ADHD in Midlife? Why So Many Women Are Finally Getting Answers - A Conversation with Dr Helen Wall

Two Women Chatting
2 days ago
26 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

If you’ve ever wondered why ADHD is suddenly being talked about so much among women in their 40s and 50s, you’re not alone - and this powerful episode of Two Women Chatting goes right to the heart of it.

In this special conversation, GP and women’s health expert Dr Helen Wall joins Michelle to unpack ADHD in midlife, why symptoms often magnify during perimenopause and menopause, and why so many women are being diagnosed only now - or beginning to suspect ADHD for the first time.

We explore the overlap between hormone fluctuations, executive function struggles, and the daily pressures of being in the sandwich generation, plus how years of masking have hidden ADHD traits in plain sight. Dr Helen breaks down what ADHD really looks like in women, why it’s often misunderstood, and how understanding your brain can be genuinely life-changing.

This blog includes the full transcript of the episode, offering practical advice on recognising symptoms, navigating diagnosis, making the most of GP appointments, and celebrating the strengths and superpowers that come with an ADHD brain.

If you’re curious, confused, or on your own midlife ADHD journey, this is the perfect place to start.

Full episode is available on all podcast platforms or click here.

Today on To Women Chatting we're diving into a topic that feels very close to home to me, ADHD in midlife women… and I couldn't think of anyone better to help unpack it than Dr Helen Wall. You might recognise Helen as one of TV's favourite doctors, as resident GP for BBC Breakfast, BBC Morning Live and a columnist for Women Magazine.

She's a women's health specialist and an all-around voice of sense and science when it comes to understanding how our hormones, brains and busy lives collide.

Now if you've been around here a while you'll know I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago so I'm on this journey too juggling menopause, midlife, motherhood and about thousand open tabs in my brain. So in this episode we're going to talk about what ADHD can look like for women later in life, why so many of us are only getting diagnosed now and how to manage the overwhelm with a little more self-compassion and maybe a little less caffeine!

Let's just say if you've ever walked into a room tripped over your suitcase from the holiday you returned from a week ago, find that you're doing the same wash multiple times over because you've forgotten to put it in the dryer and your time blindness is an inside family joke. This episode is for you!

And here is Dr. Helen Wall. Welcome to the show.

Dr Helen

Well thank you for having me here and that's a brilliant segue into exactly what we'll be talking about today.

Michelle

It is, you are so passionate about this, aren't you? What draws you so much to this particular area? Because you are a GP, so you cover all parts of medicine, menopause as well, but so frequently you post about this and you're passionate about raising awareness, aren't you?

Dr Helen

Yeah, I mean I've always had an interest in women's health. did actually apply for run through training to be an obstetrician gynaecologist and I was actually very heavily pregnant with my first child then and decided to go into general practice. So although I love being a GP, that love for advocating for women and making sure women get the right care that they need has always been there. I think that probably stems back to my mum who was a midwife and I grew up obviously with her having that same passion. yeah, every time I've done anything in my career as a GP, it's always drawn me back into working to advocate and help women get the right care. And it's such a frustrating area of medicine that women don't get the care that they need and there's still so much disparity and inequality I feel for women in medicine.

That's something that I'm really passionate about trying to change. It's a huge, huge thing to change, but little by little, things like this, we can all do a little bit to do that.

I've got a particular interest in ADHD. My daughter, who's now 17, has a diagnosis of that. I recognise many of these traits in her, and I started to see it quite commonly in my menopause clinic that I run, an NHS menopause clinic for our primary care network, I started to see women that I just thought there was something else going on here and started to recognise traits that I'd recognised in my daughter and vice versa. I became a bit passionate because I didn't want my daughter to get to the point of being in midlife, having missed opportunities, having felt that she'd struggled all her life to get to the point where she suddenly had a light bulb moment and everything imploded.

So that's where that sort of grew from really, wanting to get things better for women.

Michelle

I think a lot of people have heard now about neurodivergence, you know back in 30 years ago when women were going through menopause it wasn't talked about it, wasn't really recognised so can you give me a brief 101 on what ADHD is

Dr Helen

Well, it's a neurodevelopmental disorder. And I think that's a really key point that we need to make here, because I think there's a lot of hype around at the minute about it being a trend and about it, there being no test for it. So therefore, people just jumping on the bandwagon and people are describing symptoms that everybody's got as having ADHD. And it's absolutely not that.

We've got really, really clear evidence that there are functional and structural differences in the brains of those people with ADHD, so how the brain looks and how it works in terms of the neurotransmitters and the chemical messengers and how they function. And we've got evidence that there is genetic predisposition and certain gene loci, so parts of genes that lead to neurodivergence, in particular ADHD and autism. We have real evidence that this is a real thing that exists but despite that we're still getting particularly women told that they've not got ADHD and that they're overthinking things and it's just part of growing up it's just part of menopause and so on and that really really grates on me.

Michelle

Me too. That gender bias is so, it's still enormous, isn't it? Because, you know, traditionally we thought of little boys jumping up and down on sofas and being sort of slightly out of control as being ADHD. But little girls were so often told to sit still, be quiet, behave. And that masking behaviour, we've carried that for decades.

So let's switch quickly because there is so much ground I need to cover with you. Why are women now starting to get diagnosed in midlife?

Dr Helen

Well, I think for things like this, really, I think we're talking about it a lot more. And I think something that has changed in the last couple of years is we've actually started to look at how female hormones impact the female brain. It's absolutely ludicrous that in 2025, I'm sitting here saying, but in 2023, there was the first study done that looked at how female hormones can impact on our brain, for years.

I went to medical school, I did lots of GP training, I've worked in medicine for 20 years and we never talk generally day to day about the fact that oestrogen and progesterone affects how a woman's brain functions, it affects how she thinks, it affects the ability for her to process information, to retain memories, to you know get up and go. All of these things are driven by chemical messengers like for everybody but also by our sex hormones and the first study was done in 2023 looking at how hormones impacted menopause, so why do women become depressed, anxious, etc. Why do they get brain fog in perimenopause and menopause? And then they started to link it back to, actually because our sex hormones are starting to fluctuate or dip. I think from that we've got to extrapolate that into all different aspects of medicine, including neurodivergence. really escalating information and research now to show that those drop-in fluctuations in our sex hormones impact how the brain works in neurodivergence as well as the general female brain.

And I think once you get a movement going and people start to talk about these things more, exactly what you're doing here today, which is fantastic by the way, people start to think, women start to think, hang on a minute, I'm not just ditzy or lazy or disorganised and actually there's something else going on here. Numerous women and people contact me day in day out on my Instagram channel about the fact that they've struggled all their lives yet seemingly been perfectly in control, they've got good careers, they've managed a household, a family.

To the outside world, they look like they've been flying but the cost of that, the internal cost of that is so great that those women often end up burnt out, tired, exhausted, and just everything imploding once our hormones start to fluctuate and deplete in perimenopause.

Michelle

it's almost like a perfect storm, isn't it? So we're coming to midlife, we've got different kinds of concerns. We might be changing careers or feeling that those menopause symptoms impact our work life. We might have elderly parents as well as adult kids to worry about and care for. And we might have partners that perhaps we, know, the silver divorce is huge. You know, we might be finding that we're tracking differently in relationships.

Dr Helen

Yes.

Michelle

So all of a sudden we've got this hormone dip and in a way, as you said, it's that burnout. We can't take it anymore and something's got to give.

Dr Helen

It's the perfect storm, isn't it? It's that perfect storm of everything lining up. We often talk in medicine about the Swiss cheese model. I'm sure other industries talk about it as well, where everything just lines up. Each of those things on its own wouldn't lead to a complete catastrophe. But once you line all those things up, you're just heading to a really dark place. women have been doing that. People say to me, well, why has this suddenly happened now?

Why are we suddenly diagnosing this now? It's not because it's new. I don't truly believe that the number of women with ADHD has risen in the last two, three, four, five years. I think we've empowered women to recognise it and start to talk about it and start to ask for help more and that's why it's gone up considerably. And it needs to continue to go up because I believe there's still a considerable number of women who are suffering and struggling in this space but haven’t got a clue what's going on for them and I hear from those women day in and day out on my Instagram channel.

Michelle

You know, in a funny way. I could almost equate it to the Esther Rantzen effect of Childline, that there were always kids being abused, but they didn't know how to let people know. Now we've gone through menopause as well, where, as a female community, we've really gathered together and raised awareness and shared symptoms. Now we're onto ADHD. And I agree with you, I think we've always had it, but we've managed those symptoms and now the overwhelm is so much.

We’re now at a point where because our parents are living longer. A generation ago, sadly, those parents probably wouldn't be around now. So we wouldn't still be sandwiched right in the middle of both those things.

Dr Helen

Let's not forget, we're not that far away from when women couldn't get a mortgage on their own without permission from their father or their husbands. I think I read, I think it was what, 1997 or something ridiculous like that. I can't remember the year now, but I remember thinking I was a teenager at the time. It wasn't that far along ago, but actually now women are working in the workplace like men work in the workplace. We're running a home where we're literally doing everything.

This is not me slagging off men, but we've added on that right to be in leadership roles, in work, running successful businesses, et cetera, that maybe women weren't doing as much even a generation ago and that adds a lot of pressure. So we're doing all these things, we're living longer. So I think years ago when women used to go into perimenopause and menopause,that was sort of a signal that they were coming towards the end of their life really - women lived to what, 50s, 60s? Now women are living into their 80s.

We're spending half our lives not having been through perimenopause or menopause. So it's a significant chunk. And as you said, parents are living much longer. People may have had children later on. So they've got teenage children who are also hormonal when they get to that point in their life. It is just an absolute, yeah.

Michelle

That is an excellent point Helen because we used to have kids in our 20s and now so many of us are having kids in our 30s or even 40s. So you know in the normal order of things back in the day by the time your daughter was 23 she would have moved out and had kids and that would not be your responsibility and, sadly, your parents may not be with you but also you are not thinking at the age of 50 let's do a career pivot let's start an Etsy shop or let's let’s,train as a nutritionist because that's been my passion all my life. Now we are literally looking at halfway through not halfway done and thank goodness we are starting to provide support and recognition.

Let's have a look at some of the symptoms that are typical of ADHD and maybe particularly typical of midlife women if you can share some of those.

Dr Helen

So I think you mentioned earlier, didn't you, about masking? And masking is a huge thing for these women. You know, the symptoms that they've had have often not been the typical. Even I've got colleagues now who still think that ADHD is about being impulsive, about running around the classroom throwing chairs. Actually, a lot of the symptoms for women, particularly women who've got to this point and not been diagnosed, have been internalised.

So they've been those things of constantly sort of having been struggling to process, to switch tasks, to keep on task and so on, but internalising that in terms of worry, anxiety, feeling like they have to mask to seem that they are on top of things, but actually having to prepare a lot for everything that they do. So I had one lady say to me that if she went to a meeting, she was a very high flying businesswoman, but she would prepare for three hours for one business meeting and she would be up to 11pm/midnight just to do that because she wanted to go into that meeting fully informed and fully on top of everything but she couldn't trust herself to be able to do that in the moment. She had to have everything completely prepped because the cognition and her pathways in the brain couldn't process that information quickly enough and a lot of the symptoms that women have are more of that thing really that preparation, brain execution, rather than the impulsivity. And if they do have impulsivity and hyperactivity, it tends to be very internalised. So it's that unable to switch off, unable to rest, fidgeting, getting in bed at night and not being able to stop that mind turning.

I'd be interested to hear what symptoms you had, Michelle, and what led you to sort of think.

Michelle

I'm glad you mentioned that because I think this is another reason that women my age are starting to get diagnosed is because we're looking at our kids differently. So our kids are coming through school and it might be flagged up that their behaviour could be ADHD or neurodivergent, which is what happened to me. I had a lot of guilt actually because when my daughter was seven, eight, nine, ten, she had a very high IQ. That came through in her academics but she was so scatty. There wasn't a week that went by that she didn't lose something, forget her homework, find quizzes and tests really difficult, getting things done in order. We didn't know what that was. And she was diagnosed with auditory processing disorder.

Later on, as she became 18, 19, 20, and I think this happens a lot when kids go to university and you lose that kind of helicopter parenting because we're still there as a support network. When they're on their own, it kind of implodes a little bit because they've got to be an adult in an academic situation. And she didn't do that great. She managed to get through. Now when I look back, I am unbelievably proud of how she managed to navigate that process without meds, without diagnosis - and it was after she went to university, we did suggest maybe she should maybe just go and chat to somebody. Let's see… Sure enough, she was diagnosed as ADHD. And as I did a podcast on this, this is four years ago when I first started Two Women Chatting and I got an expert in to talk about it, about adult kids. I'm like, hello, are you talking about her or me now? What is going on? And isn't it though? So then you start looking at yourself and thinking, gosh, apple and tree. This is extraordinary.

Dr Helen

Yes, that's so common.

Michelle

But I also feel like you mentioned right at the beginning there, the hopping on the bandwagon, the trend. It's almost embarrassing to then go and say, I wonder if I've got it too. Because my family did react like, here we go, Mum. Yeah, yeah, you as well. Definitely. They're used to it now and they accept it. But that feeling of being gaslit or will my doctor just dismiss it as menopause? Let's go down that route, shall we?

Because the mix up between is it perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms at our age? We don't know. How do we recognise whether it's more than that?

Dr Helen

Yeah, it's super hard and this is something I talk about a lot on my Instagram channel. It's hard for women to decide what's going on. What I always say is, if you have ADHD, that's not just appeared in perimenopause and menopause. That might be when you recognise it or when people around you recognise it. But actually, if you sit down and really think, which can be hard for someone with ADHD,I get that! But maybe don't sit down. Maybe walk about and really think about your childhood and how you were in your teenage years. And often at each point for women, when the hormones dishevelled a little bit. So often we will notice a distinct bit of unravelling, as I like to call it, around puberty and then perhaps when they've had a baby. And then again, when they hit perimenopause because it's that impact of those hormonal fluxes, that impact on brain chemical messaging but usually the symptoms or always the symptoms should have been present at least from under age 12.

Sometimes I'll say to women have you got any old school reports because they might not remember what was said but actually if you trace it back really carefully you can usually see if you speak to family speak to mum dad they'll always have just put it down nine times out of ten to she was just scatty she lost everything all the time.

She couldn't sit and take anything in. She couldn't process information, but that was just her. And it's not been recognised as an actual thing. It's just been labelled as something that you do and your personality. But actually, if you link it right back and go right back to childhood and then through your teens and into adulthood, you'll start to piece together where things perhaps didn't quite fit. And what women will often say to me is, I've never really felt normal.

I've never really felt, I've always felt there's something different about me or I've never really understood why I couldn't do that easily like everybody else. There's always some kind of little thing that they say that just sort of stabs you in the heart but then you think, gosh, why have we missed this for so long? That was the real thing that I didn't want my daughter to have to go through, moving forwards in life because I'd seen it in so many women.

But I have to hold my hands up and say I'm not perfect.,. I'm registered menopause specialist now, but I wasn't then. And I've probably missed it in lots of women. And, you know, I'm not proud of that, but it's about being open and honest and saying, it's okay that we've missed it in our patients, but we need to change that moving forwards because things do need to change.

I think I've probably also got a little bit of ADHD. People say, well, everybody's got a bit of ADHD, but, we recognise it in our children. I know -and I certainly have recognised traits in my daughter, in myself. You know, everybody's journey is different, isn't it? I'm not in a place where I want to go down that road of being diagnosed, et cetera, but I understand why some women do and we need to accept that everybody's an individual and we need to do what they need for that support.

Sometimes it's not about jumping on medication it's just about getting that validation of why you struggled for so long, why you've had to over prepare for everything, why you've constantly felt restless and let's talk a little bit about that rejection sensitivity dysphoria that women get because that is huge isn't it and the emotional turmoil

Michelle

Yes, please. It's massive! People don't understand how awful that is, how you always feel. I've had this podcast for four years and people say, you've done really, really well. I'm like, no, not really. But everything is magnified to a degree that you think, someone, especially with social media. my goodness. It's awful.

Dr Helen

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think we need a whole new term for ADHD for women, if I'm honest. I think attention deficit hyperactivity disorder just does not, it does not show what's on the tin at all. Not what's in the tin, is it? You know, it's completely different for women. It's often not about attention deficit. It's about attention difference. Often they've got very good attention for some things and absolutely no attention for others.

But for women, the huge part of ADHD is that emotional dysregulation. And that gets ever more difficult when our hormones go into flux. So in puberty, when we've had a baby, when we are in perimenopause and menopause, we already know, because of what I was talking about before with the effect of hormones on our brain, that hormonal flux impacts our brain in terms of anxiety, memory, brain fog, depression.

And when you've got ADHD, those things are already challenged because your dopamine levels are often not functioning well or not being read properly or lower than the normal. And the estrogen impacts that as well. So things definitely go into spiral. And emotional dysregulation is a huge part of that. And I think we don't talk about that enough and the impact that that has.

Michelle

Do you think that's why so many people who later discover they've got ADHD may have been either dismissed by their GPs or just offered antidepressants because it kind of shows itself in a sadness or a not fitting in or can't put my finger on it kind of thing?

Dr Helen

Yeah, absolutely and one of the things I always say to GP colleagues, and I'm a GP trainer as well so I try and drum this into my GP trainees, is treatment resistant depression and anxiety we shouldn't yes okay we might change with anxiety and depression you have to start one medication change to another and so on but if a lady is coming back to us time and time again - I've had ladies that I've seen where they've been in and out with anxiety and depression throughout most of adult life from teenage years and they've never got better. Why have they not got better? And often it's because we've not got the root cause.

So I'm not saying that you can't have anxiety and depression if you've got ADHD. You absolutely can. The two can coexist. But what I am saying is what we're not very good at is looking at why is this person not getting better with the treatment? What else is going on for this person? And sometimes, very often in fact, there's an underlying neurodivergence that's been missed or not recognised and that person has therefore been treated with medication for anxiety and depression. Some of that may be absolutely right because we know that if you're neurodivergent you're more at risk of becoming anxious and depressed because of the struggles of living in a world that is forcing you to be neurotypical effectively and the brain differences that happen. But we shouldn't just be reliant, we shouldn't just be labelling those people as that without looking at what else is going on for them.

Michelle

It would be a good thing at this point to mention that there's emerging evidence that ADHD people react differently to medications. So what might work for a non neurodivergent person might spiral somebody else. Can you just talk a little on that?

Dr Helen

Yes, there is very much emerging evidence about the way that our or people with ADHD and neurodivergence of their enzymes work, the way the brain reacts to medication and you know we see this particularly in hormones as well so I talk quite a bit about progesterone and how women with underlying neurodivergence often react very differently to them.

That's the same for many medications, particularly medications that affect our GABA receptors. Our GABA receptors are those receptors that are our calming receptors. So that's the receptors that if you take a sleeping tablet or you take a relaxant like Diazepam, Valium, or you have that glass of wine when you're really stressed on a Friday night, it hits those receptors and you just feel that first dull of calm.

We know that those can vary in women who are neurodivergent and therefore, we really should be looking a bit closer at how we manage these women with different medications and the same with antidepressants, but unfortunately we don't really have the guidance on that because the studies and the evidence is just really coming to the surface.

It's certainly not something that we think about in day-to-day clinical practice. I'm not going to sit here and say that I can change women's medications based on me knowing that they're neurodivergent because we just haven't got the information to do that.

What I can say is that I can be very mindful of the fact that they may not react how we expect them to and things may not pan out as we expect them to. So I often try and set that expectation and have a very reassuring threshold for tweaking and tailoring things and not being too disheartened when things don't go to plan and that's all we can really do I think at this point in time until that research becomes more and then it gets embedded into clinical guidance and practice.

Michelle

Now some women are quite fearful about going to their GP for a diagnosis in case they're not ADHD. There's that hypersensitivity again, we're going to get rejected, we haven't even got the ADHD that we thought we did. But of course, you know, there's so many kids who are in line trying to get ADHD treatment. The NHS is overwhelmed with helping cases and I don't know if they do it on a priority basis, kids first, women later. But because of waiting so much and potentially worried about getting rejected, lots of people are self-diagnosing. And I think this adds to the, ‘everyone's got a bit of ADHD', everyone's jumping on the trend. It's not necessarily that. What is your ‘doctor take’ on going the self-diagnosis route, at least to start with?

Dr Helen

I really advocate for that. I call it self-identifying as ADHD and I think it's something that we should be encouraging women to do because not every woman is going to want or benefit from medication. So I think you have to weigh up for yourself what are the benefits of me getting a formal diagnosis here. So sometimes women want a formal or need a formal diagnosis because without it they're not going to feel validated, they're not going to get the support from their family and friends, from their workplace.

They're going to want medication which you absolutely can't get without a formal ADHD diagnosis and even then as you've said it's a struggle. But I think if you are somebody who is genuinely really struggling and have struggled throughout life there are so many resources out there that you can access without a formal diagnosis of ADHD. There's so many support groups, there's online resources on places like ADHD UK, Facebook groups, you can really tap into quite a wealth of support from other women who are going through the same. And I think there's no harm in doing that. fact, I think it's quite beneficial to do that if you're not somebody who is needing that necessarily, formal diagnosis. And even if you are somebody that's going for that, we know that the wait times are so lengthy now that doing that in the meantime can be quite helpful - just to get that support because it's a lonely, lonely place I think for women and they need that support.

Michelle

It really is and I feel like if you are going for that self diagnosis and you can start putting practices in place and advocating for yourself and honestly giving yourself permission to fail sometimes. One of the things that I think having the diagnosis has done for me and for many women I know with ADHD is having that label that makes them feel like they're seen, that they're not stupid, disorganised, lazy, any of those things that you can be so self-critical about or have from partners, families, like laughing at you. I cannot tell you how many events and concert tickets, I still regret the Robbie Williams concert back in the 90s that I missed! I realise now that that I've given myself permission sometimes, if my social battery wears out and things like that, we're so much more aware post pandemic of how throwing ourselves into social situations does drain our batteries and now if I've got several events during the week I think no I'm going to need a day off where I can lay on the sofa and play Candy Crush Saga and it's alright because I'm going give my brain a little bit of a break and it has helped me operate better - so from that perspective I would encourage anybody even if it is to find out that you're going through perimenopause or menopause and maybe there's things that could help you through HRT or natural remedies or exercise. I think fundamentally we need to be kind to ourselves and allow ourselves to diagnose whatever is making us feel like something's ‘off’.

Dr Helen

Yeah, absolutely. It's that self-compassion, isn't it? And that permission to rest and that permission to care for yourself. And I think so many women are bad at that generally, whether they've got ADHD or not. think we run around, don't we, looking after everybody else, trying to be perfect, trying to be on top of everything. we've got to, in general, think women are bad at giving themselves that space, but particularly women with ADHD who've spent their life trying to stay on top of everything and keep up with everything and then hit this period of their life where the hormones go into flux. It's so disabling for them.

I've actually got a book coming out next year about this and it talks about that very thing about how we, it gives you some tools and tips on how to sort self-identify and really sort of tap into just doing exactly what you said, just looking after yourself and getting the most out of yourself and your brain really.

Michelle

I’d like to end on a really uplifting note because one of the things I think about ADHD and we can bandy around the words like superpower but a lot of creative people have it and a lot of people in emergency situations are remarkable in those times. Kate Garroway has just admitted that you know she's just done celebrity traitors and she is now pursuing an ADHD diagnosis after talking to Cat Burns who is very open about her autism and her ADHD, Martine McCutcheon, Nadia Sawalha, Denise Welsh. I could go on and on about a number of celebrities who are thankfully giving their voice and admitting that they've got ADHD. I think it's a really good thing. So I personally feel like I can lean into creativity. I really feel like being neurodivergent has given me the edge on thinking beyond laterally. I can get a problem, I can get into it and I can come up with odd, different solutions to how I either solve it, promote it or get people on my show and I, I never stop. So let's talk a little bit about the upside of having ADHD.

Dr Helen

There's so many upsides, aren't there? I read once that they thought originally it was some kind of evolutionary benefit having ADHD, that the people that were neurodivergent actually were the people that survived best in the wild, because of that ability to sort of not stop, not rest, just get on and see problems and often people with ADHD, women with ADHD particularly, but people with ADHD are often very emotionally intelligent and intuitive and they can read a room and they can read a situation. I've seen that to be true in so many instances. I got a message from somebody who's on Instagram and it said, you know, I've been told I can't have ADHD because I've got a successful career and I've never been in trouble with the police as a teenager. I mean, what an absolute load of rubbish. Some of the most successful people I've met have got ADHD or are neurodivergent in some form or other because they're just so driven and intuitive and they just get on with things and they can hyperfocus and just achieve and create and drive forwards and you know the energy that they often exude is second to none.

So I think you know it's not a problem having ADHD if you're allowed to live with ADHD rather than try and live in a neurotypical world and be forced into those pigeon holes that you necessarily don't fit into. So I truly believe it's the society around us that causes the issues with ADHD and particularly women with ADHD, not actually the ADHD itself. The problem that we've got is that we're not very good at supporting women or enabling them to get that support because for so long we've covered it up and just allowed women to mask and headlong into burnout and that needs to change and doing things like this is the exact reason why I'm doing that because I think together we can help make that change.

Michelle

There is a reason why GCHQ, the house of spies if you like, actively recruit people with neurodivergence because of their problem solving skills.

One last thing actually Helen, when people go to the doctor, they've got a short amount of time, how can they maximise the time that they've got to try and get some help? What should they do in advance?

Dr Helen

I would definitely recommend that you do a screening test for ADHD. It's a really crude measure. You can find it on most ADHD websites, ADHD UK, there's one on there. It's a crude measure and it doesn't give you the full picture, but it just enables the GPs to focus their mind. I would go with information about not just the symptoms you've got, but how it has affected you. So if you feel like you've been masking, actually talk about the cost of that masking and the fact that it might look like you've got a good career and you've done all these things and it doesn't look like it, probably have. But the cost of that and the internal restlessness and burnout that that's caused and I would try and link that back to childhood if you can because the GP will be looking to see that this isn't something that's just happened in perimenopause, menopause or post-childbirth or something, it's something that's been neurodevelopmental and throughout the life course so you need to provide a little bit of information about that.

I always say this to people and I completely understand how this happens. I'm very pro advocating for women and women with neurodivergence and if I see a lady who doesn't know that and she comes in to see me, often they come in very defensive and expecting a fight basically and that can be really hard dynamic then to come back from in a consultation. I think try and park every dismissal, everything you've had. I know this is really hard and it's easy for me to say one side and go in with a fresh mind with the information you've got and have a clear ask that you want to be referred for X, Y or Z or you want to be, you you want to have a look at your menopause or whatever and go in fresh and open and give the GP a chance because I think sometimes it's hard when people have seen other GPs or with the healthcare pressures or they've had problems from family who've dismissed them and they come in and they're very argumentative and on the attack and the consultation just spirals nowhere.

So that would be my best advice just to go in open-minded with the information with a clear ask for what you want and if you don't get what you want and you don't get where you think you need to be then it's absolutely fine to go to go again to a different GP. Don't feel that you have to write that off. You can keep going and ask for a second opinion. You can do that with anything.

Michelle

and use the resources that are out there. Your Instagram channel is brilliant. You've pinned up some really, really wonderful explanations of how people should go about getting that diagnosis, what they should be looking for and how they should keep records.

Michelle

I would really, really advocate for women if they are feeling like they need to get that diagnosis. Don't be put off by the imposter syndrome, the ‘I'm going to be rejected’. It is weirdly empowering just to know, not to like shout it from the hilltops. It's your private information but it might just help you deal with the burnout, the constant juggling, just so much that goes on in midlife.

Helen, thank you so much for joining me today. You've been really, really informative. Thank you.

Follow Helen on instagram @doctorhelenwall or take a look at her website www.tvhealthdoctor.com

Helen’s book Menopause and ADHD: How to navigate hormone flux and neurodivergence will be out in May 2026. Pre-order here