Congressional Briefing on ADHD: Our Trip to DC and the Conversation on Capitol Hill
Washington, DC, is only five hours from home. So when Mindful Choices for ADHD asked for a panelist at a Congressional briefing on ADHD, Understanding ADHD: Policy, Science, and the National Conversation, the trip decided itself. We’ve been to DC many times before. This time, my 3 teenagers would get to stand on Capitol Hill, and watch their mom do the thing she'd been telling them about for months: sit across from policymakers and congressional staff and tell them what ADHD actually looks like in a family living it.
The walk from our hotel to the Capitol was only a few blocks, and it was enough for an unhealthy amount of sweat to soak through our “nice clothes” for the briefing. 100 degree days. It seems we are really good at scheduling family getaways during extreme heat and humidity. But then again - it IS summer…
We reached the Capitol, or rather the building beyond it, which meant another stretch in the heat before we made it inside Cannon: a maze of long hallways lined with Congressional office doors, staff moving in and out of meetings, important people passing by in clusters I didn't recognize. My husband led the way. My brain does not do well with hallways and doors that all look the same, and I'll fully admit I was lost within about ninety seconds.
We passed the room twice before we found it, tucked into a corner off the main hallway, away from everything else. Cannon 130. And sitting inside, already there, already ready, was Dr. Kathleen Nadeau.
She's been working in this exact space, ADHD diagnosis and treatment, since the 1970s. Over fifty years. She received the CHADD Hall of Fame Award in 1999 for her groundbreaking work on women and girls with ADHD, alongside Dr. Patricia Quinn, whom I had been on a panel with in another virtual event. She's written books. Let’s just say, she knows her stuff. And there she was, alone in an empty briefing room, early, waiting.
I stood beside her, listening to her own adhd story, and thought: how did I end up here!? (The answer is - I started a podcast and this website - and asking God to tell me where to go next.)
The Room Fills Up
The rest of the room filled in fast. I didn’t notice because I was chatting away. The other panelist, Dr. Aaron Dodini, a clinical psychologist who runs AXON ADHD based in Arlington, VA, came in and said he had already met my family in the hallway. Dr. Shanta Whitaker, Mindful Choices' Chief Science Officer. Jakara Eason is moderating. And close to fifty people in the audience, many of them Congressional staff, plus representatives from NAMI and CHADD. It wasn’t about getting as many people in the room as possible. It was about getting the right people in the room to hold an honest conversation about how policy helps decide how and when families like mine receive diagnosis and treatment for adhd.
The whole point of the day, hosted by Mindful Choices for ADHD in cooperation with the Bipartisan Mental Health Caucus, was that better policy begins with better information.
My job on that panel wasn't the research. It was the lived experience. Mine, and my kids'.
What I Told Them
I told them about preschool and church. About how my husband and I started taking turns picking up our son, because there was always "a talk" waiting for us at pickup. Every day.
I told them about the playgrounds. How I kept a mental list of which ones we could still go to, because I could feel the side-eye from other moms the second my son didn't play the way their kids played. The list of playgrounds kept getting shorter. Even both Chick-fil-A playgrounds near us were out.
I told them about Home Depot. My husband and I were standing maybe five feet from our son, five years old at the time, and in the time it took to look away, he had climbed the mulch display and was standing on the top shelf of the garden center, waving down at us as if he had just won something. Onlookers were staring, pointing. And somewhere in that moment, watching him grin from the top shelf, I realized this wasn't just "busy." This was a kid who needed something, I just wasn’t sure what it was yet. He is our youngest, and we didn’t have these kinds of problems with our first two kids.
Then I told them about the process. We started with cognitive behavioral therapy, and we loved our therapist, but "take a deep breath and count to ten" doesn't land the same way for a hyperactive seven-year-old. I did all of the natural things - we tried lavender, sensory tools like burning a candle, making glitter bottles for visual stimulation, bracelets and necklaces, fidget toys, all before trying medication. Medication has been its own journey, but we discovered that once on the right medication and appropriate dosage, it helped him slow down enough to actually be present in his own life. That's the thing I wanted the room to understand: it's okay that our path was medication. It's okay if another family's path is ADHD coaching, or something else entirely. What's not okay is how long it takes most families to get to any path at all. That's what needs to change.
Effective care is not about choosing one intervention over another. It's about having an individualized plan built around a person's symptoms, goals, and stage of life. There’s still more to learn about adhd across the lifespan. But with the data and information we have right now, there’s no reason it should take years to get a diagnosis and treatment. And Dr. Dodini is building that solution right now. It’s what I wish I had access to over 10 years ago.
Two Other Lenses in the Room
I was only diagnosed myself a few years ago. My daughter has ADHD too. So I sat on that panel with three lenses stacked on top of each other: my son's hyperactive-little-boy ADHD, my daughter's and my own ADHD as women and girls, and now, on both sides of me, forty and fifty years of clinical expertise in exactly those two areas.
Dr. Nadeau talked about ADHD across the full lifespan, and how differently it shows up depending on who you are and when you're diagnosed. She referenced Dr. David Goodman more than once, another Mindful Choices steering committee member I'd done a virtual summit with a few weeks earlier. It's a small world when you start connecting the voices of adhd.
Dr. Dodini told a story about his own daughter, a high school valedictorian, heading off to college, and how her friends kept telling her, "You clearly have ADHD," long before anyone in her own family, including her dad, whose entire career is diagnosing it, saw it. That's what pulled him into building AXON, a practice designed to shrink the diagnosis timeline from years down to days.
I brought my plaud notetaker with me - to capture all of the amazing insights and conversations we had. But I left it in the back of the room with my wallet and forgot all about it. doh!
Family Time, Around the Edges
We turned this trip into more than one day on the Hill. We drove down from northwest Pennsylvania, about 5.5 hours away, arrived a day early, and caught the Bible Museum on a free Tuesday before the briefing even started on Wednesday. It was 100 degrees the entire trip. We rode the metro. We stood in the kind of heat that makes you question every decision that led you outdoors.
The day after the briefing, we went to the Air and Space Museum instead of fighting the crowds at the FIFA Fan Zone. Nobody had it in them to stand one more minute in that heat.
What I Want You to Know
If you're the mom reading this at midnight because it's the only quiet hour you get: I know you don't have time to research any of this. You're just trying to get something resembling dinner on the table, keep the underwear clean, and survive the homework fight. You are smart. You are exhausted. And you deserve a compass for this journey, not just a diagnosis and a shrug.
That's what I want. Not for you to white-knuckle this alone in the dark, running into roadblock after roadblock the way our family did for years. You need a light. A compass. Someone who's already walked this journey and can help you see your next step. I do not have it all figured out either, but I do believe we can help each other figure things out as we take small steps forward.
I never said this journey would be easy. But it's a heck of a lot easier when we can walk through this together. I hope this helps you see your path forward. Please reach out if you want to connect!
