Thirteen women living with a partner who has ADHD said so much of daily life fell on them that Hebrew University researchers concluded they should be recognized as caregivers. The study's title quotes the feeling: "I wish it wasn't all on me."
Dana Zeides Taubin and Adina Maeir, occupational therapy researchers in Jerusalem, held long, open-ended interviews with 13 women who don't have ADHD themselves. Each was in a relationship with a partner diagnosed with adult ADHD. The study appeared in the journal Disability and Rehabilitation.
Three themes came up across the interviews: how ADHD shows up in everyday life, the burden that falls on the partner, and the ways women learned to cope. Their accounts showed their partners' symptoms placing a heavy weight on them.
Learning about ADHD, setting limits, and building ways to work around ADHD-related barriers as a team were the main strategies the women developed. Many of them took on a caregiving role inside the relationship.
Doctors treating adults with ADHD should see the whole household, the researchers argue, and offer both partners education and counseling. They also suggest peer support groups, individual counseling, or couples therapy built around life with ADHD.
All 13 women were white and in heterosexual relationships, a limit the authors point out themselves, so the findings may look different in other couples. For these women, the organizing, remembering, and managing landed mostly on one side of the relationship.