Reaching Out to Your Community

How can we best reach adults with ADHD who have no idea they have it? Based on my 12 years of advocacy, I'd say it is through people with ADHD talking about it openly and honestly with others in their day-to-day communities. In this way, others hear the facts about ADHD from people they already know instead of thinly drawn profiles in the media.

I jokingly refer to our Adult ADHD CHADD group in Palo Alto as  "ADHD without Borders," because the meeting routinely draws transplants from many countries, including China, India, Vietnam, Israel, Germany, and Brazil.

These people often express great relief to finally find a group who understands them, because their friends and family back home typically do not. Realizing the genetic connection, they cannot accept that ADHD is an "American invention." They clearly see that extended family members also have ADHD and they need to be educated. They vow to take the message back home and put ADHD in a context their friends and family can understand.