WOMEN IN AESTHETIC MEDICINE

THE WOMEN WHO WERE MISSED

As more and more women receive ADHD diagnoses later in life, Vicky Eldridge asks what neurodiversity means for the women working in aesthetic medicine

If I had a pound for every time someone told me they thought I had undiagnosed ADHD, I’d be able to take myself out for a nice slap-up meal. Unsolicited diagnoses aside, as I’ve entered perimenopause and read more about the number of women being diagnosed later in life, it’s made me wonder: what if I am one of the many women who have spent their life masking in order to fit in?

It’s a question that seems to be coming up for increasing numbers of us in midlife. For some, it follows a child being assessed for ADHD or autism and identifying with many of the traits being discussed. For others, it comes when ways of coping that have worked for decades suddenly don’t seem to work quite so well anymore.

Dr Sarah Jenkins, a women’s health and menopause specialist who lives with AuDHD, believes perimenopause can be a tipping point. She says many women have spent decades managing careers, raising families and maintaining social lives while believing that the “internal exhaustion” they experienced was simply the cost of modern adulthood.

“My patients describe this feeling like ‘suddenly falling off a cliff’,” she says. “They suddenly cannot function like they used to.”

WIAM board member and editor Anna Dobbie understands that feeling. She was diagnosed with ADHD 10 years ago, but after turning 40, found her concentration became less reliable, her sleep more disrupted and everyday tasks required considerably more effort.

“I knew I had ADHD, but I had not expected that perimenopause would change how it felt,” she says. “The balance I had found suddenly shifted.”

BUT ARE WE ALL MASKING?

WIAM board member and aesthetic nurse Tracey Dennison has never received a formal diagnosis, although, like me, she has been unofficially told she may have ADHD.

“It’s a tricky one because the way my brain works is all I have ever known,” she says. “Overwhelm is a big thing, but then I do a lot, so anybody would feel overwhelmed, I think.”

Masking particularly resonates with her and for me too. “Masking is a huge thing, which I did all the way through school in particular. But then people have a desire to fit in naturally, so do we all mask as well?”

Yet she also recognises behaviours that will be familiar to many people with ADHD.

“I have to impose structure on myself, so I don’t start 10 jobs all at once and leave them all unfinished,” she says. “Lists are a must every single day, and I do drop the ball sometimes, thinking I have answered messages when I haven’t – I have just read them and moved on to the next thing.”

This is definitely one of the things I resonate with. I struggle to function without a list to focus me. I always leave things to the last minute, which is probably why I have always needed the adrenaline rush of a newspaper or magazine deadline to move things over the line in my work life. I really struggle with procrastination and avoidance when I am overwhelmed and I am highly emotionally sensitive, particularly when it comes to any sort of perceived criticism. But would a diagnosis help? Dobbie says it did for her. “The diagnosis did not make those difficulties disappear. It did, however, give me a system for understanding them”, she says.

THE NEUROSPICY ENTREPRENEUR

Dennison also raises an interesting question about the type of women drawn to aesthetic medicine.

“I think many people in a clinical entrepreneurial space have neurospicy ‘tisms’ and it is part of what makes us effective and capable,” she says.

The flip side is the hidden effort required to keep everything functioning. As Dobbie points out, “You can be successful at work, raise children, manage a household and appear highly organised while putting enormous amounts of energy into making sure nobody sees how hard some of it feels, but perimenopause can challenge that carefully designed system.”

MAKING ROOM FOR DIFFERENT MINDS

For PAUSE Live founder Charlotte Body, discovering ADHD in midlife has also changed how she thinks about inclusion.

“When I entered midlife, I never expected ADHD to become part of my story,” she says. “Yet understanding my neurodiversity has been one of the most empowering experiences of my life. It helped me realise that many women are navigating similar challenges without the support or diagnosis to make sense of them.”

This year, PAUSE Live has introduced a dedicated Neurodiversity Space alongside sessions exploring ADHD in women, masking and hormonal change, creating somewhere quieter and more sensory-friendly for attendees to step away from the intensity of a busy event.

Dennison would like to see similarly practical thinking across other industry events.

“Having areas in conferences where you can stand to listen really helps – I cannot do sitting for long periods of time – and equally quieter spaces to decompress in are really valuable to me personally.”

Crucially, neither adjustment requires someone to disclose a diagnosis to benefit from it. Perhaps neuroinclusion isn’t about identifying who in the room has ADHD or autism, but questioning whether everyone needs to sit still, network in a noisy exhibition hall or absorb information in precisely the same way.

“We need to be cognisant that we all have different personality types regardless of any neurodiversity, and within that we all have things that work for us and things that don’t,” says Dennison. “It’s a huge subject, but great to start the conversation.”

Dennison is right; it is a great start to the conversation and it’s made me think: perhaps it’s time to start thinking differently about the ways we all learn to function, fit in and succeed. I don’t know if I will ever get a formal diagnosis, but what I do know is that the more we talk openly about neurodiversity, the more I feel its ok that we all think, feel and experience the world differently and that makes the world and the aesthetics industry a richer place to be in.