Woman Diagnosed with ADHD Says 'Suddenly My Whole Life Makes Sense'

Dec. 21, 2010 — -- John Dailey never knew why he was always so disorganized. His struggles in school grew into struggles at work. But when his 3-year-old daughter started to show signs of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, he realized that he had been seeing those very signs in himself his whole life.

"I had given up trying to figure out why I was the way I was and just accepted it and said this is me," Dailey told "Good Morning America."

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Dailey, from Ramsey, Minnesota, was diagnosed with ADHD six years ago, on the same day his daughter was diagnosed. He was 36 years old.

Dailey is among the estimated nearly 5 percent of American adults living with ADHD, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Ashley McDermott is another parent whose diagnosis came about because of a child. While she was researching her son's ADHD, she was astonished to find that she was reading about herself.

"I closed the book the second chapter, and started to cry. This is my whole life. I can't believe this is me," she said.

"It was life-defining because suddenly my whole life makes sense," McDermott said. "Every part of my personality that I never could understand why I was the way I was, it all made sense."

Dr. Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist who works out of Boston and New York, said there was no doubt that ADHD was genetically transmitted.

"There's some cases you can acquire it, but 95 percent of cases you acquire from the genes of your parents and grandparents," he said.

There appear to be differences in the way that grown women and men experience ADHD.

According to Sue Hallowell, Ned Hallowell's wife and author of "Married to Distraction," women are generally "more of the day-dreamy, inattentive type, so they're not the ones who were jumping off the walls like the boys with ADHD with hyperactivity disorder."