World Mental Health Day: Nothing Was Wrong With Me

I spent thousands of hours in therapy trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

Thousands. Year after year, office after office, the same question in a hundred different forms. Why can’t I work the way other people work? Why do I vanish into a project for three days and then sit in front of a blank screen for a week? Why do I feel like a broken copy of a normal person? Then, at 64, I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism. The shorthand is AuDHD. And the answer to all those years of questions turned out to be simple.

Nothing was wrong with me. I just had a different kind of brain.

I felt relief the moment I understood that. Not slow relief, the kind you talk yourself into. Immediate relief. I knew the answer, and I could stop looking for a flaw that was never there. World Mental Health Day falls on October 10, and this year’s theme asks for lived experience. (See my review of An Unquiet Mind) So this is mine, along with the two things I’d tell anybody who feels that something is wrong with their life.

When is World Mental Health Day, and how did it start?

World Mental Health Day is October 10 every year. The World Federation for Mental Health, an international organization founded in 1948, first marked it in 1992. The idea came from Richard Hunter, then the federation’s deputy secretary general, and the goal was simple: one day a year when the whole world talks openly about mental health.

Within a couple of years, each World Mental Health Day had a theme, and the World Health Organization now supports it along with governments, charities and health services around the world. Past themes have covered everything from workplace mental health to suicide prevention to mental health as a basic human right.

The 2026 theme is “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.” The federation is asking people who’ve lived with mental health conditions to speak up, and asking everyone else to listen. I like that theme. Statistics have their place, but people change their minds when they hear someone tell the truth about their own life.

What is AuDHD, and how is it different from ADHD?

AuDHD is the informal name for having both autism and ADHD. For decades, doctors weren’t allowed to diagnose both in the same person. The diagnostic manual changed that in 2013, and since then researchers have found that the two show up together far more often than chance would predict.

Living with both is a strange mix. The ADHD part craves novelty and chases interest. The autistic part wants routine, order and predictability. One half of your brain wants to start fifteen projects. The other half wants nothing to move. A lot of us spend years thinking that tug-of-war is a character flaw.

In my case it showed up as what I call a scattershot pattern. Long stretches of nothing, then everything at once. I’d write fifteen thousand words in one sitting, then go a week without producing a page. I’ve written more about how I stopped fighting my brain after the diagnosis, and about using that pattern on purpose.

What does a late ADHD and autism diagnosis feel like?

For me, it felt like setting down something heavy I’d carried so long I’d forgotten it was there.

Before the diagnosis, every explanation pointed back at me. I was lazy, or undisciplined, or not trying hard enough. The productivity books said so. The routines that worked for everyone else failed for me, and the only conclusion on offer was that I was the problem. I believed that for fifty years. The diagnosis didn’t fix anything, but it explained everything.

The hyperfocus, the empty weeks, the way I couldn’t make myself care about tasks that didn’t interest me, all of it had a name and a reason. None of it was a moral failing. It was wiring. Once I knew that, I stopped spending my energy fighting myself and started building my working life around the brain I have.

Plenty of adults are getting diagnosed late now, in their forties, fifties and sixties. I talked about mine on the Adulting with Autism podcast. If you’re one of them, you may feel grief along with the relief. Grief for the years you spent thinking you were broken. That’s normal. Let yourself feel it. Then get on with the life you have left. There’s plenty of it.

Does therapy focus too much on what’s wrong?

I think a lot of modern therapy does, yes.

You walk in because something hurts, and the whole session is built around finding the problem, naming it, digging into it and taking it apart. Week after week, you practice looking for what’s wrong. I believe that trains people to orient toward the wrong. Do it long enough and you start to think everything’s wrong, because that’s all you’ve been looking at.

I spent thousands of hours doing exactly that, and none of those hours found the answer. They kept me hunting for a defect. When the answer finally came, it had nothing to do with a defect. That’s my experience, and it’s my opinion. Therapy helps plenty of people, and I’m not telling anyone to quit. I’m telling you to watch where it points you. If every session leaves you staring at what’s broken, ask whether that’s getting you anywhere.

How do you start focusing on what’s right?

Stop focusing on what’s wrong and focus on what’s right. If you do, you’ll find that in most cases, the right far outweighs the wrong.

Start small. Take a walk. Look at the bugs, the plants, the sky. That sounds too simple to matter, and it isn’t. When you’re convinced everything in your life is broken, a bee working a flower or a clear blue afternoon is evidence that some things aren’t.

I know this one personally.

Years ago, a cheap film camera got me photographing flowers, birds, bees and bugs, anything in nature that held still long enough. I was painfully shy back then, and photography pulled me out of it. You can’t spend an afternoon looking closely at the world without noticing how much of it is fine. I wrote about that in my piece on World Photography Day.

Then look at the people. There’s got to be at least one person around you who’s good. Find that person and pay attention to them, because they’re part of what’s right, too.

How do you audit the people in your life?

If you’ve done all that and you still think everything’s wrong, look hard at the people around you. Do an audit.

Go through every single one of them. Ask one question about each person: are they helping your life or harming it? Be honest. It doesn’t matter who it is. A relative, a close family member, a close friend, a distant friend, a reading buddy, a walking buddy. Everybody goes on the list.

Then act on the answers. Push away the people who are causing you harm, gently or not so gently. Keep the people who aren’t.

That’s hard, especially with family. People will tell you that you owe them, or that you’re overreacting. But someone who drags you down every time you talk to them is costing you something, whoever they are. You’re allowed to protect yourself. Those are the two things I’d recommend to anybody who feels that something is wrong in their life, or whose life isn’t going right, or whose life is a constant disaster. Focus on what’s right. Audit the people.

What can you do on October 10 to help your own mental health?

Tell the truth about your own experience to someone who needs to hear it. This year’s theme asks for exactly that, and it costs nothing.

If you’ve been diagnosed late, with ADHD, autism, both or anything else, say so to someone who might be where you were. You might be the first person who makes them wonder whether nothing’s wrong with them either. Take the walk. Look at the bugs and the sky. Run the audit on the people in your life, and act on it.

And if you’re in crisis right now, don’t wait for an audit. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time of day.

Plenty of people are carrying around the same verdict I carried for fifty years. If writing your story would help you set it down, my memoir services are built for that, and the ADHD series collects everything I’ve written about working with a brain like mine.

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