Pulled from a tunnel and into the light

Wei Ling observes that many parents neglect signs of ADHD, and take their children to hospital after teachers have suggested them several times.[Photo by Jiang Dong/ China Daily]

Focused

The Beijing man says that throughout his childhood and adolescence his parent and teachers did not understand him, believing he was smart, but that he did not study enough. Though he could be very easily distracted as far back as he can remember, he says, he could also be highly focused and engaged, and learnt very quickly if he was interested in the subject matter at hand.

"If you put degrees of attention and concentration on a scale, you find children with ADHD can frequently move from one extreme to the other," he says. "What they lack is something in between, the ability to give a moderate amount of concentration and to do so steadily and continuously."

As a child he cared a lot about the comments teachers made about him and his work, and he was highly sensitive about the way they treated him, particularly when he was being scolded for being "disobedient" or for failing tests.

If a teacher was anything other than extremely patient and understanding, school verged on the intolerable, and he felt increasingly anxious and depressed, he says.

School texts were virtually a closed book for him because all he could do was dip into them and read a few passages or pages, the task of reading from start to finish being impossible.

The extensive knowledge that he did pick up from reading a lot of books, although not thoroughly and completely, combined with his high IQ enabled him to perform more than adequately at primary school and junior middle school, but in high school, learning became extremely difficult, requiring more detail-oriented study and strong powers of logic. His academic performance was so bad that he became depressed and often skipped school for months.

Even when he had done well in tests when he had been younger, he felt anxious and insecure, he says, because he was aware that he paid little attention to studies, and managed to wing it through tests, passing only as a result of good luck.

"I didn't know what was wrong with me, and I despised myself."

In those days, when his family lived in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, no one around him had ever heard of ADHD, and looking back on what he has been through, he says, he is grateful to his parents, who were highly supportive and often put a lot of effort into getting him special attention and care from teachers.

His mother, who had done some psychology training while preparing for college entrance exams, chose to motivate him to behave and study hard in a positive way, rather than resorting to scolding and punishment, he says.

However, even if he had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child, he doubts that his parents would have dared tell anyone.

"Children can often be extremely cruel, and anyone who discloses that they have a mental illness is going to be picked on because there is 'something wrong' with them. I think that if my classmates had known about my ADHD they would have ostracized me."