A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD: Embrace Neurodiversity, Live Boldly, and Break Through Barriers

Sari Solden, MS and Michelle Frank, PsyD in A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD, a New Harbinger self-help workbook, teach self-validation. They approach their mission from deeply intimate perspectives: both women live with ADHD, and both have dedicated their professional lives to supporting ADHD-abled people. The authors examine many probable life-shaping aspects of an individual’s experiences, from early childhood through middle-age, and gently and humorously show readers what those experiences may have embedded deep in a person’s mindset, often destructively. Solden and Frank dissect the “I AM BAD” scripts that can cripple anyone, leaving anyone afraid or struggling to succeed academically and professionally, to have personal relationships, to feel content. While the focus of A Radical Guide is on women with ADHD, their ideas are so thought-provoking I found it an empowering exercise to take their concepts, swap out “ADHD” whenever they were asking a reader to look at their ADHD-related experiences and swap in other “minority” perspectives  – so, for example, “bisexual” – while going through the conversations and questions to see what lessons and messaging that might reveal.