OCD Or ADHD? Why It's So Hard To Tell The Difference

When you look at it, because obviously with a specialty in ADHD, you're going to get people who also come in and have OCD, and we get people who come in for OCD who have ADHD.

I don't put myself out as a specialist in ADHD, so I want to work in collaboration with an ADHD specialist.

And for me, I think that's great clinical practice to do.

I'm sure, though, you've seen people who have seen other therapists beforehand who are one of those who sadly check every box on a certain publication's website that says, I treat these 97 different things, and I do 25 different types of therapy, and I treat people from the day they're born until the day they die.

Yeah.

I can treat anxiety, depression in my sleep.

I know what that feels like.

I call them, you know, sort of these nuggets that I get that I can kind of feel it in my bones.

I've been doing ADHD for so long, exclusively for so long now.

So I'm not a jack of all trades.

I'm a specialist and I specialize in this.

But yes, absolutely.

You know, just in preparing for this podcast today, I started to think to myself, like, wait, do I have OCD? The other night at a parent lab, I'm doing a parent lab for parents and caregivers of children and teens with ADHD, and I put the waters, you know, sort of lined up just so it would look neat and pretty when they walked in, and the labels all facing out.

And I said to myself, like, oh, my gosh.

imagine, and I wondered out loud to myself, kind of like, huh, this is kind of OCD-like.

Remember that movie, Sleeping with the Enemy?

I

wondered if that was that.

And I thought to myself, it started to organize my brain.

It started to sort of make me feel more consistent.

It started to sort of level my, decrease my anxiety in terms of I was going to, you know, get off to a great start with this parent lab.

But then I wondered, there was nothing that I was fearing would happen, right? There was nothing that I was...

Any harm that would, you know, come to me or somebody else if I hadn't had rearranged the water bottles just so.

And I thought to myself, gosh, what a bear these conditions are if we're not practicing, if we're not exposing ourselves to the overwhelming or feared thing.

Yeah, because that is the mistake of OCD.