FAQ – Perinatal Experience – AADPA Conference 2026
What is the poster presentation about?
Here is the blurb I wrote for the conference submission – the outcome may be a little different as I worked on the poster in the lead up to the print deadline:
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2022, aged 37. The same year I started exploring IVF to become a single mother by choice. I gave birth to my beautiful daughter Ruth in 2024.
In 2024 I also completed my ADHD Coaching certification. Because we ADHDers like to make multitasking an art form.
The diagnosis process for ADHD was the most scrutiny my past, and present mental and physical health had ever been under.
But it was a walk in the park compared to the experience of navigating IVF, the public hospital system, and early post-partum with my bevvy of socio-medical identities and intersections.
Instead of presenting a list of grievances, I would like to portray, instead, my pregnancy and post-partum journey as a case for moving the story of the late diagnosed ADHDer forward.
Unlike the small amount of studies focussing on the autistic experience of pregnancy, that tracks the journey in its entirety, the conversations aroundpregnancy and ADHD seem to myopically focus on “the medication question” (Attachment 1 – example bibliography). We need to move beyond that.
An ADHD diagnosis is the starting point for someone – once they understand how it touches their life, they can move on to the goals they had never thought possible.
But we need partners in this journey. Not professionals who need you to educate them, or present barriers that are no longer relevant.
For my poster, I want to portray the journey to my daughter, and all the people and points in my care where knowledge and compassion made a world of difference.
I am creating an infographic that presents this journey, deidentified and factually to demonstrates:
1. the huge amount of medical professionals that had input into my care, from IVF to post-partum
2. the champions and blockers in this journey
3. the administrative, bureaucratic, and advocacy burden placed on people who disclose a disability or intersectional identity
Through storytelling, visuals, and a good sense of humour, my presentation will be a call to action to all medical professionals, ADHD specialists or not, to see the benefits of a holistic, empowered, neuroaffirming approach that can support new parents with ADHD.
I am a published playwright and poet, and have a strong background in storytelling and stagecraft. I recently recounted some of my experience at the Maternal Child Health Conference as part of their lived experience advisory panel – you can watch this here.
Where did you get your info or research from?
This is my story. I am hoping to throw as many resources as possible into this part of my website before the conference – but I’ll be honest, it’s been a lot of work to get this together, and I won’t have time to do it all and continually fish matchbox cars out of my bed in the middle of the night.
So if you can, subscribe to my newsletter, or keep checking back here for resources as they come through.
I have also had many many conversations through interest groups and through my work with the Maternal and Child Health Consumer Panel
This might just be your experience and a one off
In the process of building this I had conversations with multiple ADHDers about their recent pregnancy and postpartum experiences.
I was surprised about how close their experiences were to mine.
While I did not use direct anecdotes in this poster presentation, those conversations motivated me to move forward.
I did not make this initial presentation a research paper based on my limited time and resourcing. Full resourcing would have gone to ensure that any participant received trauma-informed care, and had an opportunity to co-design this work.
That being said, one bad experience should be enough to move the conversation forward.
But if it was a repeated experience, we’d all hear more about this
(Including a strong note on intersectionality)
This is my experience as an ADHDer, but also as a white, middle class, cis woman. I identify as LGBTQIA+, and I am a single mother by choice. Many, but not all, of my differences are invisible. I cannot speak for other communities and minorities.
I can speak to how attitudes towards me changed, and continue to change, whenever I disclose any of my attributes, but if I’m asked to spend too much time talking about what this looks and feels like, I’m going to ask how much information you need to move this forward.
I believe and honour the experiences of people I don’t want to presume to speak for, and I don’t need them to prove this experience to me to see what I can do to move things forward.
As an ADHDer that is late diagnosed, who spends time, professionally and socially, around other late-diagnosed ADHDers, I know, again by anecdotal experience, that we have come up in a world that is very keen to focus on our shortcomings, and train us to blame these challenges on ourselves first before anything else.
The big hearts of ADHDers will move mountains to think of ways to take responsibility for what has happened before we even begin to wonder if it might not be us, after all.
Part of that is an eroded self esteem that I am determined to heal in myself, and give space and time to others to do the same.
Part of that is our big hearts struggling to accept that our needs are not optional if we want a longer life span.
Part of it is the ongoing struggle for some ADHDers to say they have a disability, a value neutral term that continues to be loaded with other peoples’ meaning.
But the lack of disability confidence in perinatal care is well documented.1 2 A lack of confidence towards supporting any cohort that is not seen as average would resonate or rhyme. Feeling like you’re being listened to, that your doctor is connected to your primary doctors, and are focussed on your experience being a positive path to welcoming members of the family into the world, needs to be an instinct, rather than a shit fight.
I wish I could represent all intersections in this story, but that again that speaks to a broader body of work that I do not have the resourcing to meet to feel like I’m doing it justice.
Are you sure this is exactly how this happened? You may not have been privvy to discussions behind the scenes
That is true, and that is kind of the problem. I don’t know all the conversations or interactions that took place around me. I don’t know why some decisions were made over others, and I don’t know how informed those people who made decisions were.
I’m a bottom up processor, and need context, and understanding of a number of elements to make an informed decision. Fragmented commentary across multiple formats is does not facilitate this.
Accommodations, actively listening and working to meet these needs can facilitate informed decision making, and a feeling of autonomy in an uncertain process.
It looks like there is a system issue here
Yes. And it’s business systems issue. And a policy issue.
These domains typically fall back on what is commonly known as the Swiss Cheese approach to risk management – layer upon layer of hoops and barriers that the risk would need to slip through in order to happen.
I believe that this risk management approach, commonly used for systems, procedures, and yes, public health policy, has started to be leaned on more as resourcing, nuance and experience has started to be stretched thin.
And yes, this is a whole new cohort of people and needs that is being discussed. But the right to access family planning, in particular if you are part of minority, is not a new problem to navigate.
Having blanket frameworks move too far into individual medical and case management is potentially risky for any person who falls outside of the norm.
The person wanting to get pregnant is in risk of being seen as a risk instead of a person who needs to be supported in order to mitigate the risks that exist in any pregnancy. The person is not the thing to be mitigated. The barriers they face that can raise their sense of wellbeing and autonomy are.
A guideline is not a law. People’s bodies and minds carry nuance, and boy howdy do those bodies and minds change when they are growing a human.
These changes need to be accommodated, rather than controlled.
General public health advice cannot be the one stop shop for people with individual needs at one of the most vulnerable times of their lives.
General public health guidelines rarely considered adult AFAB people could have ADHD, let alone that they may have needs beyond the diagnosis.
A range of bodies and identities continue to be considered outliers when people are building a family. These cohorts need the most support, rather than being treated as an inconvenience, or expected to take on additional admin.
If the system is built to implement the best practises developed by human expertise, and to sustain and efficiently manage these practises through the entire pregnancy journey, then improvements need to be made.
The purpose of the system is to have a positive outcome for clients. If that is not occurring, we need to tweak the system.
I’m not like that!
I’m sure you’re not. I did this poster, for this conference, because the attendees are professionals who, what it says on the box, have an interest in ADHD.
My biggest reservation about this poster was to make medical providers feel like they needed to defend themselves. It’s caused late nights and second guessing myself.
But it’s my story. It happened. And the values that (I hope) make me a good ADHD and Neurodiversity Coach, are the same values that want to ensure this kind of experience never happens to others at such a pivotal point in their lives.
And it was my values that drove the decisions I made, and that meant the child that chose me to be their parent is here today. No regrets. Ever.
I understand that this is new territory for us all, and I want to keep the conversation going so that we have better wellbeing outcomes for clients in the future.
Current ADHD diagnosis and treatment structures alone rely heavily on a trusting and collegiate relationship between specialists and a GPs. Let’s model these trusting relationships to move these conversations forward and set a standard.
But you could have / should have accessed this program / had this conversation / sought this support
I am a researcher – a classic late-night rabbit holer of an ADHDer. I will never fully know how many tabs are open on my browser(s) – and that is not a metaphor.
But I could not research everything there was to know about navigating IVF and pregnancy. I had to make cheese sandwiches and lie down a bit.
I would still turn up with folders of printouts to my appointments, but I had my limits. I was growing a human.
If I didn’t know about the support, program, or method at the time I was accessing these services, then they were not accessible, or have not been advertised in the way they deserve. And that’s a problem.
In short – I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I relied on the experts to support me along my way. The results of the care were mixed.
The person it produced is exceptional.
I also left so much out of this poster in the name of simplicity. This poster is the least complicated version I could make, which means it excludes many avenues for support I tried to create and maintain, as well as the many channels that I opened to support myself, and try and build some sort of continuity of care.
It looks like a lot of this is outside of my scope of influence
It probably is. I learned a lot about risk during this process that I did not want to. Medico-legal, and reputational risks are of course important factors to consider as an expert in your fields. But I often found that medical providers would not clarify which risks they were telling me about until I asked them.
And again, ADHDers who want to grow a human have needs that do not align with general population cohorts and advice.
The long term health and wellbeing of the parent, is going to have an impact on the child. Especially if the parent is left without the support they need beyond the birth.
These are conversations that are going to keep growing between the community and the medical community – how you decide contribute is a part of that conversation.
Like all patients, we are expecting the person in front of us to provide support and best practice advice in the way that we need for the time of life that we are in.
I was one of the people who had a trained professional say that I couldn’t have ADHD because I wasn’t “running around their suite like an 8 year old boy.”3
Adults being diagnosed with ADHD are still going to encounter adult problems that cannot be addressed by approaches and attitudes that are half designed for children, half designed for other purposes, cohorts, and irrelevant issues.
These incomplete resources also, in my own opinion, sometimes live outside of the scope and relevance of the issue they are being used to address.
So jump in if you can, the water’s fine.
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- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33772765/ ↩︎
- Spoiler – they were wrong, I did have ADHD ↩︎