"Barren Wasteland"

I recently sat down for coffee with adult ADHD life coach, Pete Quily. I wanted to get a feel for the current landscape of support services, provincial policy and funding available for adults living with ADHD here in B.C. Quily, who spends most of his waking hours supporting adults with the condition as a certified life coach and blogging about new research and statistics, seemed like a logical place to start the conversation.
 
When asked to describe that landscape here in B.C., his response was practically involuntary: "Barren wasteland."

OK. Let's expand on that.

Quily cited the 2007 closure of the only clinic in Vancouver specifically dedicated to diagnosing adults with ADHD and the 14 month wait list the clinic had when the doors closed.

He spoke of the B.C. Medical Association's 2009 report titled "Your Attention, Please:" A Call to Improve Care for ADHD Patients in which the BCMA stated that the government needed to provide services specifically for adults.

And perhaps most poignantly, Quily shared anecdotes from his own experiences as an adult with ADHD. In his estimation, the stigma associated with the condition is partially to blame when it comes to the lack of conversation around the topic within provincial policy.

It's this void of conversation that I hope to begin to fill with my graduate research.

As a student at the University of British Columbia's graduate School of Journalism, I'm committed to creating an insightful, intimate and thoroughly researched piece of journalism focused on the stories behind the diagnosis of adult ADHD.

My research will include interviews with experts in the fields of psychology and psychiatry and an extensive review of existing medical findings and reports. I'll delve into the various schools of thought sprouting up around the staggering increase in diagnosis rates over the last twenty to thirty years and will review the policies set in place to respond to this increase. I'll meet with the people who support adults living with ADHD to gain a better understanding of what care is available, and I'll explore treatment options - both traditional and unconventional.

I can pursue all of the above and produce a perfectly comprehensive and accurate piece of text, supported by numbers and science and experts. But I hope to take my work further than that.

I want to offer a voice to adults living with ADHD - living with the stigma. I want to tell the stories of the people that love them and what adult ADHD means to a family, to a spouse and to a sibling. I'd like to share these stories through audio interviews and allow them to accompany the numbers and the science and the experts. I want to present adult ADHD as a human condition.

I've explained my own personal understanding of adult ADHD in a previous blog post. I've explained that I have no agenda other than to push the public conversation around adult ADHD forward. And now I'm explaining that I need your help.

I need people that are willing to come forward about their experiences with adult ADHD and in doing so, contribute to that public conversation. The impact of a project like this hinges on the stories I am able to tell and perhaps, so too does the deconstruction of the stigma associated with adult ADHD.