Women & ADHD

Among the people I remember most from clinical work are women who came in midlife carrying decades of exhaustion and self-blame, and a quiet certainty that something about them, as a person, was wrong. For many of them, what had been there all along was ADHD - unrecognized, because it looked nothing like what the textbooks described.

Adult ADHD, and ADHD in women in particular, is at the center of my work. Women are diagnosed later and less often, and their difficulties are easily read as anxiety, depression, or personal failure. The cost of that invisibility gathers quietly across work, relationships, and self-worth. I study this not as a narrow specialty but as the question that runs through all of my work: how does suffering become invisible - and what becomes possible when it is finally recognized? In that sense this page is not the whole of my clinical work, but the place where that question is at its clearest.

Current Research

As principal investigator (2025-2026), I am studying the characteristics and lived experience of women with ADHD in Korea through text-mining and qualitative research - listening to both the large patterns in how women describe their lives and the depth of individual stories.

This work is reaching an international readership. The qualitative protocol paper, “Finding Clues to Role Conflict Experience and Support in the Life of Adult Women With ADHD in the Korean Society,” was published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods (2025), and the in-depth interview study is now underway. The scoping review “Mapping the Landscape of ADHD Research in Girls and Women” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Attention Disorders, and a text-mining study of online-community data is currently under review. An earlier scoping review of adult-ADHD research in Korea showed how little the experiences of adults, and of women, had been studied here.

Where This Work Is Going

Recognition is only half of the question; the other half is care. I am interested in how mindfulness-based approaches can serve adults with ADHD - supporting attention, emotional regulation, and self-compassion together. I translated Lidia Zylowska’s Mindfulness for Adult ADHD into Korean, co-wrote “How to thrive as an adult with ADHD” with her for the international magazine Psyche, and presented with her at the CHADD 2025 international conference; I have also completed training in functional medicine for ADHD. I hope this work will widen into ADHD-informed trauma care - care that reads attention, emotion, and a long-accumulated history of shame together. My wish is to help build care that does not ask women with ADHD to become someone else, but supports them in understanding themselves as they are and living well.