From the Editor’s Desk: Mental Health Will Drive You, Well, You Know (Premium)

I’ve written a lot this summer about my various health initiatives, about being proactive and addressing issues before they become serious, and about some of the small successes I’ve had with regards to blood glucose and weight. But I’ve skirted around the other half of this crusade, which is mental health. And so maybe it’s time to address that now.

Which is difficult for many reasons. This is a deeply personal thing that paradoxically benefits from this modern era of better understanding but is also held back by an over-sensitivity about certain terms that were once common and accepted. We didn’t discuss this type of thing when I was growing up, but for those in my kids’ generation, it’s all out there. Bridging that gap is problematic for people my age.

But what the heck. I’m big on self-improvement, and while I did go into this kicking and screaming—and procrastinating, my age-old tactic for those things I simply wish to ignore—I finally came around. It just took a little prodding. OK, a lot of prodding.

That said, I feel like I was on the edge of understanding some of this for many years, as I’ve long been fascinated by certain commonalities between myself and many others in our industry. There is an interesting crossover, for example, between software developers and artists, people who like to create things by drawing, painting, writing, playing musical instruments, and so on. And there is this other half of the equation, which is all about social shyness and compulsiveness, about being really good at something, maybe too good, and not at all good in other areas.

Anyway, my daughter was diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) during her Freshman year of college. This term is a perfect example of my note above about terms that used to be fine but for some reason today are not: we used to differentiate between ADHD and ADD (attention-deficit disorder) because the difference is meaningful, but today it’s all called ADHD, with those in the latter camp now described, stupidly, as ADHD without hyperactivity. My daughter has ADHD without hyperactivity, or what I think should still be called ADD.

And so do I.

This started when my daughter described to us how she was diagnosed, and the behaviors that collectively make up her ADHD. And in doing so, my wife Stephanie realized that our daughter was also describing me. Forgetting for a moment that I didn’t make this connection myself, I have often observed that one of the most troubling aspects of being a parent is recognizing that my children’s bad behaviors directly stem from me. And that my kids’ best characteristics come from my wife and not from me. Maybe I was simply trying to avoid that inconvenient truth.

But over time, my wife would bring this up with me, often in the wake of some episode, which in my case typically ranges from an absolute lack of focus and forgetfulness to an instant anger at whatever is happening around me. There is a strange paradox in a person who is compulsive enough to see a 1,000-page book through to fruition—my original co-author and mentor Gary once asked, rhetorically, what kind of people would thoroughly document thousands of APIs for an obscure developer environment, as we had in writing the Delphi 3.0 Super Bible a million years ago—but can’t remember appointments or even why he stepped into a room.

For example, I told the story, I’m sure, of a trip to Paris with my wife and daughter, when we walked up to the rear entrance of the Père Lachaise Cemetery and stopped to review a map of the place on a sign. I can’t remember how the places on the map were ordered—alphabetically, numerically, this part escapes me—but I distinctly remember exploding at the illogical nature of what I was seeing. “Why the f@#$ would this thing be ordered like this?” I blurted out. My wife, arguably smarter and inarguably calmer, explained why. And I immediately de-tuned. “Oh, right. That makes sense,” I said. Crisis over.

But not for my daughter. There was no one around us, but she comically spun her head around to make sure. “Did anyone else just notice that?” she asked, confused how I had escalated and de-escalated so quickly. At the time, I saw this as a good character trait. Sure, I can get angry pretty quickly, but I also listen to logic, and I was happy about that. I feel very strongly that opinions should be based on facts, and that when there’s new information, you shouldn’t be stubborn about changing your mind. To me, this fell into that bucket.

But there was more than that. I have difficulty performing routine, everyday tasks like renewing a driver’s license and scheduling appointments (and then remembering those appointments). I am impatient with nearly everything, from waiting in lines to dealing with other drivers. I have a weird sensitivity to sounds, including those produced by our pets, none of which seem to bother most people. I am often on autopilot and can miss an exit while driving somewhere familiar. And more.

As these types of things happened, my Stephanie would prod. Maybe you need to see a therapist. You should try to fix this problem.

I heard her. I vaguely agreed it was necessary, that she was right. And I never did a damn thing about it.

Then, in July 2022, we went on an Alaska cruise with Leo and Lisa Laporte and dozens of TWiT fans. It was a great trip, and it provided us with a few days in Seattle, a favorite place of mine, one I hadn’t been to since before the pandemic. And so I caught up with a few friends, including Stephen Rose, who is now hosting Petri’s UnplugIT podcast. Stephen and I have been friends for almost 15 years, we hit it off immediately, and I’ve always enjoyed those times when our paths intersected.

Stephanie and I had lunch with Stephen and his wife, and as we talked, he was describing how he had been diagnosed with ADHD, and I found myself suddenly in a weird fugue. What he was describing … was me. Was so much me that I stopped listening briefly in an almost panic. I wasn’t aware of our wives, the place, or its pretty view of the water. Everybody was looking at me. And suddenly, this thing that I had avoided was obvious. I had ADHD. I needed to get this fixed.

There is some humor here about me ignoring my wife but listening to a friend that the four of us have embraced in a good-natured way. And there is some sad reality to the fact that I somehow managed to let a year go by before I actually did something about this, though to be fair there were some big life upheavals in there too, notably the Thurrott.com ownership transition that kicked off right at the beginning of 2023. But I cannot let this part of the story pass without emphasizing the role that Stephen played in making this happen. He mentored me selflessly and constantly, and he popped up again and again to see if I’d finally taken some steps to just help myself. I can never repay him for this. (And to be clear, Stephen is very open about what he calls being neurodivergent. It’s possible we’ll speak about this publicly someday on a podcast.)

But once we had switched over our health care and got settled in the new apartment, I finally went to the doctor to start this year’s proactive health initiatives. And among the items on my list was the name of a therapist that she could recommend. She did, and my wife and I went to see this therapist together, who was impressed with us a couple (always appreciated) and felt that I was perhaps smart enough to have overcome ADHD for much of my career until it started becoming too much, which was exactly what had happened to Stephen.

And so she recommended that I take two separate tests over time, one for intelligence and one for cognitive ability. I went into both with a sense of dread: I feel like I’m reasonably intelligent but wasn’t interested in having that explicitly scored. And I worried that the cognitive test would find some deficiency. What I got, instead, was what the therapist expected: my working memory—my ability to take in and hold information in immediate awareness and then perform a mental operation on that information—is a standard deviation below my cognitive ability. That is, if I’m not fully engaged in something that interests me, my ability to focus and remember anything falls through the floor. I was smart enough to compensate for my ADHD, but only when the task was interesting to me.

This is how someone smart does poorly in school. More specifically, it’s how I’ve written over 30 books but can’t remember to turn off the stove or schedule an appointment. These tests and a report from the therapist were forwarded to my doctor, who interviewed me (and my wife) and diagnosed me with ADHD. And then we had to talk about medication.

I am not a fan of medication.

My whole life, I’ve avoided or minimized my use of medication. When I had ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) surgery in the early 1990s, for example, I went off the pain medications in half the time required, for example. One of the big motivators behind this year’s proactive health push is to avoid medication. And now my doctor, who was on board with me using diet to lower my blood glucose levels and, hopefully, tame such things as high blood pressure and cholesterol, was telling me I needed to take medication. Every day.

I wanted to resist this, but there’s no clear-cut alternative as with the physical health topics noted above. And so I tried to at least minimize it, which I’m realizing now is perhaps misguided. In any event, she started me on Atomoxetine hydrochloride because it’s not a stimulant and thus won’t raise my blood pressure—there’s no use fixing one problem and causing another—and if it worked, great. But it didn’t work, and so by the end of June, it was clear we had to call in the big guns. And so my doctor started me on a low dose of Adderall, which is a stimulant. A controlled substance, my pharmacist later told me. Fantastic.

I took Adderall each morning in July, while we were in Mexico City. And I could see some impact on my ability to focus, some occasional acceptance of things I didn’t like, though it disappeared in the afternoons. (And I did get a lot of long-form writing done during that trip.) And when we returned home and checked in with the doctor, my blood pressure was perfect—120 over 73, most likely diet-related—and so now we’re experimenting with two pills, one in the morning and one at noon. This seems to have no additional benefit, however, so we’ll likely raise the dosage as soon as Thursday, when I go back for my next check-in. This is apparently common: Stephen and my doctor have both discussed how finding the right treatment is an ongoing process. It’s also quite new to me.

During this time, I’ve had a few freakouts that I’m hoping will become less common in time.

For example, my wife and I walk for 40 minutes every day, and part of that walk involves crossing Macungie Memorial Park, which the township uses for big annual events like car shows in the summer. One morning in early August, we were stopped at the park gate by a woman who was collecting money for the biggest of these shows, to the tune of $9 per person. We don’t carry money and weren’t going to the show, I explained, we were just walking through, as we always do. Well, you can’t today, I was told, you have to pay.

“I am not paying $18 to walk through a park that I walk through every single day,” I responded. “Feel free to try and stop us.” And then we kept walking.

No one tried to stop us, but I could hear the woman at the gate swearing and complaining about us. And … it ate at me. We talked about this all the way home, obviously, and I knew I had to fix it. So I went into the apartment, grabbed $20, and drove back to the park gate, where I apologized to the woman and paid the bill. She clearly appreciated this, and while we didn’t quite hug or whatever, I felt good about it and then weird about it when she, in turn, apologized to me. No need, I said: that wasn’t the person I wanted to be, and I was trying to do better. Oddly, she lives in Macungie, too, so we sort of bonded over that. I told her that was a terrible way to meet a neighbor, and that that was all on me.

So that’s nice, I guess. But it’s also the same type of incident as that described in the Paris cemetery story, a quick rise to anger followed by the calmness of logic. The goal is to skip that first step.

In short, I’m still broken. But I am at least working on it.