Something Shiny: ADHD!

De: David Kessler & Isabelle Richards
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  • Resumen

  • How many times have you tried to understand ADHD...and were left feeling more misunderstood? We get it and we're here to help you build a shiny new relationship with ADHD. We are two therapists (David Kessler & Isabelle Richards) who not only work with people with ADHD, but we also have ADHD ourselves and have been where you are. Every other week on Something Shiny, you'll hear (real) vulnerable conversations, truth bombs from the world of psychology, and have WHOA moments that leave you feeling seen, understood, and...dare we say...knowing you are something shiny, just as you are.
    2021 Something Shiny Productions
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Desarrollo Personal Hygiene & Healthy Living Psicología Psicología y Salud Mental Éxito Personal
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Episodios
  • Can you be super empathic and autistic? (um...YES) - Neuropsychs Explored Part IV

    Can you be super empathic and autistic? (um...YES) - Neuropsychs Explored Part IV
    Apr 23 2025
    Isabelle finishes sharing her neuropsych results, including recommendations for ADHD and autism (HINT: unmask! WHAT?) From the categorization of ADHD like a storm warning system (Mild/moderate/severe) to how job interviews might be the one place to mask (and how David does his interviews), David and Isabelle spelunk around how certain measures, like empathy, are not 'markers' of autism in the way we may think. Share your favorite fidgets with us! Go to somethingshinypodcast.com/fidgetlove now!---Isabelle goes into greater detail about how her neuropsychological assessment was able to show her how she initiates and sustains auditory and visual attention and a little bit on processing speed. But to get more data, she’d need to undergo testing designed for people with traumatic brain injuries or strokes or dementia—what? It's a little strange to realize that the gold standard for learning more about brain functioning as a grown up with ADHD is the same that’s used for brain injuries. David points out that he uses the word neurodivergent intentionally, in order to point out that there is a diversity of brains, rather than a deficiency or something wrong with you. There are brains that work well in crisis and brains that work well when things are calm. Doesn’t that make sense? Would we say that someone would be “severely apt” at handling chaos? Maybe, you just do what you’re good at? Isabelle goes back to the scale of mild/moderate/severe ADHD—mild reads as boring, moderate—moderation SUCKS—all the words for the scale are poor. David names: if you can’t use the words to apply to “happiness” —it’s a bad scale for humans. Would you say you are ‘mildly or severely happy?” Probably not. So maybe we use different words for humans. People with ADHD are not storms and do not require storm warnings (last time we checked). As part of her neuropsychological evaluation, Isabelle got pages and pages of recommendations for next steps. She got a lot of great data, and also realized that one episode of Something Shiny provides more—so that was affirming and helpful in terms of the work the podcast and its community are doing. Her evaluator left off her autism recommendations, sending them along later, but said, essentially, the only recommendation is to unmask more. That “the only place masking is helpful is in job interviews.” Other than that it’s harmful. It takes energy, it burns people out, it’s hard. Isabelle then goes on to rant about how biased job interviews are, unless you’re giving case examples—but then, David is also super good at job interviews. He checks—did you go to high school or college? Cool, you must be smart. Then, do you want to work with him? Check. Then, would he want to hang out with this person? Yup. And finally, a bunch of curveballs to see how people think on their feet. Because that helps you see how people think and how they communicate about their problem solving, which is good data. Then David names that there are questions he’d love to ask about people that he can’t, beyond the protected class questions about age or location or self-identity—he wishes he could ask if someone is neurodivergent or if someone in their family is neurodivergent, that is an asset to David. He sees the ability to think outside the box in order to do what they do. But he knows he’s not trusted, most hiring people are lying to you, employers are anxious, you’re not going to like them. Every employer is terrified of rejection, it’s so complicated. But he sees neurodiversity and awareness of that as a major plus—if somebody understands that and has self-esteem around it, knows what accommodations they need, they are curious about that. Isabelle has such a bias for self-insight—she wonders, how someone who was so socially off the rhythm of her peers, how was it that she had a lot of high measures for sensory things, but high measures on empathy? Which seems odd, because all of the autistic people Isabelle knows have off the charts empathy, which David concurs. Like the empathy for the crushed ant on the sidewalk. This is so true for Isabelle, she remembers crying for hours about a three-legged hamster she saw in a pet store named “Tiny Tim”—in retrospect, his paw was probably chewed off by his littermates or his mom because hamsters are ROUGH like that—but her mom told her he was okay because he was “fat”—to be fair, she was fatphobic and Polish immigrant mentality an maybe also autistic herself, but she was so distraught. She used to track one ant walking all the way to its hill to make sure it made it because she felt personally responsible for seeing that it was okay. She was so scared she’d look at it later and wonder if she wasn’t autistic—but the stakes were so high, she was scared of not having the community she felt like she was on the cusp of having and understanding. As David puts it: "we will fight for worth and ...
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    17 m
  • Do we really need labels like ADHD and AuDHD? - Neuropsychs Explored Part III

    Do we really need labels like ADHD and AuDHD? - Neuropsychs Explored Part III
    Apr 2 2025
    Isabelle and David continue to explore how an official ADHD or autism or AuDHD diagnosis might be a useful bridge to belong to a community. But what about the people who see these labels as pathologizing, including famous ADHD researchers like Dr. Russell Barkely? David and Isabelle explore some of the ways that thinking of ADHD from the negatives only and leaves people using the label not as a tool for empowerment, self-understanding, and advocacy--but as an excuse. Furthermore, what about labels like "Asperger's" (low-support need/high-masking autism) that has its roots in Nazi extermination camps? Neuropsychs Explored Part III.---The pro to identifying as having ADHD that David now understands, that he didn't understand years ago, was that it allows you to fit into a culture and a group differently. He walked into a room in his 30’s (at an Eye-to-Eye conference) and found himself fitting in. David needed the label to understand himself. He brings up Dr. Russell Barkley and his research—Isabelle jumps in with a factoid about Barkley’s twin who had ADHD and addiction issues and died in a car accident…which helps give her context for why Barkley is so big on ADHD being a risk factor while driving. David wants to make it clear—it is a tragic story, and he’s not about casting anyone as evil or bad—but Barkeley’s work does do a number on people’s self esteem. They look at his research and think they can’t change and they start to use ADHD as an excuse, not an explanation. It’s important to have compassion for people, he does talk a lot about addiction and car crashes, and we all have sad parts of our past, and its what we do now that matters. When he’s talking to a room for non-ADHDers, they tend to think that people with ADHD are less, rather than more. He likes folk music and David likes rap, and David is not going to pretend to like folk music. Isabelle names that she tries to make sense of something so dehumanizing, like the six hour training she sat through of his that left her in tears, gaining some context for his story gave her a chance to reduce how slimed she felt. Knowing why does decrease suffering. Isabelle has seen a lot of hostility and backlash about AuDHD. Autism is a spectrum—yes, there are non speakers and folks with high support needs. But maybe it was what back in the day was called Asperger’s, a now unused term. David names that Dr. Asperger was a Nazi (sympathizer?) Who created a line around autism (essentially how high-masking someone was) that determined who lived and died. For more on this deep history of Asperger — check out the links below. Isabelle and David agree to have a way longer conversation on the history of neurodivergence. Isabelle talks more about her neuropsych assessment, including sample questions, and fill in the blank type sentences to write. And she was given a questionnaire to give to someone who knows her well—for kids, this might be both to caregivers and teachers, so they can get data about how the kid is functioning in multiple environments. Isabelle then waits, gets a twenty-some page document, and they sit down and cover it all. Isabelle has in the months between first hearing the neuropsychologist state that she meets criteria for autism, confirming her suspicions, she went on a deep dive on all these pieces of information. Isabelle felt the fear of having this diagnosis taken away from her felt so deeply. It was so hard, even just listening to the summary, she wanted to skip to the end (another autistic trait, she is learning, wanting to know the context so she can track what’s being described or knowing where it’s going), and she yes, she has autism, and she burst into tears. Isabelle finally has an answer to the riddle, which a chunk of it related to ADHD, but this is another part of the mystery, like she has been looking in funhouse mirrors her whole life, and now she has an accurate reflection of who she is, like a real, non-distorted mirror. She also has “severe” ADHD. David and Isabelle dig in with how negative this criteria is (which, side note, connects to Barkley’s research). Are we weather systems? Are we severely awesome? Maybe we change it to extremely? Gah. Asperger’s and the history of neurodivergence Articles and books on Dr. Russell Barkley Known as a big researcher of ADHD, does really good research, and pushes forward a lot of diagnostic criteria and is in a position of power changing the game for a lot of humans. The caveat that Isabelle and David often make is that: he takes a really doom and gloom, pathologizing perspective (which are scary research-based bits of information). Asperger’s Autism: you have 40% chance of ADHD, and then DEFINITIONSNote: “Neuropsych” is shorthand for BOTH a neuropsychological assessment or a neuropsychologist (which is confusing).Neuropsychologist is "an expert in how brain injuries and conditions affect your behavior, mood and thinking skills. ...
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    20 m
  • How can you trust the world when the world doesn't get you? - Neuropsychs Explored Part II

    How can you trust the world when the world doesn't get you? - Neuropsychs Explored Part II
    Mar 26 2025
    David and Isabelle go into greater depth about neuropsychological assessments--both back in the day and now-for kids, and for adults--and Isabelle's AHA moment about self-disclosing her AuDHD self. From the odd history of the intersection of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and ADHD (did you know you couldn't be diagnosed with both for a long long time?) to realizing how literally she takes the world and how much it helps to finally have a turn signal on the car that is her, David and Isabelle dive deep into unmasking and the mistrust we have for the world when we are so misunderstood.---Isabelle likes having her new neuropsychological results because someone who is not her got to tell her that she has autism, and David has a different experience. His story was like three different hours of testing done at school, and it spit out that he was Oppositional Defiant, and then only in college did it notice he had differences in spelling and then ADHD. His experience is watching clients have their kids be flagged by a pediatrician or teacher to be tested and then they want to retest themselves. But David is so scared he’d go in now and learn…he doesn’t have ADHD? And that Isabelle actually understands this, because there was a big gap (of several months) between the interview and the tests. Isabelle goes into further details around how she took her test in a little cubicle. And how for kids, it looks more like play, it involves an IQ test and way more details about processing speed, working memory, visual spatial reasoning, reading, symbols, numbers, etc. to help with understanding learning differences and accommodations. So Isabelle had to sit in a cubicle and stare at a computer and click on a mouse for fifteen minutes and it was awful. When he was a kid, David was pulled from class, he had no idea how long it was going to take, there was a person sitting there who was reading from a book and asking him questions. For kids, a level of buy-in becomes very important, it’s hard to get data when you’re a willing participant. For David, his first neuropsych showed how unwilling he was to participate, because it was something he was forced to do because there was “something wrong” and they were looking for what was wrong. This is not don’t like this anymore. It’s important to talk to someone who has been assessed to see how they liked their assessment. You can get a second opinion. There are people who specialize in different areas of neuropsychological testing. And someone who is great at diagnosing ADHD may not be great at diagnosing autism or vice versa. And up until 7 years ago or so, it was impossible to have both autism and ADHD be a primary diagnosis; which connected to insurance company lobbying when the DSM was being updated, ensuring that the rates of certain conditions wouldn’t skyrocket because that would impact insurance coverage and ability to cover/deny and all kinds of political and social isms. The history of diagnoses and what makes the cutoffs incorporates layers of ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia…all kinds of oppression. David names how important it was an opening when you could have a combined AuDHD diagnosis because it started to mean that these diagnoses of deficiency, and all the stereotypes around all autistics being nonspeakers or having high support needs, started to get busted and it became more encompassing, maybe even of strengths? It’s possible for us to be complex beings, being perceived as having ADHD or autism in another context. We are the keepers of the stigma, it was the ‘last thing we wanted to be.’ The other day, Isabelle’s kid went to the doctor, and she always felt the doctor was annoyed with her for being so literal and asking so many detail-oriented questions. Her kid answered the doctor’s question of “does your throat hurt?” By checking in and saying “No.” And she had a lightbulb flash and realized he was taking the doctor literally. So she tells her kid “You and me, we both take things really literally and answer questions extremely honestly. I think the doctor means when she asks if your throat hurts, she means across the last week or so and not necessarily all the time or right now.” And he answers, “YES!” And she saw the doctor warm up to her kid and to her and she felt the difference, and maybe it was the vulnerability or the disclosure. For David's friend, there was a significant amount of distrust in the world, there was a pattern of miscommunication and people asking you things that they don’t mean, when they learned they were autistic, their last instinct was to tell someone. But when they came back from the dentist, they talked about how much the light was bothering them, they gave me some glasses and made it so much better. David can't make us all believe we are safe, we can feel cared for when we tell people what we need and they respond. Statistically, some of the time, your need won't be missed and until...
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    21 m
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