People with inattentive ADHD may be easily distracted, forget daily tasks, or have trouble listening, following instructions, and paying attention to details.
Those with hyperactive-impulsive ADHD may feel restless, talk often, interrupt others, or have difficulty waiting. People with combined ADHD have symptoms from both groups.
Girls and women are more likely to have inattentive ADHD, whose quieter symptoms are easy to miss. For instance, testing wasn't suggested to drummer Airis Broughton until a middle school teacher noticed that she could only remember what she read when she fidgeted with blocks.
Even hyperactive ADHD signs can get overlooked in girls.
"Boys are allowed to be rambunctious, and if they're too rambunctious, [people say] 'Maybe he has ADHD. Let's go take care of him,'" says Cash Honey guitarist and keyboardist Ashton May.
"Masking" — hiding symptoms, consciously or not, in order to fit in — makes ADHD in girls harder to diagnose.
By 3 years old, McNairy was "constantly moving," but she didn't receive an ADHD diagnosis until high school. Until then, "I grew up not knowing anything about myself, what I liked, what I needed, what I wanted out of life. Constantly being told I was 'too much' made me try and be like everyone else," McNairy says.
Growing up, May was described by others as "super-talkative" or "quirky." As an adult, that extra energy morphed into a lack of impulse control. "I did not handle conflicts well and would fly off the handle all the time," May says.
After being diagnosed with ADHD, "I felt, 'OK, finally, I have an answer. I'm not just like an unhinged person,'" May says, "because that's the kind of stuff that you tell yourself."
Women feel enormous pressure to come off as "normal and productive," Simpson says.
