Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD's Lost Generation

Why is a generation of women only now discovering they have ADHD? A journalist recounts her own experience living for decades with undiagnosed ADHD and explores the transformative power of finally coming to understand your own brain.

When freelance journalist Carla Ciccone became a mother, she realized she might need to finally see a therapist. Sure, she had struggled to hold down a job and manage her intense emotions for most of her adult life, but she’d always made it work. But “making it work“ wasn’t going to cut it now that she had another human being to raise.

Months into therapy, at age thirty-nine, Carla was officially diagnosed with ADHD, and she learned that she was far from the number of women Carla’s age who were being diagnosed with ADHD had more than doubled in recent years. Forty-one million prescriptions for the psychostimulant Adderall were filled in the United States in 2021, a 10% increase from the year before—and, for the first time, a substantial number of these new prescriptions were being written for women.

In Nowhere Girl, Carla weaves her personal story with a broader investigation into the rise of ADHD diagnoses. She looks back at the classrooms of the 1990s, where ADHD was diagnosed mostly to little boys who were unable to sit still, shifts her gaze to the hormonal upheavals of adolescence and their unique effects on the neurochemistry of girls, and then examines her own chaotic entrance into motherhood and her desire to do right by her own daughter. Throughout, she examines the science and cultural history of ADHD, and considers how the hundreds of thousands of women now being diagnosed with ADHD can revisit their own personal histories and navigate their way towards a steadier, happier adulthood.