Dan has a PhD – and ADHD. He’s extremely intelligent, but many of the executive function tasks other people take for granted – paying bills, taking out the trash, cleaning the house – are often beyond him. In the second of our series of fictionalized accounts of the barriers people experience to getting housing, we’ll look at Dan’s journey.
Somehow Dan muddled through college. He had a reputation as an “absent-minded professor” and people forgave his erratic timekeeping, forgetfulness, and haphazard housekeeping. After being awarded his doctorate he went back to live with his mother who kept the house clean, paid the bills, and made sure Dan got to work on time – where his flashes of brilliance in his chosen field were just about enough to compensate for his scattershot approach to everything else.
This was fine – until Dan’s mom died. The effort of taking on all the tasks his mom had taken care of began to grind Dan down and he became extremely depressed – and, as the state of his home and his ability to manage his job deteriorated – deeply ashamed. In a downward spiral lasting several years, Dan lost his job, his sobriety, his home, and his self-respect.
Now living on the streets, Dan retreated from other people, getting a reputation for being an abrasive loner with a caustic tongue. He would not accept help from anyone. But a shelter worker saw him reading a detective novel and – seeing a shared interest – engaged him in conversation about it. Over the next decade, a tentative sense of trust developed.
By this time the shelter worker was working for Friends In Deed’s Street Outreach and Housing team, and the stars aligned – somebody Dan trusted enough to help him was in a position to be able to help him. Dan moved into a motel and even agreed to see a psychologist about his ongoing and profound depression. It was this psychologist who – considering Dan’s life history and the significant discrepancy between his academic and executive function abilities – finally identified and diagnosed Dan’s severe ADHD.
Unfortunately, Dan’s history of substance abuse means his doctor won’t prescribe him the stimulant medications that are often the most effective treatments for ADHD. However, knowledge of the diagnosis has begun to erode some of Dan’s shame and deep self-hatred, there are other treatments to try, and in the meantime Dan is finally on the path to independent housing.