ADHD Dad Blog

Better Late Than Never

Archives: August 2009

ADHD & Over-Compensating Disorder

Early on, my ADHD and I caused such havoc and disappointment that I developed a psycho-level work ethic to try to fix the things I was bound to screw up or forget before it happened.

“Dad, stop already. The microwave is clean enough. I want to make popcorn.”

That’s my 13 year-old daughter, Coco. And she’s wrong.

You have to use a scrubby sponge on the inside ceiling of the microwave to get all the little bits of chili and soup that get stuck up there. You don’t want one of those bits falling into your coffee when you heat it up, at least I don’t. Besides, I’ve got to take the rotating plate out and put it through the dishwasher to get off the grime. And the bottom corners have some dried up gook that I’ll need to dig out with a fork tine. The popcorn will have to wait until I get this job done properly. Just give me a second. Or a half-hour.

Coco rolls her eyes.

“OCD much, Dad?” The accepted myth in my family is that I’m obsessive-compulsive. That seems reasonable, considering OCD is well-documented as a possible comorbid condition with ADHD. But I’m not OCD.

I am ADHD - of course. Hypomanic – uh huh. Stammer – y-y-yep, word-retrieval incompetent, and pathetic short-term memory - that’s me. Alcoholic – well, duh.

But in all the testing I’ve gone through at various times in my life I’ve never been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. No matter how clean I keep the house.

Then again, there are a bunch of people that worked with me back when I was a TV writer-producer that would definitely agree with my daughter. My passion for organization, folders, binders, production calendars projecting four months into the future, and scripts finished weeks ahead of production drove a lot of writers on staff right over the edge. I went to work earlier and earlier and stayed later, pushing myself and everyone else, checking and rechecking, petrified of forgetting something or falling behind. Towards the end of one season an exhausted writer stood in the middle of my office and yelled at me, “You’re not a Pharaoh, Frank! You can’t just keep loading the work on for no reason!”

Honest, I would cop to OCD it if I had it. Kicking and screaming all the way, I’ve learned one basic rule from my own experience and from the examples of others with all sorts of disabilities; deal with any challenge straight on – accept whatever it is, get the help you need to understand and handle it, and get on with the day. So, if I’m not in denial, then what’s going on?

Over-Compensating Disorder, that’s what. Yeah, I made it up, but listen:

I think early on, my ADHD and I caused such havoc and disappointment that I developed a psycho-level work ethic to try to fix the things I was bound to screw up or forget before it happened. No matter what disaster I caused in school or Boy Scouts, at least my room was clean and my bed was made. Plus when everything is so messy and hard to control inside your head, having the kitchen clean can bring a little peace.

Yes, I’m nuts and confused, but as I told Coco, when I pull my hot cup of coffee out of spotless microwave my head and the world both seem a little easier to handle.

A Deeper Look at Alcoholism and ADHD: Part 3

Across the kitchen counter from me stood my wife, Margaret, and our two children. If I didn’t get sober, they were gone. I started to say something, but something in all three of those faces shut me up.

So there I am in 1998, a mental breakdown putting me in the safe hands of the medical profession who are testing me six ways from Sunday to find out what’s wrong so we can change whatever that is and I can be all better.

Truth was, though, I didn’t want to change, figure out coping strategies, make a plan, or you know, do any actual work to get better. I wanted to hang out and trade psych jokes with some cool interns and trippy patients -- Middle Aged Man, Interrupted without the Angelina sad part.

But I did seem to listen, I read the materials, and I did show up for appointments, and I did take all my meds. And I got back to gin as soon as possible. I didn’t need a story to build that room in my head where everybody agreed with me because there was just me in there. I just needed gin. The more gin, the stronger the walls. When a doc said it wasn’t a good idea, I found another doc.

So, after what for anyone else would have been a sobering diagnosis of multiple mental disorders and with no job prospects and a wife and two children to support, my primary objective was to make sure I had a justification to drink. Not very admirable, I know.

But hey, I’m a drunk.

I’m also no lightweight. There was no reason to panic. I knew what I was doing. I got a new agent again, sold a pilot; someone was looking at me for a series. Everybody just sit down, shut up and leave me alone. This is my classic mantra from inside my room in my head with its one little window on the world. You probably have two windows, but as I’m functionally blind in my left eye, I’ve only got the one. But that’s fine with me -- less openings to defend.

And that brings us to what for me what all this is really about for me -- excuses. That one-eyed thing is true but so what? I’ve always built self-pity escape hatches wherever I go.

The statistical facts are out there. “At least 25 percent of patients receiving treatment for AODD (alcohol and other drug use disorders) have ADHD, and 20 to 50 percent of adults diagnosed with ADHD meet criteria for AODD.” -- Smith, Molina, and Pelham Jr. - Alcohol Research & Health

There’s absolutely no doubt that if you’re ADHD you might be susceptible to substance abuse. But that was not and is not the problem as it relates to me. I am not susceptible to substance abuse. I am substance abuse. I don’t need an excuse to party. AODD, you bet. Done them all and would love to keep doing them all forever, but I cannot, because I’ll keep doing them forever everyday all day and all night long until I run out and go over to your place and do all of yours and then borrow your car to go get some more. I mean, c’mon -- otherwise what’s the point?

What I said to myself for the three years between diagnoses and sobriety was that the only reason I abused alcohol before was because I was self-medicating my ADHD and hypomania. But now that I was in treatment I could drink because I was all better, see?

I kept propping up this pathetically empty lie until finally one morning in April of 2001; I stood in my kitchen in Honolulu. Across the kitchen counter from me stood my wife, Margaret, and our two children. They were through asking. If I didn’t get sober, they were gone. I started to say something, but something in all three of those faces shut me right up. I just nodded my head and started to live one day at a time. That’s when I finally squeezed out of that room in my head and stepped out into the world. I dropped all the excuses and lies, and free of that, I put my arms around my family and held on tight.

Again this is only how it is for me. But I will tell you this: I am one very lucky one-eyed, ADHD, hypomanic, alcoholic.

A Deeper Look at Alcoholism and ADHD: Part 2

None of my ADHD behavior seemed all that strange to me. When I peeked out at other people from inside my head, I noticed their reactions, whether I was drunk or sober. Man, they were so rigid and judgmental.

The definition of insanity is said to be doing something the same way again and again and each time expecting a different result. I think my particular insanity pattern throughout my life is doing whatever my next impulse says to and not even paying attention to the result. But at 49, in the middle of my breakdown, I didn’t see any pattern. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t keep holding things together with denial and martinis. I thought I’d been fine up until then.

My childhood was happy -- for me, anyway. Teachers pulled out their hair. Boy Scouts kicked me out permanently for stealing a transistor radio on a hike honoring honesty and then lying about it. I accidentally set some small fires that adults had to put out, got stuck in a few construction sites, and got lost running away. To this day, I look at cops as nice folks who will get me out of jams and get me home safe.

My adulthood was happy -- again, for me, and only sort of. Two previous marriages ending in divorce, countless failed relationships, and an early history of too many jobs in too many places all over the country doesn’t sound like a joyful noise, even to me. I was flying ADHD solo, and without a net. Once in my twenties, after saving and planning for months, my best friend and I hitched to New York from Columbia, Missouri, on our way to Europe. In New York, on the way to the airport, I changed my mind, deserted my best friend and went back to Missouri on the bus. I started and quit college twice, then moved from Columbia, to Kansas City, and to San Francisco, all the while constantly drinking and smoking pot. Then I moved to New York, where I was pulled over on St. Mark’s Place by an NYPD squad car for singing and running drunk down the middle of the street on my thirtieth birthday. They were nice folks and getting me out of New York City traffic I’m sure helped get me home safe. But the point is, none of this behavior seemed all that strange to me. When I peeked out at other people from inside my head, I noticed their reactions to my behavior, whether I was drunk or sober. Man, they were so rigid and judgmental. Thing was, when I was drunk, I didn’t care what other people thought so much.

So although there was plenty of evidence outside of me to the contrary, up until this recent breakdown, inside my head I was convinced I was fine. This is how I operated: There’s out there, and there’s in here. Who are you going to trust, the bottle in here that keeps the noise down, or those nasty bozos out there? What do they know?

As nuts as that may sound, I had some experiential evidence on my side. In 1969, I’d had an anxiety triggered episode while doing my 2-year Conscientious Objector service at a stateside medical center and went to the psychiatric clinic for help. Those docs put me on a ton of Stelazine and gave me a copy of I’m Okay, You’re Okay to read. After a couple of weeks, I dropped them and got through it on beer, weed, and John D. McDonald paperbacks.

Okay, but now it’s 1998 and having reacquired my trust of any therapist who would listen to me even though I never listened to them, I’m laying exposed in quivering pieces waiting to be put back together. Or at least get a story to use to build a new little room in my head.

Next: Part Three -- The Final Wreck-oning

A Deeper Look at Alcoholism and ADHD: Part 1

The distracting ADHD noise in my head was the same whether I was a success or a failure. But martinis always muffled the chattering.

I’ve written a couple of times before in this blog about my alcoholism and its relation to my ADHD and hypomania and other scattered comorbid disorders I carry jangling around in my head like loose change. But I find the alcohol/ADHD dynamic to be a difficult, smoky thing to express and I always feel I don’t quite get it. So, I thought I’d give it another try. I hope it will resonate for you. And if it does, I hope you’ll leave a comment and perhaps a story of your own. I also hope I’m not starting to sound too much like Garrison Keillor here.

You could call this a Hollywood alcohol and drug story, but it’s not. It’s not even a cautionary tale about a rube being misguided by hubris and ego, though I am a rube, for sure, and I did pack my head with a bunch of self-inflating lies. The honest dirt floor of this story has more to do with the difference between facts and excuses, and how much you’re willing to lose, and how much pain you’re willing to cause before you finally own up.

I was diagnosed with ADHD, hypomania, and depression after a breakdown I had when I was 49 years old. It seemed to me I had pretty good reasons to fall apart even without all the medical jargon. After crawling back from one implosion of my TV career, I had managed to snag another job retooling a show that, after months of work, promptly bombed. After that, I went to meetings for other shows and the more I wanted any job, the less anyone wanted me. My new agent said people weren’t “responding” to me -- I was too desperate and scattered. The ADHD I didn’t know I had was becoming increasingly obvious and irritating to everyone else. The meetings got shorter and more perfunctory. I stopped being desperate and began telling people what I really thought about their shows. Pretty soon, not even my agent returned my calls.

I sat at home pacing by the phone trying to calm the incessant, negative, vicious chattering going on in my head -- the same negative chattering that banged around in there when I came home after a day being a serious big shot. And I did the same thing I did back when we still had our big house and all that -- I had a few martinis. The distracting ADHD noise in my head was the same whether I was a success or a failure. Every chattering idea started with, “Yes, but what about this?” And wound off down yet another unexplored, dark wormhole twisting down to the same pit of self-loathing they all did.

But the martinis always worked. They muffled the chattering, plugged up the wormholes. That done, I could sit inside my head drinking, singing, and peeking out the window at everyone else: The interior ADHD noise cure. My exterior was droopy eyed, inattentive, and slurred words -- but I was inside, so what did I care? For years, Margaret had tried smashing through that window to pry the bottle out of my hand. But I held on. I was smart, persuasive, contrite, and lied my ass off when I had to, because without the gin, I’d smash myself to pieces inside the walls of my prison.

Finally, though, it all came unglued in one evening at home trying to help my then ten-year-old son with his homework. Unseen (by me, anyway) psychological stress factors had increased to such a level that they’d crushed the walls of my gin-soaked cell and busted everything else I’d built around myself to a million pieces -- and I ended up curled up on the bedroom floor in a fetal position. By the time I’d managed to finally scramble to the doctors for help, I was flailing around in the deepest, darkest panic in memory. I was a quivering, weepy mess. I told the therapists I didn’t know why my whole life had fallen apart so suddenly. Why couldn’t I keep it together?

I always had before.

“Frank is a capable child, but has not yet found his place in the group. He seems to feel he must be the clown and constantly entertain the class. For a while he was better, but during the last few days, he has become almost impossible.” – My Kindergarten Teacher, Nov. 5, 1954

Okay, maybe not.

Next: Part Two -- The definition of insanity.