When Mel B publicly disclosed her ADHD diagnosis, she described spending decades feeling like she was performing a version of herself that the world expected: managing, coping, succeeding, while something underneath remained entirely unexamined. She is far from alone. 

For years, the cultural image of ADHD has been a hyperactive young boy, unable to sit still, disrupting classrooms. But a growing body of research and a wave of high-profile disclosures from women like Mel B, Martine McCutcheon and others, is beginning to shift that picture. Women, it turns out, have been living with undiagnosed ADHD in significant numbers, not because the condition presents differently, but because they have learned to hide it. 

This is masking. And for high-achieving women, it can be almost impossible to see from the outside. 

"I had spent so much time trying to be a square in a round circle, and it was exhausting," McCutcheon has said. "It was so draining. It was just so hard." What nobody around her could see was what it cost her to do it. None of that effort was visible. None of the management, the compensating, the constant recalibration. From the outside, she simply looked like a woman who was coping. 

There is a cruel paradox here, because competence can become camouflage.

Research consistently shows that girls with ADHD are more likely than boys to internalise their difficulties as they grew older, developing sophisticated coping strategies that mask the underlying condition. They over-prepare. They people-please. They work twice as hard to achieve the same results and then attribute any success to effort rather than ability. By the time they reach adulthood, the masking has become so habitual that even they can no longer see it clearly. 

Dr Samantha Hiew, a clinical psychologist specialising in neurodevelopmental conditions, describes the experience many of her patients share. "They come in having spent years interpreting their needs as personal failings rather than valid signals," she explains. "The exhaustion, the overwhelm, the sense that everyone else finds this easier, they have absorbed all of that as evidence that something is wrong with them, rather than as information about how their brain works." 

For Helen O'Rahilly, a senior television producer, the diagnosis came in her fifties, prompted by her daughter's own assessment. "It was like someone had turned the lights on," she says. "Suddenly I could look back at my whole life and see it completely differently. The chaos, the drama, one traumatic event after another, it all made sense for the first time." 

She had spent decades in a demanding career, managing teams, commissioning programmes, meeting every deadline. She had also spent decades in a state of what she now recognises as chronic overwhelm, managing herself as much as she managed everything else. 

This is what late diagnosis looks like for many women. Not a sudden crisis but a retrospective reckoning. A new vocabulary for needs they were already experiencing. A framework that finally makes sense of a lifetime of feeling simultaneously capable and barely holding together. 

Dr Hiew explains what is happening neurologically. ADHD involves differences in how the brain regulates dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation, attention and reward. This dopamine dysregulation, to use the clinical term, means the brain struggles to sustain attention on tasks it does not find stimulating, while hyperfocusing intensely on those it does. For women who have developed strong compensatory strategies, this can look from the outside like high performance while feeling from the inside like an enormous and unsustainable effort.

There is also a phenomenon known as rejection sensitive dysphoria, an intense emotional response to perceived criticism or failure that is particularly common in women with ADHD. It can make professional environments, where feedback is constant and performance is evaluated, feel uniquely threatening in ways that are hard to explain to people who do not experience it. 

Couples therapist Karen Doherty often sees the relationship dimension of late diagnosis in her practice. "I work with couples who have spent years assuming they process information in the same way, only to discover after a diagnosis that they don't," she explains. "By then, one or both partners may have felt alienated, shamed or blamed. Understanding the difference can be life-changing. But it can also bring grief." 

The grief is for the years spent not knowing. For the strategies that worked just well enough to mask the need for support. For the version of yourself you might have been with better information earlier. 

Late-diagnosed women are finding a new vocabulary for needs they were already experiencing. Support groups, online communities and an increasingly informed clinical conversation are making it easier to seek diagnosis and to understand what that diagnosis means in practice. The picture of ADHD is changing, slowly, from a condition that happens to restless boys to one that also happens to high-achieving, highly capable women who have simply learned, very well, not to show it. v