand.”
I wasn’t a bad kid, and I desperately wanted to do well, but I simply didn’t understand how other people could look at a page and absorb the information. For me, the words would just ricochet off. My dad would ask, with real bewilderment, why I couldn’t just try harder. My headmaster wrote in one of those reports that unless there was a sea change in my attitude, I’d never amount to anything. That is a wild sentence to read about yourself as a child. It stays with you.
By my late 20s, I was struggling to pay bills. A parking ticket, or some other relatively simple piece of admin, would balloon into something monstrous because I couldn’t sit down and deal with it. I felt a kind of physical resistance whenever I tried to concentrate on certain tasks, no matter how crucial they were. The difficulty of needing help to do basic things is hard to describe.
Then I started thinking about how this would affect my future, wondering what would happen if I became a parent. How was a child meant to look up to me if I couldn’t manage a bill or even the most basic tasks?
Throughout my life, I’d been told by various people that I had ADHD, but I never thought much of it. When I finally decided to get a diagnosis, it was the voice of former Conservative MP Louise Mensch I had in my head. Years earlier, she and I had done a TV show together – SAS: Who Dares Wins – and she’d said to me: “I think you’ve got ADHD, and the reason I’m telling you is because I’ve got it, I’m on medication, and it has absolutely changed my life.” The more I struggled to do adult things, the more I thought about those words: “It absolutely changed my life.”
Thompson says a conversation with former Conservative MP Louise Mensch helped set him on the path to diagnosis - Andrew Crowley
In the end, I came to my ADHD diagnosis in a rather non-typical way, via a documentary I was making for Channel 4. It was a special journey, and an emotional one. I cried a lot when I received my diagnosis. I felt a weight lift that I didn’t even know I was carrying.
Luckily, my family and friends have been really supportive of my journey to diagnosis. My mum always said I was perfect just as I am, and that my differences were, in her words, part of my “adorable charm”. Ultimately, though, my family have seen how much the diagnosis has helped me, and how much sense it all makes looking back.
The reality is that, in my generation and my parents’ generation, schools didn’t have the understanding and knowledge we have now. While resources remain stretched, I am very glad to be part of a generation in which awareness is increasing.
Sam Thompson has written a book to help children understand their ADHD
I think what’s often lacking in debates around ADHD – and neurodivergence more broadly – is empathy for the fact that we’re all coming at it from our own experience. I feel the same when people talk about a “crisis of overdiagnosis”. Personally, I think we’re only now realising how different people are. When I hear someone argue that diagnoses are being handed out too freely, I just think, “Why do you care so much about someone else’s diagnosis? If it helps them, why does it bother you?” It’s not about demanding special treatment. It’s about people understanding their own brains.
But I also understand that not everyone grew up in a world where these conversations about neurodivergence and what it means were possible. We are all learning in real time, so empathy is hugely important.
For me, getting a diagnosis has lifted a lot of the old shame and worry I’ve carried around since I was a child. It has allowed me to develop tools to manage my brain – and to harness its potential. I’ve recently written a book for children, You, Me and ADHD. The whole idea is that a child can read it and feel proud of who they are. They can understand why and how ADHD can be a superpower rather than a problem to be smoothed over.
It’s the kind of message that would have meant the world to the boy whose headmaster said he’d never amount to anything.
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