My Greatest Creative Fuel Was Blind Panic

In Vishnu Rao’s Own Words — from JYNM: “The High Performer Trap and the Cost of Excellence”

“Different does not mean wrong, and I am not alone.”

— Vishnu Rao

I looked at a photo of myself from three years ago recently, next to a photo of myself now. I look like I’ve aged ten years in that gap. I spent most of that time thinking I just had bad anxiety and depression. I was forty before I learned those were symptoms, not the whole story.

I’m a clarity strategist and storyteller, married to a therapist, and I spent years in advertising before moving into independent strategy work. I was diagnosed with AuDHD — autism plus ADHD — and OCPD at forty, after a workplace crisis finally forced the question nobody had asked before.

1. The Mask Breaks Eventually — Mine Broke at Work

Masking is easy as a kid, mimicking whatever’s rewarded around you. In adulthood there are too many competing models to imitate — it’s like a scene from The Twilight Zone where faces keep shifting and nothing is clear. Eventually the mask breaks, either through burnout or something catastrophic. I didn’t realize how much effort I’d been spending on it until after my diagnosis. What I’d always called ordinary tiredness turned out to be years of accumulated masking fatigue. What I thought was sleeping in on weekends was actually my brain shutting down from sheer boredom, not genuine rest.

2. Anxiety and Depression Were the Symptom, Not the Root

For years I was told anxiety and depression were the conditions themselves. My diagnosis reframed them as symptoms of undiagnosed executive dysfunction. I had an all-or-nothing relationship with big tasks — I could only see the distant summit, never the steps — which produced repeated panic spirals under deadline pressure that eventually generalized into chronic anxiety. I was also strongly non-confrontational, and I later realized I simply lacked the mental bandwidth to process conflict live, so I’d replay entire arguments silently in my head instead of ever actually having them.

3. The Body Keeps Score, Even When You Refuse to Read It

I ignored warning signs for years: sleep that functioned as emergency shutdown rather than recovery, Sunday-night dread producing literal cold sweats before Monday meetings — which I later understood wasn’t fear of being shouted at, it was exhaustion at repeating the prior week’s depletion all over again. Tension headaches, weight gain, visibly accelerated aging. The tipping point came after a workplace blow-up, when a founder who recognized the pattern personally connected me to a psychiatrist. A real clinical assessment — not an online quiz I could game to give the answer I wanted — got me the diagnosis, and eventually medication I’d feared for years would blunt my creativity. It didn’t.

4. “Don’t Be a Burden” Was the Script Keeping Me Isolated

I carried this internalized rule for years: you deserve to carry your own struggles rather than burden someone else with them. I think that script is a hallmark neurodivergent trait, and it kept me isolated far longer than it needed to. Most neurodivergent people I’ve met only recognized themselves after meeting another neurodivergent person and seeing their own reactions mirrored back at them. My advice to someone newly suspecting they’re neurodivergent isn’t “get tested immediately” — self-testing can be exploited, and labels dropped too casually can backfire. Find real community first. Find someone else who gets it.

Tools & Strategies

Self-imposed artificial deadlines — manufacturing structure since freelance work removes the external office kind.
Time-based client billing — allocating fixed hours per client to avoid over-investing in one relationship.
Formal diagnostic assessment over self-testing — a clinician-guided evaluation instead of an online quiz I could game.
Third-space peer support groups — informal, recurring meetups as an accessible entry point before or alongside formal diagnosis.

Every journey is almost 99% the same. We may have different stops, our sceneries might look different, but the tracks are all the same. The fact that your story is the same as someone else’s story is not a bad thing.

Listen to the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=y3VHHvSCexM

Topics covered: #AuDHD #LateDiagnosis #Burnout #Masking #ADHDAtWork #Neurodivergence

How Far Behind Is India, Really?

In Dr. Neena David’s Own Words — from JYNM: “ADHD, School Stress & Family Burnout”

“Keep your foot on the accelerator.”

— Dr. Neena David

Very early on in my clinical practice, at an ADHD conference in Washington, an American researcher asked me how far behind India was from the West on understanding ADHD. That question bothered me sufficiently and over the next few years began to intentionally inform my doctoral research. The need to contextualize ADHD with respect to cultural differences, came up as an important blank to fill.

I’m a Clinical Psychologist with over twenty-seven years working with children, adolescents, adults, and familiesI have an independent psychotherapy practice working with adults and couples and I head the Counselling Services Team at Mallya Aditi International School. I received clinical training at NIMHANS and completed doctoral research at TISS, Mumbai.

1. The Six-to-Seven-Year Gap Between a Teacher Noticing and a Parent Acting

My research found ADHD in India is identified overwhelmingly through the school lens, not through parents proactively consulting pediatricians — teachers effectively function as proxy clinic settings. Academic dips, not behavior concerns, are usually what finally pushes a parent to seek help, creating an average six-to-seven-year gap between a teacher first flagging concerns and a parent acting on them. India’s guru-shishya tradition compounds this: a child avoiding eye contact while a teacher speaks, plausibly an ADHD or anxiety trait, gets read as disrespect toward the teacher-as-guru instead of as a symptom. That value judgment shuts down communication, even though my research found teachers, once attentive, could identify struggling kids with an accuracy that closely matched formal diagnostic questionnaires.

2. What an ADHD-Friendly Classroom Actually Looks Like

Minimizing chaos through predictable routines, knowing every child by name, seating that reduces traffic and stimulation rather than simply putting a child at the front, multi-modal instructions combining visual and verbal, and built-in movement breaks, since attention naturally dips after roughly twelve to thirteen minutes. I stress catching and affirming already-on-task students, not only reacting to disruption — a simple “I like how you’re sitting and ready” can reset an entire class without shouting. To redirect a student without publicly singling them out, I recommend private, pre-agreed nonverbal cues, like two taps on the desk, alongside one-on-one relationship-building check-ins.

3. The Family-Systems Paradox: High Stress and High Growth, Together

When a child is neurodivergent, the whole family becomes the system absorbing and adapting, often unequally — patriarchal norms in India typically leave mothers as the default sole caregiver, even as more fathers begin stepping in. Distinct roles solidify: a parentified sibling who becomes a proxy parent, a hero child who overachieves to compensate, a rebel child who becomes a distraction. My research surfaced a genuine paradox: high reported stress coexists with equally high reported empathy, resilience, and growth across family members. I compare resilient families to earthquake-zone bamboo houses, built lightweight to bend and recover rather than never break.

4. When the Parent Is Neurodivergent Too

Mothers consistently show higher rates of anxiety and depression than fathers when raising a child with additional needs, constantly shock-absorbing a logistical crisis alongside an unaddressed emotional one. Asking for help — even paying for therapy or taking an evening for yourself — is a sign of resilience, not selfishness, despite society judging women far more harshly than men for doing exactly that. There’s a quieter, harder case too: a parent who is themselves undiagnosed neurodivergent, whose dysregulation spikes in sync with their child’s. Parents in that position have to recognize and work on their own patterns before they can consistently regulate and support their child.

Tools & Strategies

Nonverbal redirection cues — a private, pre-agreed signal to refocus a child without calling them out publicly.
Strategic seating — placing a child away from high-traffic, high-stimulation zones, not just at the front of the room.
Affirming visible on-task behavior — noticing focused students out loud resets classroom tone more effectively than correcting disruption.
Built-in movement breaks — structured around the natural twelve-to-thirteen-minute attention span.

There is no perfect script. There are a lot of curve balls that will come at you as a parent, as a family member. But you are not alone. And if you pay attention, reach out, and ask for help, you will definitely find it.

Listen to the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=gLTPqFGy9y4

Topics covered: #ADHD #IndianClassrooms #ParentingND #FamilySystems #LearningDisabilities #NeurodivergentParenting

Why ADHD in Girls and Women Gets Missed — And What That Costs

By The Misfit Collaborative

The diagnostic criteria for ADHD were developed primarily from studies of young boys. This is not a conspiracy — it’s a research history. Boys with ADHD tended to be loud about it: hyperactive, disruptive, impossible to ignore. Girls with ADHD tended to be quieter about it: inattentive rather than hyperactive, internalising rather than externalising, compensating through effort and people-pleasing until the whole scaffolding collapsed.

The result is a generation of women who were never diagnosed as children, who spent decades believing something was fundamentally wrong with them, and who are only now finding out what that something actually is.

In India, where girls’ difficulties are additionally likely to be attributed to emotional sensitivity, family stress, or not being academically gifted, the gap between girls with ADHD and girls with a diagnosis is wider still.

How ADHD presents differently in girls

ADHD has three presentations: predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, and combined. Girls are more likely to present with the inattentive type — and the inattentive type is the one most likely to be missed.

Where a hyperactive boy disrupts the class, an inattentive girl sits quietly at the back and disappears into her own head. She’s not causing problems. She may even appear compliant. The teacher doesn’t flag her, because she’s not flagging herself.

What she is doing:

Daydreaming. Not as a choice, but as the default state of an under-stimulated brain seeking input.

Losing things. Constantly. Keys, pencils, books, the form she was supposed to return. Not carelessness — working memory and object-permanence difficulties.

Starting but not finishing. A trail of half-completed projects, brilliant beginnings that never made it to submission.

Hyperfocusing on the things she loves. For hours, without noticing time passing — which confuses the people who’ve been told she can’t concentrate.

Emotional sensitivity and rejection sensitivity. The ADHD brain processes social rejection intensely. Many girls with ADHD describe a terror of getting things wrong socially, a hypervigilance around how they’re being perceived, a devastation at criticism that feels completely disproportionate to others.

Exhaustion. Compensating — through effort, through people-pleasing, through working twice as hard to produce the same output — is tiring. By adolescence, many girls with undiagnosed ADHD are clinically burnt out.

What masking looks like

Girls are socialised to mask. From early childhood, girls receive feedback that regulates their behaviour: be quieter, be tidier, don’t interrupt, be helpful, be agreeable. This socialisation doesn’t cause ADHD, but it does shape how ADHD expresses — and it produces a performance of neurotypicality that can be convincing to everyone, including sometimes to the person doing it.

Masking looks like:

Watching others carefully and mirroring what they do
Developing scripts for social situations
Overcompensating on organisation (colour-coded planners that take more energy to maintain than they save)
Getting very good at apology and self-deprecation to pre-empt criticism
Pushing through exhaustion rather than disclosing difficulty

The problem with masking is that it works just well enough to prevent diagnosis — and not well enough to prevent the cumulative cost. The girl who masks successfully through school often collapses in university or early adulthood, when the external structure disappears and the internal scaffolding reveals itself as entirely borrowed.

The late-diagnosis experience

Many women are diagnosed with ADHD in their thirties, forties, or fifties — often triggered by their child’s diagnosis, or by burnout, or by coming across a description of ADHD that finally sounds like them.

The response to late diagnosis is rarely simple. There is often grief — for the years of unnecessary struggle, the relationships damaged by misunderstanding, the potential not realised because the support wasn’t there. There is anger. And, very often, profound relief: a framework that finally explains a lifetime of experiences that previously made no sense.

In India, adult ADHD is barely on the diagnostic radar at all. Many GPs and psychiatrists are not trained to identify it in adults, let alone in adult women. The route to diagnosis is long, expensive, and dependent on finding a specialist who knows to look.

What actually helps

Early identification is the obvious answer — but the systems that enable early identification (trained teachers, informed school counsellors, awareness of inattentive presentation) are not consistently in place.

In the meantime:

Know the signs — particularly the inattentive and emotional presentation, which doesn’t look like the ADHD most people imagine
Take girls’ struggles seriously — “she’s just a worrier” and “she’s very sensitive” are not sufficient explanations for children who are clearly struggling
Push for assessment — a psychoeducational assessment is the route to understanding; a diagnosis is the route to support
Read widely — the books in our ADHD reading list include specific titles on women and girls, including A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD and You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!

The late-diagnosed woman who finally understands what she’s been dealing with isn’t failing to cope with ordinary life. She’s been coping with ADHD without a map, without support, and usually while being told that whatever she was experiencing was her own fault. Understanding that reframes everything — including what support she deserves going forward.

If you’re trying to build better identification and support for girls with ADHD in your school, we’d love to work with you.

The Misfit Collaborative offers training for Indian schools on identifying and supporting ADHD across genders — not just the presentations that are easy to see.

7 Books About ADHD Worth Actually Reading

TMC Takes: Book Recommendations

If someone handed you a book about ADHD every time you googled “why can’t my child just sit still,” you’d have a small library by now — and most of it would be useless. So we did the filtering for you.

These seven are the ones that actually hold up. Some are clinical, some are personal, some are both. All of them will make the experience of ADHD — your child’s, your student’s, your own — feel less confusing and a lot less like someone’s fault.

Quick answers to things people usually ask:

Best first book? Driven to Distraction. It’s been around since 1994 and nothing has replaced it.

Books for women and girls? A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD — because women and girls are underdiagnosed everywhere, and that’s even more true in India.

Books for people who figured it out late? Smart but Stuck and You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! — both written specifically for people who spent years wondering why they couldn’t just get it together.

The List

1. Driven to Distraction — Edward Hallowell & John Ratey

The one everyone recommends, and they’re right to. Hallowell and Ratey are both psychiatrists and both have ADHD themselves, which means they write about it from the inside — with warmth and humour and zero condescension. It’s the book that makes people go “oh. oh.” This is where to start.

Good for: The newly diagnosed, the recently parenting, the “I’ve always suspected” crowd

2. ADHD 2.0 — Edward Hallowell & John Ratey

Three decades of new science, in one book. Includes research on the Default Mode Network (which finally explains the boredom-as-agony thing) and updates on everything from medication to emotional regulation. Read this after the first one, or instead of it if you want the current version.

Good for: People who’ve already done the introductory reading and want to go deeper

3. Scattered Minds — Gabor Maté

The book that changed the conversation. Maté — also a physician, also ADHD — argues that the condition can’t be understood without looking at emotional context: early relationships, stress, environment. It’s not a replacement for clinical understanding, but it adds something most clinical texts miss entirely.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering whether your child’s ADHD and their anxiety are connected, this is a good place to sit with that question.

Good for: Parents processing a complicated picture | Anyone whose ADHD and emotional history feel tangled together

4. You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! — Kate Kelly & Peggy Ramundo

The title is the whole thesis. Written by adults with ADHD, for adults with ADHD — and it reads like one. Funny, honest, and deeply validating, especially for the person who was called “bright but scattered” for thirty years before anyone thought to check whether something else was going on.

Good for: Late-diagnosed adults | Parents who see themselves in their child’s diagnosis

5. The ADHD Advantage — Dale Archer

Archer’s argument: the same traits that make ADHD hard in a conventional setting — hyperfocus, risk tolerance, adaptability — are exactly the traits that make some people brilliant in the right context. It’s a useful reframe, though best read alongside something more clinical so the real challenges don’t get glossed over.

Good for: Adults who are starting to own their neurotype rather than apologise for it

6. Smart but Stuck — Thomas E. Brown

This one is for the person who is clearly, demonstrably capable — and still cannot get through a regular week without something falling apart. Brown explores the gap between intelligence and executive function with unusual precision, and explains why people with this profile often go undiagnosed for so long.

Good for: High-achieving students, late-diagnosed adults, and the school counsellors trying to figure out why the “smart” kid isn’t performing

7. A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD — Sari Solden & Michelle Frank

ADHD in women and girls has its own presentation — more internal, more masked, more often mistaken for anxiety or people-pleasing or just being “a lot.” This book names all of it clearly and without apology. The word “radical” in the title is doing real work.

Good for: Women at any stage of the diagnosis process | Mothers who recognise themselves in their daughter

Most of these books were written in Western contexts, and they show that. But the experience they describe — masking, shame, the exhaustion of performing “normal” — isn’t Western. It’s deeply recognisable to anyone navigating ADHD in an Indian school system that still doesn’t quite believe it’s real.

Want to talk books, training, or building actual ADHD support in your school? We’d love to hear from you.

TMC Takes: we recommend it because it’s good, not because it’s popular.