A(Anxiety)DHD By Zoe Schiff

Living with anxiety is hard enough. Living with ADHD too? The disorders practically feed off each other, making every decision a tug of war and every task more difficult to focus on.

It has been found that about 50% of adults with ADHD are also living with an anxiety disorder (Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 2015). Another estimate states that anxiety is as common as 30 to 40% among adults with ADHD (Tartakovsky, 2013). Anxiety is indisputably the most prevalent mental illness in the U.S., and it impacts 18% of adults. Anxiety does not spare children, either, affecting one in eight (National Institute of Mental Health, 2005). It can keep these children from performing to their potential in academic settings, isolate them from social occasions, and increase the risk of substance abuse (Anxiety and Depression Association of America 2015).

It is often coupled with a disorder such as ADHD, which has implications enough on its own in the classroom—difficulty paying attention, consistently demonstrating a failure to understand or follow rules or complete required tasks…had persistent academic difficulties that resulted in the following: lower average marks, more failed grades, more expulsions, more dropout rates (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). ADHD has hallmark symptoms that are amplified by anxiety: Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). While symptoms vary according to the anxiety disorder, the general symptoms of anxiety include: Feelings of panic, fear, and uneasiness, problems sleeping, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, an inability to be still and calm…muscle tension (WebMD, 2015). Paying attention in class or in a meeting when one is both unable to sit still due to visceral fear and due to a disorder with symptoms that disrupt ones daily life can be exceedingly stressful and exhaustive.

Anxiety can make coping with ADHD more difficult—or vice versa. Drug treatments that help ADHD can worsen anxiety, and treatments that aid anxiety can worsen the symptoms of ADHD. Often the route taken is to treat the disorders one at a time—rarely simultaneously. Ultimately, the treatment of both disorders is in the therapists jurisdiction.

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