Penny Williams [00:00:03]: Welcome to the Beautifully Complex podcast, where I share insights and strategies on parenting neurodivergent kids straight from the trenches. I'm your host, Penny Williams. I'm a parenting coach, author, and mindset mama, honored to guide you on the journey of raising your atypical kid. Let's get started. Welcome, everyone. In this episode, we're doing something a little bit different. I want to play you an episode of another show that I think you will like and will be relatable for you. It's called Climbing the Walls.

Penny Williams [00:00:43]: This six part series investigates why women with ADHD have gone undiagnosed for so long, and how that changed dramatically during the pandemic when the diagnosis of ADHD in women skyrocketed. This show asked, why women? Why now? How has underdiagnosis impacted women's mental health? I checked out the first episode, and I was blown away, y'all. Not only is it shining a much needed spotlight on ADHD in women and girls, but it's full of so many facts about ADHD that are largely unknown to the public and rarely communicated to the individual or the parent at the time of diagnosis. They discuss so many things that I wish I had known when my kid was diagnosed instead of learning them on my own over multiple years. So here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

Danielle Elliott [00:01:50]: I've never been all that good at listening to instructions. When flight attendants ask passengers to put their phones on airplane mode, I don't. I usually scroll Instagram until we lose service. That's what I was doing one morning in February 2024. I was scrolling Instagram when the little red icon appeared in the top left corner of the app, a new message. I opened it. It was a link to a video. My thumb was hovering over it as the wheels lifted off the runway.

Danielle Elliott [00:02:19]: I saw the top half of the news anchor's head and the logo for Fox News. The screen froze like that. At the time, I was working on a film about affirmative action, so I assumed that the link had something to do with that. We were in the air for about six hours. And as we landed, I opened Instagram again. I saw four more messages. Everyone was sending me the same link. As it loaded, I realized it had nothing to do with affirmative action.

Unknown [00:02:47]: Adult women are being diagnosed with ADHD at a record pace. In just two years, diagnosis rate has nearly doubled. So what's driving

Danielle Elliott [00:02:56]: yes. ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Unknown [00:03:01]: Phones could be a root cause, but ironically, it's also what's raising awareness about it.

Danielle Elliott [00:03:06]: It was all over the news that week.

Unknown [00:03:08]: Joining us now is Brooke Schmidtman. She's an ADHD and executive function coach. It's great to have you here. So tell us why. Why women? Why now? Why are these diagnoses going up?

Brooke Schmidtman [00:03:20]: Diagnosis in ADHD is going, people are understanding more about themselves since the pandemic. So when we had so much downtime to really understand ourselves, that's when mental health was on the rise. And we

Danielle Elliott [00:03:34]: It seemed like Brooke had more to say, but the anchor jumped in.

Unknown [00:03:37]: So but what if you know, all of us are distracted because of our phones. Right? I can be reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page at night. I'm like, wait. Let me check what my sister just sent me on Instagram. But where's the line between someone who feels distracted because of their phone and someone who actually has ADHD and gets a diagnosis like that. And if at that point

Danielle Elliott [00:03:54]: I knew exactly why my friends were sending me this clip. Why are so many women being diagnosed with ADHD? Do they really have it? I started asking these questions sometime in the summer of twenty twenty two, a few months after I joined the ranks of the recently diagnosed.

Emily Mitchell [00:04:15]: Listening to a news anchor question the rise in diagnosis, I realized, I really do want to know. Why women? Why now?

Danielle Elliott [00:04:26]: For the last year or so, I've tried to answer these questions. I've talked to scientists, doctors, and I've talked to many, many women who have ADHD. Some who were recently diagnosed, others who have known for decades. This is a story about science, social expectations, stress, and the way we live. It's about who we trust. Most importantly, it's a story about women. This is Climbing the Walls. I'm Danielle

Emily Mitchell [00:05:04]: Elliott.

Danielle Elliott [00:05:11]: I had a fairly unique pandemic experience. I started dating someone in the first week. I was 35, and this was honestly my first relationship, unless, you know, you actually wanna count the revolving door of four month situations I've been in for the last ten years. Anyway, everything was new, and it was distracting me from everything else happening in the world. We moved in together. Things were good for a while. I remember waking up one morning and just staring at the wall, not really moving. I laid there long enough that my partner looked at me and said, are you okay? And still without moving, I said, we used to be able to get on planes and a few hours later land in a completely different part of the world.

Danielle Elliott [00:05:55]: I just miss being able to be anywhere else. A few months later, we got vaccinated. A A few months after that, we broke up. I stashed a few boxes at my parents' house, booked a flight, and left. I spent the next two months working remotely from Mexico and Belize, then went to California and Colorado for work. It was fun, but the whole time, I kept thinking about the night we broke up. We needed to break up. We both knew this was coming.

Danielle Elliott [00:06:22]: He initiated a conversation, and I exploded. I had this visceral reaction. I said things that I knew would cut deep. I couldn't look at him. I started packing, taking frames off the walls. I felt out of control and it felt really out of character. I don't yell at people, ever. I thought I'd learned to control my emotions.

Danielle Elliott [00:06:43]: But that night, I acted like a child. So three months later, I was still beating myself up over it. One night, I googled extreme reactions to rejection, And this article popped up about something called rejection sensitive dysphoria, RSD. I'd never heard of it. One magazine article described it like this. It is always triggered by the perceived or real loss of approval, love, or respect. It looks like an impressive, instantaneous rage at the person or situation responsible for causing the pain. Some people use the pain of RSD to find adaptations and overachieve.

Danielle Elliott [00:07:23]: They constantly work to be the best at what they do and strive for idealized perfection. The last section of the article started with this sentence. Rejection sensitivity is part of ADHD. I remember reading that sentence and thinking, wait. Do I have ADHD? I didn't really think I could because as far as I knew, ADHD meant you couldn't focus. When I'm interested in something or I have a deadline, I focus so well that I sort of forget the rest of the world exists. I found an article on ADHD. It explained that ADHD is a spectrum of attentional issues.

Danielle Elliott [00:08:01]: The next day, I talked to my therapist. She suggested I take a self screener. So I took it, and it said that I have symptoms of ADHD. And I, for lack of a better word, I pouted. I didn't wanna have ADHD. Everything I read said that women with ADHD struggle in relationships, careers, and as parents. I wanted to believe I'd figure these things out. And to hear I might have a condition that apparently makes it harder to do these things, it felt scary.

Danielle Elliott [00:08:34]: I booked a telehealth appointment with a psychiatrist. On a cold morning in February 2022, I sat down in front of my computer, logged into a video platform, and started talking to a psychiatrist.

Dr. F [00:08:48]: -It's also tricky. How do you make the diagnosis if it's not, like, so glaringly obvious to a child? Usually, it's the hyperactivity symptoms that that draw attention.

Danielle Elliott [00:08:58]: -There was a cop outside my window. I looked back at the screen and tried to focus on what the psychiatrist was saying. She seemed to be sitting on a bench at a kitchen table. I could see a green lawn behind her and wondered where she lived. I realized I was distracted and tried to tune back in. She was still explaining how teachers or doctors usually spot ADHD in kids.

Dr. F [00:09:17]: The teacher is saying, oh, Billy, you're really weak. Right? It's it's often harder when it's more more of the attentional symptom.

Danielle Elliott [00:09:24]: Right. Which I What the I was recording on my phone because I wanted to be able to listen back to what she said about treatment. I wanted to get this right. She explained that girls with ADHD are usually not as hyperactive or disruptive as boys with ADHD. And since they're not disturbing their classmates or their teachers, their symptoms go unnoticed. She asked me about my childhood. How did I do in school? Did I make friends? Do I have any specific memories? I told her stories from preschool, kindergarten, second grade, fifth grade, seventh grade. I asked her if ADHD is why I didn't talk or walk until a year after most kids my age.

Danielle Elliott [00:10:04]: My mom says she had me tested for special education preschool, but I didn't get in. In grad school, my adviser always said, Danielle, I think you have shiny ball syndrome. None of us suspected an actual syndrome. I just like chasing new ideas, usually before finishing whatever I'm working on. 10 into the call, the doctor said she thinks I have ADHD. I wanted this to be much more complicated. I wanted her to do a whole series of tests, but there are no definitive biological markers for ADHD. No blood test that says, yep, you have it.

Danielle Elliott [00:10:38]: Instead, the diagnosis is based on your experiences throughout your life and your family history. The official criteria is listed in a book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM. It's published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM says that symptoms of ADHD develop by the time a person turns 12. If the symptoms begin after that, it's not ADHD.

Dr. F [00:11:05]: Basically our executive function. Right? So the frontal lobe is the seat of a lot of this. Mhmm. And it's tricky. Our our frontal lobe is not fully developed into well into teenage years. So the way so again, this is a lot of executive function. So executive function is is a lot of part of our cognition.

Danielle Elliott [00:11:22]: She went on like this a little bit longer, talking about something called executive function, which I'd never heard of. Then she prescribed a stimulant, which is a type of medication often used to treat ADHD. And with that, I joined the ranks of what seemed to be a rapidly emerging demographic, women diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic. One $500 video appointment, and I was now one of those women Fox News was talking about. My insurance didn't even cover it. I wasn't sure I wanted to be on a stimulant. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear any of this, honestly. But I dug into it anyway, doing my research alongside self discovery.

Danielle Elliott [00:12:05]: That's what I do after all. I should mention, I'm a science journalist. I also produce documentaries and podcasts. The more I learned about ADHD, it was clear that I have it. And I learned that it was so much more than what I had thought it was. I thought it was about focus and attention, but it turns out it's also about emotional regulation and scheduling and your ability to stay organized and sustain interests. I read things that said people with ADHD have a constant battle between structure and stimulation, and that we have strong internal voices that are often completely set on telling us that we're doing everything wrong. On social media, there were a lot of women talking about ADHD.

Danielle Elliott [00:12:45]: And honestly, they all seemed a lot like me, college educated, mostly well adjusted white women who apparently wanted to be more adjusted, and that started to give me doubts. I would scroll through Instagram and TikTok and think, you all seem to have partners and children and big enough careers to help you reach large audiences on social media. If you have ADHD, how do you stay organized enough to create all this content? Is there any chance you're just capitalizing on this moment when ADHD seems to be trending? I don't like to minimize anyone else's experience. I think I was just pushing back against the idea that I had ADHD by proposing that maybe none of us women had it. That maybe we just weren't good enough. As if that's somehow better. You can't spell Danielle without denial. My notion of who was talking about ADHD started to expand when I moved into a new apartment that summer.

Danielle Elliott [00:13:58]: Great light, closet space, friendly building. I got to know three of the women on my floor. We were watching TV one night, and one of them mentioned her ADHD. Another one of the women jumped in and said, oh, I was diagnosed last year. Over the next few months, I started hearing this everywhere. A bartender at my favorite spot, two friends talking on the train, friends telling me about their moms being diagnosed. Unlike what I saw on social media, they weren't all white women. Then researchers published data that supported what I was seeing around me.

Danielle Elliott [00:14:30]: Tons of women are being diagnosed with ADHD. From 2020 to 2022, the rate of diagnosis skyrocketed. Okay. Let me get inside your head for a minute. You're probably thinking, what's the big deal? A lot of women were diagnosed with ADHD in the past few years. So what? Sounds like you made some new friends and got some helpful meds out of it. Why are you so mystified? Like, this subject needs a podcast mystified. Is this your latest shiny ball? It goes back to what the psychiatrist told me on the phone about why my own ADHD wasn't identified when I was a kid.

Danielle Elliott [00:15:07]: Girls tend to have different symptoms, she'd said. Hyperactivity is much less common. Our brains, though no less unique than that of any rambunctious boys, slipped under the radar. For many, many years, this was the accepted wisdom. Doctors weren't diagnosing ADHD in girls because they simply didn't know they had it. One doctor told me that in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, he was taught the ratio of boys to girls with ADHD was ten to one. On top of that, the medical community also firmly believed that people outgrow ADHD in adulthood. Those two beliefs together meant that very little thought was ever given to women, grown up adult women having ADHD.

Danielle Elliott [00:15:56]: When I was in grad school in 2013 and my adviser joked that I had shiny ball syndrome, she didn't consider that I might have ADHD. I was studying science journalism. I read so many journals and articles that year and never came across anything that would suggest such an idea. Obviously, something had changed in the last few years. Women with ADHD were now being found everywhere, from my apartment building to Fox News. I talked to dozens of women who, like me, went undiagnosed until recently. Women in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. One woman in her mid seventies.

Danielle Elliott [00:16:37]: So, yeah, that's my shiny ball. My podcast worthy question. Why women? Why now? One day, I was at a friend's birthday party, and someone said something I've never heard before. He said his mom was diagnosed with ADHD early back in 1963. I couldn't resist. A week later, I was in Michigan meeting his mom. If I wanted to figure out how we missed this in an entire generation of women, I felt like talking to someone who hadn't missed it was a pretty good place to start.

Emily Mitchell [00:17:13]: I was, famously active child, kinetic. The word then was hyperactive.

Danielle Elliott [00:17:20]: This is Emily Mitchell. She's a graphic designer in Traverse City, Michigan. We met at her house and sat in a basement office.

Emily Mitchell [00:17:27]: So I was famously hyperactive, kinetic, always moving. When you hit public school and you're in kindergarten as I was, there is nap time, and I couldn't sit still, lay still on my mat. My mother made me a chain of safety pins that we attached to my mat so I would have something to do.

Danielle Elliott [00:17:51]: That's like something to play with somewhat quietly.

Emily Mitchell [00:17:54]: She tried things that would help me, not conform, but to participate in what the structure of the day. And because I was young, I don't know how it went, but say the teacher complained, and then my mother took me to a doc our doctor, who was a pediatrician who was young. He was just out of med school. I mean, he was in a young crop of new pediatricians.

Danielle Elliott [00:18:18]: And this is in Michigan?

Emily Mitchell [00:18:19]: In Michigan, in the Detroit area. Oak Park, Michigan. And he I remember him. I was fond of him, and I felt special in his office, you know? And he he said to my mother, you know, Emily likes people, and the last thing she needs is to be a problem to her teacher as she starts her public education. That's not gonna be good for her. So it's something that we should try. And it was Ritalin. And I took it, and it helped.

Emily Mitchell [00:18:46]: It helped.

Danielle Elliott [00:18:47]: The first time we know of a doctor giving stimulants to kids is in 1937. About twenty years later, in 1955, the FDA approved Ritalin as a medication for adults battling depression and a handful of other conditions. Then in 1962, the FDA approved it for use in children with attentional deficits and hyperactivity. A year later, in 1963, a young pediatrician recognized this in six year old Emily, and he prescribed Ritalin.

Emily Mitchell [00:19:18]: I called it my silly pill, my silly pill. And that was just part of my life. So it helped me be a good student. And we didn't realize that until I stopped taking the Ritalin.

Danielle Elliott [00:19:29]: The American Psychiatric Association published the second edition of the DSM in 1968 when Emily was in fifth grade. This edition described a condition called hyperkinetic reaction of childhood. It's characterized by overactivity, restlessness, distractibility, and short attention span. The DSM said children outgrow this by the time they become teenagers. Emily was 11 years old, and she was starting to feel self conscious about her silly pill.

Emily Mitchell [00:19:57]: So when I was in fifth grade, I stopped taking it. Mhmm. And my grades immediately went down. And it didn't alarm my parents. You know? I I think it was just the thing to do at the time. You just you grow out of that. You don't have to take that anymore.

Danielle Elliott [00:20:10]: However like you had grown out of it? Like, did you as a fifth grader, do you remember them having a harder time sitting still or Yeah. You're nodding?

Emily Mitchell [00:20:19]: Couldn't focus on, you know, the evidences that my grades went down. And I I graduated high school undistinguished academically under three point o.

Danielle Elliott [00:20:28]: No one suspected that Emily's grades might somehow have been affected by this hyperkinetic energy because doctors thought kids outgrow the condition. She was in high school in 1971 when a Canadian psychologist named Virginia Douglas gave a speech that would change everyone's understanding of hyperactivity, hyperkinesis, and attentional disorders. This was at the annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Psychologists. Doctor. Douglas explained research she'd conducted at Montreal Children's Hospital, where she determined that hyperkinesis is associated with attentional deficits and impulsivity. Hyperkinetic reaction of childhood became known as attention deficit disorder, ADD. In 1980, the third edition of the DSM updated the diagnostic criteria and officially changed the name. By then, Emily was a recent art school grad living in Toronto.

Danielle Elliott [00:21:25]: She was married, building a life as a textile designer and weaver.

Emily Mitchell [00:21:29]: I wasn't even interested in the fuzzy stuff. It was the structure and the fact that you could do something with a slim piece of thread and turn it into a whole humankind's history of, you know, both art and function. It's an amazing history, and it was interesting to do. My husband

Danielle Elliott [00:21:46]: Emily started to gain a reputation in the art world. One of her pieces was exhibited at a museum in New York, but she and her husband were feeling the pull to move home to Michigan. They bought an old schoolhouse in Traverse City. It's a picturesque town right on the water. It's dreamy, and in many ways, so was their life. Financially, though, it was tough. Emily waitressed and continued making art. But being an artist in Traverse City, Michigan wasn't the same as being an artist in Toronto.

Danielle Elliott [00:22:16]: Her husband had started a graphic design firm.

Emily Mitchell [00:22:18]: So I joined the company, and we've been together as creative and life partners ever since.

Danielle Elliott [00:22:25]: What a life. She met someone and fell in love, built a creative career, moved to this beautiful place. They had two little boys. Emily absolutely loved being a mom. But a few years into joining her husband at the design firm, Emily was struggling at work.

Emily Mitchell [00:22:39]: So I'm in a business now with deadlines. I'm in business with a partner, someone who, in his case, was a champion workhorse, could get things done in a very structured way, on time, reliably, and at a high level, at a high professional standard. I am very good at generating ideas, but you have to close it up.

Danielle Elliott [00:22:59]: Meaning, you have to hit deadlines. And to hit those deadlines, you have to be decisive. She would start with lots of ideas. She could whittle the ideas down to three front runners.

Emily Mitchell [00:23:09]: And I might get stuck on the three. Okay. And say someone

Danielle Elliott [00:23:12]: else will say, this is the final.

Emily Mitchell [00:23:14]: Yeah. I just see the potential in everything. I might say, well, I really need to run out all three. You know? I need to take these three to the next level. Or and then while you're looking at the three, you might say, you know, this one has led me to a variation that and so on.

Danielle Elliott [00:23:28]: It was a problem because the schedules only allowed her to run through one final choice. She was doing three times the work, and it wasn't working. Emily was figuring this out as it was happening. The company was successful, and the work was demanding. She was in a high stakes environment. She loved it most days. But when deadlines approached

Emily Mitchell [00:23:49]: I suffered. So I was suffering at work. Also just the just the office environment. You got a list of things you have to get done every single day. So I found myself often staying up all night, and, that wasn't in some people's lives, that's not a problem. But it was difficult for my partner. It caused a lot of anxiety for him. That was, painful for me.

Emily Mitchell [00:24:13]: It was painful for me because I don't like letting people down, which you if you remember the doctor in kindergarten, Emily likes people. She does not like to be a problem to people. Mhmm. And I didn't when I was 24 or or 38 either. So I started wondering, It was just And you felt like

Danielle Elliott [00:24:31]: you were letting him down.

Emily Mitchell [00:24:32]: Yeah. Yeah. And but in the meantime, we we know we're starting to have a family of small children, and we're running this this business. So I think I spoke to a a guidance counselor, the local college, to double check that I had made a good decision. You know, it wasn't the profession. It was office work.

Danielle Elliott [00:24:51]: A good decision was in the job that you chose.

Emily Mitchell [00:24:53]: Yeah. Why am I unhappy in my job? You know, you know, why does this feel it's just so stressful. I ended up speaking to my family doctor. Mhmm. Annual physical. How are you? How are you doing? And he said, you know, you, you let's have a look at your brain. It might be just your brain that the way your brain is. So I

Danielle Elliott [00:25:18]: was mid nineties. Mhmm. Emily stopped to do the math. She counted on her fingers, and we laughed because this is something I do too. Emily thinks she talked to her doctor when she was 30, so that would be 1987 or 80 eight. They talked about her medical history, including the diagnosis in kindergarten and her silly pill. By then, doctors were starting to recognize that adults often have symptoms of ADHD. But officially, it was still considered a condition of childhood.

Danielle Elliott [00:25:46]: Emily was lucky to have a doctor who was up to date on the clinical findings.

Emily Mitchell [00:25:49]: So at 30, I was diagnosed Mhmm. With ADD. There's no mention of h. There's no h in there.

Danielle Elliott [00:25:57]: A revised edition of the DSM combined ADD and hyperactivity in 1987, now officially calling it ADHD. It was a controversial update and one that didn't quite reach Emily at the time. She still thought of her childhood condition and her ADD as separate things. It would be a few more years before she connected them. Still, she had her diagnosis, and it helped.

Emily Mitchell [00:26:20]: It answered a lot of questions about my path to that point, and it did help me make a list in my day job and stick to the list and to just use my time differently. There was impulsivity. It helped with that, less interrupting. So it was about work. The goal was to be productive at work.

Danielle Elliott [00:26:44]: And it worked. Emily is my idea of the best case scenario. Each time she recognized a challenge, she sought help, and she was diagnosed according to the most advanced scientific understanding of the time. Most women didn't have this sort of luck or privilege. Emily is quick to acknowledge that she comes from a highly educated, open minded family. She had access to great doctors, and they treated her appropriately. It helped that she had symptoms most commonly associated with boys. But still, her experience is rare.

Danielle Elliott [00:27:15]: Ideally, the science would have moved faster, but it advanced quickly enough to meet most of her needs. There was still one complication of her ADHD that she couldn't quite figure out. It wasn't about her ability to make deadlines. It had more to do with the way people treated her when she struggled with those deadlines. She grew up in a family where she was cherished and celebrated. She said she didn't really know criticism until she became an adult. Now people, including her husband, expected her to do things in certain ways. And when she didn't, they were harsh.

Danielle Elliott [00:27:48]: She struggled with this. For once, her doctors didn't have a new diagnosis. She read everything she could find on adult ADHD. She saw that someone was hosting a conference in Michigan to discuss adult ADHD, and she went.

Emily Mitchell [00:28:02]: I just was very curious about how to how to really thrive, you know, to really, stay with it about that brain trait and to, be in the company of people who were putting on workshops and conferences. They happened to be almost entirely by women, about women.

Danielle Elliott [00:28:23]: At one of these conferences, Emily picked up a book called Women with ADD.

Emily Mitchell [00:28:28]: My copy of that book is full of pencil on every page. It was about my job. It was also about my marriage and my partnership and what kind of partner I chose and how it was

Danielle Elliott [00:28:38]: playing out that way. The book was written by a woman named Sari Soldan. It was published in 1995. Emily said it helped her understand the emotional side of ADHD. For her, it was the final piece of the puzzle. But wait. Nineteen ninety five? What about that common story I'd heard that women were only now being diagnosed because up until recently, no one understood how ADHD impacts girls and women. I've seen versions of this story reported in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Post, and all over digital media.

Danielle Elliott [00:29:11]: I've heard it in newscasts. Friends say it. A psychiatrist said it to me as she diagnosed me. It's a clean story. I bought it and repeated it. Then I read Sari Salden's book, and I realized there's a problem with this version of events in which doctors just didn't know how women experience ADHD. The problem is, it's not true. Sari lives a few hours from Emily, so I went to see her.

Danielle Elliott [00:29:41]: And that day, she helped me understand my questions. Why women? Why now? In new ways.

Dr. F [00:29:47]: There was a huge fight keeping out adults and then women.

Danielle Elliott [00:29:51]: Sari was deep in this fight. She never planned to be a pioneer. But she became one when she wrote about what it's like for women with ADHD.

Dr. F [00:30:00]: You don't usually get to be there at the birth of a whole new way of looking at human beings. And that was what it was. That was why it was eye opener. It was like, wow. We can look at these people and ourselves through this new lens.

Danielle Elliott [00:30:11]: That's next time on Climbing the Walls. Climbing the Walls was written and reported by me, Danielle Elliott. It was edited by Neil Drumming, Sound design by Cody Nelson. Brianna Berry was our production director. Ash Beecher was our supervising producer. And Diana White was our associate producer. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. Research by Karen Watanabe.

Danielle Elliott [00:30:37]: Our music was composed by Kwame Brandt Pierce, with additional music provided by Blue Dot Sessions, and our mixing was done by Justin D Wright. This series was brought to you by understood.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. From understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cautier, and Seth Melnick. A very special thanks to Ray Jacobson, Julie Ziets, Jordan Davidson, Sarah Greenberg, and Kathleen Nadeau. If you want to help Understood continue this work, consider making a donation at understood.org/give.

Penny Williams [00:31:27]: That was the first episode of Climbing the Walls. Wasn't it fantastic? To listen to more episodes, search for Climbing the Walls in your favorite podcast app. That's Climbing the Walls. Thanks for joining me on the Beautifully Complex podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share. And don't forget to check out my online courses and parent coaching at parentingADHD and autism.com and at thebehaviorrevolution.com.