Georgie Morse loves losing hours in her garden, seeing her ability to hyper focus on gardening tasks as a benefit of her ADHD.
“Hyper focus is probably the biggest positive, both from a work point of view but also from hobby point of view, like gardening or mountain-biking or whatever it is,” Ms Morse said.
“If you do manage to latch onto something, you will be entirely focused on it, you pay fantastic attention to detail.”
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But there are more downsides to the condition, with Ms Morse struggling with common symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“Day-to-day functioning is really difficult for me, I don’t function effectively,” she said.
“Time management, money management, health management, parenting, the consistency that children need is really difficult for me to give them.
“I’ve spent 30 years always trying to work to a schedule, be more organised, be on time.”
The struggle with executive functioning symptoms can create a financial burden for people living with ADHD, coined “ADHD tax”.
One way that has impacted Ms Morse has been through accumulating parking tickets and associated late payment fees.
“You pick up the ticket and go to pay it immediately but the tickets don’t register for 24 hours so I put it somewhere safe and never came back to it,” she explained.
“So over a two-year period, I probably racked up about $2,000 in parking fines, because each parking fine starts at about $45. And then with late fees, it gets to around $140 or $150.”
$8,000 mistake on parental leave form
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Psychologist Maddi Derrick — who also has ADHD — said that while neurotypical people sometimes struggled with forgetfulness or distraction, those symptoms were significantly worse for the ADHD community.
“With ADHD we’re experiencing it every day at a high level, it’s very pervasive across settings, it affects multiple aspects of life and there are these sorts of vicious cycles that can happen there,” she said.
Dr Derrick said there were differences in ADHD brains relating to attentional control and aspects of motivation, memory and time perception.
“And all of this makes it hard to do what is needed to do in daily life at the time when it’s needed to be done, in the way that actually suits the majority but doesn’t suit the ADHD neurotype,” she said.
Dr Derrick’s worst experience with ADHD tax led to her receiving $8,000 less in parenting payments than she was entitled to, after she misinterpreted a question on a form and received a baby bonus instead of paid parental leave.
“I tried to follow that up with Centrelink, followed it all the way through to the ombudsman, and was ultimately told ‘We’re sorry, we understand what happened, but there’s no law in place that allows us to change that’,” she said.
“As an organisation, they didn’t have the flexibility to allow for someone approaching their paperwork in a different way with a different neuro-type.”
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A Senate inquiry into ADHD in Australia this year looked at the experiences of the estimated one in 20 Australians living with the condition.
It found the associated costs have “deep and pernicious impacts on individuals’ lives that cannot be understated”.
Research estimates the total productivity cost of the condition to be $17,851 for every working-age Australian with ADHD.
Dr Derrick believed businesses and organisations issuing bills and fines should start to take diagnoses into consideration.
“We have disability parking spaces, we have parking spaces for parents with prams, because we understand that it’s more difficult for people under those circumstances to go about their daily life and we want to even the playing field,” she said.
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Dr Derrick said ADHD symptoms were largely invisible.
“So we need an awful lot of education to help society, as well as the organisations within it, understand where the challenges might be.
“To allow them to consider the fairness of policies and processes they put in place, and what steps there may be to be able to redress if they realise that they’ve actually created an unfair playing field there for the person with ADHD.”
Dr Derrick advised organisations to start with being more flexible.
“If you do have a neurodivergent person, same goes for autism as well as ADHD, to actually hear what they’re saying and be open to the idea that they’re genuine in that they hadn’t understood, that there was a difficulty with complying with a certain expectation.”
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