Help Managing Adult Child's ADHD & OCD

[Sonbon1]

Hi - am new to this forum and would like to understand how to help my son become independent, and am wondering if it will ever happen. He is 25, diagnosed at age 19 with both ADHD and OCD after failing out of college because he could not concentrate. He had been an exceptional HS student and graduated with honors and scholarships. He told me he never opened a book in HS, so college was a complete shock. All of a sudden everything fell apart, much to our dismay. He stopped going to class, abused OTC meds in an effort to stay awake and fall asleep, and eventually attempted suicide. Since that time he has not finished school, although he has tried but either stops going or fails his classes. He is currently working fulltime and planning to finish. He has a difficult time getting up in the morning, staying on a schedule, and getting to places on time. He has been fired twice in the past year for being late. Last year he went through a bad breakup and moved back home with us. He was financially drained and emotionally spent because of his girlfriend, who has been charged with domestic abuse against him. We are in the middle of an upcoming trial regarding the abuse.

My fear is he will be with us forever, and we all need to move on with our lives. If he moves out, will he get up and go to work on time or sleep all day? When he is home, we at least can monitor his activities and keep him on track. He doesn't seem to be concerned with bills - lets his mail lay around for days before finally opening it after I say something. At times he's like a 25-year-old toddler. Are there services available to help him? Mental health is impossible to navigate, and although he is seeing a psychiatrist and doctor for his medication management, there is nothing available to help him with his day-to-day life. Where can we turn? I am a prisoner in my own home because I'm afraid to leave him. I fear he won't get up and go to work, will get fired and then will be here every day, unemployed. It's not a healthy environment for either of us.

Also, are the ADD and OCD meds he is on something he will take for life? Are there programs available to help him cope and give him the skills to cope? As a parent of an adult child, there is little I can do to force him to pursue any support groups, but I can at least try to convince him of the benefits.

Thanks to anyone who can give me some insight.

[dubstepMaul]

wow, I am in similar situation. My son is 27, dropped out of college, has only had part time jobs and just got fired from a job he loved, at that time he was considering a future in law enforcement. He has never moved out and I fear he never will. He was diagnosed ADHD when he was 6, all school years were a terrible struggle. He also suffers from frequent debilitating migraines so that is another struggle. He tried to go back to school, took one class and failed it.

I think our boys need a life coach, but I know mine would never go for it.

[Sonbon1]

I thought about the life coach - at what point do we stop paying for counseling, coaching, etc? He certainly does not have the means to. Is the life coach something that insurance covers? This is all foreign territory for me.

[HadEnuf]

I will say, he's probably anything BUT unconcerned (e.g., about bills): more likely, he's completely overwhelmed; and very likely you can add PTSD to the alphabet soup, thanks to the abuse. It's going to be a rough climb, and there WILL be falls: the risk—especially with OCD on top of the greatly-intensified emotion of ADHD—is that one of these falls could become self-perpetuating if allowed to further erode what sense of worth he has left.

Overcoming all the inadvertent bad training we receive (much self-inflicted, make no mistake) is often a bigger job than managing our actual symptoms: it can in some ways be likened to re-adapting to a foreign culture we previously misunderstood because it was so utterly alien to us, on first contact.

I know. I've been there. I'm still very much a work in progress. Even without OCD, there have been times that were simply excruciating; and there will most likely be more of them. I've been lucky enough to manage somehow to fend for myself through much of the upheaval; but there have been times I had to take on and repay some large debts to family, and my retirement savings have been wiped out repeatedly. Not giving up and retreating to live homeless under a highway bridge (my ultimate terror) is a too-frequent battle I would not wish on anyone.

My single most important advice to anyone without ADHD trying to help someone with it?

Never presume our actions mean the same as they might were they your own, nor that you know what we think or feel. (Indeed, it is wise not to make these presumptions with anyone, at any time.) Also, don't let us assume we know what you think or feel: we learn to expect others' disapproval, rejection and wrong assumptions more or less by default, and we are no less prone to project our expectations on others than anyone else might be.

Hearing anyone without ADHD express empathy rather than disapproval and projection of motives nothing like our own is so shocking to many of us that we might be tempted to reject it as a pose. (Writing this, I realize it touches on the notion of projection as a perversion of empathy.) Don't let us do that: LET US SEE YOU SHARE OUR PAIN GENUINELY, SO WE CAN KNOW WE ARE NOT ALONE IN A HARSH AND UNFORGIVING WORLD. This can lift the single, greatest burden that saps our potentially prodigious strength.

The cost of not breaking through our disillusion?

Failing to suspend (often wrong!) judgment can lead to a pernicious pattern reflected to some extent in both your son's having fallen into an abusive relationship and his neglect of routine (like bills): we tend to lose the ability to distinguish whether others' demands are reasonable or not. As Asconsequence, we may become overwhelmed even by reasonable demands and avoid them with every bit as much vigor as we should those less reasonable.

Much of this develops from the combination of others' expectation bias and our perverse ability to focus in crisis (when others might panic visibly), but often not when calm: others pressure us when we indicate discomfort with a request, until a massive, panic-driven madrenaline surge enables us to get it done in “fight mode” (after which we crash and burn, like anyone else pushed to the limit), reinforcing the assumption we “could have done it, just didn't want to” because others have no idea that the cumulative pressure was equivalent to force-feeding a month's supply of ADHD medication at once (which would leave anyone else tweaked out like a stereotypical meth-head).