This transcript has been edited for clarity. Watch part one of this series here.
SPEAKER: Molly Seidel is one of only three American women to medal in the Olympics in one of the most brutal of events, the marathon. Perhaps what's even more remarkable about Molly is her success in overcoming a series of mental health challenges.
MOLLY SEIDEL: Having lived with various forms of neurodiversity and mental illness since basically childhood, I feel right now that I'm in a place where, obviously, with this kind of stuff, you're never like, quote unquote, "cured," but I feel in a much better and more stable place than I've been in a really long time due to taking a step back over this last year and really putting in the work and the time to focus on it. And I think that's probably the most important part of dealing with these kinds of things.
The funny and gnarly thing about any of these mental disorders and what I've experienced is that it almost seems like a game of whack-a-mole, that when you whack down one thing or when you feel that you've got a handle on one thing, it jumps to another thing. So when it's not-- when it's not like obsessive restriction, it turns into bulimia. When you get rid of the bulimia, it turns into restriction again. Then that turned back into -- it's -- that's the frustrating part that if -- and what it took me years to figure out that if you're just trying to treat the symptoms and not addressing the underlying causes of some of these things, it will just tend to jump from diagnosis, to diagnosis, to diagnosis.
And I got the -- my two main diagnoses just are the ADHD and the OCD. Obviously, it was years apart for the two of those and it took longer to identify the ADHD. But it came with such a sense of relief and knowing of just like, oh, my God there's a reason why I feel the way that I feel and maybe I'm not just thoroughly messed up and thoroughly a terrible person because your brain just works a little bit differently.
And I think a lot of that came with a deep sense of shame for me. And that was the hardest part of just being I don't know why my brain just can't work the way that other people's brains work. And especially -- I think especially with the ADHD -- the OCD was one because that was more of a pathology, kind of just being like, OK, this is something that I really need to work on and improve, this is a disorder. Whereas with the ADHD it came with this sense of just like, oh, my God, this makes so much sense. I think that was the most freeing thing and the thing that has gotten me to the place that I am now of being like, OK, there are specific lifestyle changes that I can make to make sure that my brain works optimally and then they worked. I wish that I had been more vocal about exactly how I was feeling earlier and it might have gotten to the solution a lot earlier. Because I think, especially as women, a lot of us are willing to almost like gaslight ourselves of just being like, oh, it's not really that bad. And then you look objectively at it and you're like, no, this is actually objectively pretty bad and there has to be a better way to live than this.
I'm a pretty big nerd when it comes to this stuff, so I enjoy learning about it and I really enjoy trying -- reading medical papers, trying to figure out stuff, doing my own research, especially as it comes to some of these alternative techniques for treating ADHD. So having a basic level of competence with that I think has really helped. But then I think just at this point, having been through pretty much the better part of -- being through 10 years of working with different therapists pretty consistently, learning the dialogue, learning the -- basically just getting a better understanding of how my brain works. And I think that ultimately is the point of therapy is learning to have a better relationship with your own brain and understanding the mechanisms by which your brain works. I think that's been the most helpful thing to be able to be a little bit more confident and trust in myself to know the things that I need to be doing. And maybe some aspect of it is being able to take ownership of not just expecting that I'm going to go to a doctor and they're going to give me a pill and that's going to fix everything.
This video originally appeared on WebMD on April 25, 2023
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Cite this: ADHD Patient and Olympic Medalist Molly Seidel Takes Control of her Diagnosis - Medscape - Apr 26, 2023.
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