In today’s episode we’re joined by Dusty Chipura, a passionate advocate and ADHD Coach, to explore the nuanced world of ADHD and pregnancy. With her personal and professional experience we will be looking into the challenges and questions that often come up with this subject.
There is a huge gap in what we know about ADHD and pregnancy and it can be hard to find good information. Dusty is an outstanding coach and a font of knowledge in this area. Even if you aren’t pregnant or planning on a pregnancy soon this episode is well worth listening to.
William Curb: ADHD and pregnancy, really interesting to realize that there is so much that we don't know, because really there hasn't been a lot of research been done on women in ADHD for a long time, and then specifically women who are pregnant. I mean, there's not a lot of research done on pregnant women for obvious reasons, but it does mean that there's a lot of assignments that are being made. I saw something recently you were posting about medication in ADHD for pregnancy, and how the views on that are really changing.
Dusty Chipura: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you were about to say this earlier, but you said, well, I know why we don't have a lot of research on ADHD and I think it's less about the fact that we don't do research on pregnant women and more about the fact that again, up until recently, we haven't really talked a lot about gender parity with ADHD. We're still catching up in those conversations regarding how ADHD and things like autism manifest for women and people with uteruses.
And it's really the beginning of the discussion, even around stuff like what does it mean for people going through menopause, right? This idea about that there's a difference when you have hormone and cycles. All of that is, I've only heard that within the last couple years at the most. It's all stuff that we haven't talked about up until recently, primarily because the discussion is always centered around white boy or white man as the main person experiencing symptoms, right?
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. And I understand like for their initial research, they're like, oh, we want to have things be settled. We know hormones affect medication, so we don't want to study people that have fluctuating hormones. And but then if half your population has hormone fluctuations, you kind of need to know that stuff.
Dusty Chipura: And I also think it has to do with the fact that like pregnancy, for most of us in the West, birth rates I know in Canada are really declining. So for a lot of us, especially now that people are starting to have babies older and stuff, this might be something we experienced once, twice, you know, maybe three times in our lives, or maybe never, right? Not all people with uteruses are even going to experience pregnancy. So on top of the fact that like we don't talk that much or are only starting to talk about hormones and people with uteruses, like that's a subset of a subset in terms of sort of the medical research and stuff, right?
Pregnancy is sort of this moment in your life that comes and goes. And so I think maybe up until now, when a woman or a person with a uterus is like sort of thinking about their whole life, it's one moment of it. There's also like work and there's also like being a parent and there's also like, you know, all these other aspects and ways that ADD shows up in your world that they'd be thinking more about because I think like with pregnancy, while it's happening to you, while you're pregnant, you're going to be really focused on that and you're going to be having a whole experience.
But almost as soon as pregnancy is done, you're like, you're literally onto the next thing, like you've got a newborn, you've got a person you're responsible for keeping alive, especially if you're a first time parent. So like, I think after you're done being pregnant, it's like a little bit easy to forget that like this was a whole thing that was challenging. So for those people who are more on the like the end of it where like they're about to be pregnant or they've just found out they're pregnant, they're the ones who are like, oh my goodness, like what do I do?
William Curb: I remember when we brought our kids home from the hospital and then there is that like, wait, they're just letting us do this?
Dusty Chipura: Yeah.
William Curb: With what?
Dusty Chipura: I don't know about you, but like less from an ADC perspective and more from like a birth worker perspective, you know, whenever I heard my mom talk about giving birth, I had this idea about labor that it's like this horrible thing you get through. And my mom always had this saying, like she really say, like, oh, you forget the pain of labor, like you forget because you've got this beautiful baby. And so like it, you know, labor sucked and it was painful, but you just forget about it.
And so I always had this idea about labor that it's just this thing that you like get through, you put it behind you, you never think on it if you don't have to, right? And if that's the predominant attitude that we have in the rest about pregnancy and delivery, well, of course, we're not going to talk about it. We're not going to focus on it. It's almost something we want to avoid thinking about and talking about. It's the thing that is on the way to getting our baby, right? But from a birth worker perspective, right?
What we know about pregnancy and labor is like, it doesn't have to be this like horrible traumatic thing that you are like glad you don't remember the pain of because you just loved your beautiful baby so much. Like, yeah, it's going to be painful. Yeah, there's going to be challenging aspects of it. But I think that pregnancy is a really, really special time of life. I think that labor is something that can be like joyful and beautiful and peaceful.
And I think that there are a lot of other examples in the world of like what the process can look like. It doesn't have to look horrible and short and traumatic. And I think that's an important perspective to have because anything that's hard and traumatic for a neurotypical person is going to be even more so for a person with ADHD, right? Like it's going to be sort of even worse for us.
William Curb: Yeah, because we already know we have good amount of research showing that trauma manifests ADHD like symptoms. And so I see like that is like double dipping into these kind of like executive function difficulties, where you like you have this amplification effect of when, oh yeah, I have this trauma and I have ADHD. It's not just creating the same symptom twice. It's like, oh, this is amplifying what's already going on.
Dusty Chipura: And we know that rates of postpartum depression are much higher in ADHD impacted birthers, right? Like people with ADHD are more risk of PPD.
William Curb: Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I'm going to learn so many things I had no idea about in this conversation, which is I think one of the things that's like why this kind of stuff is so important because I am steeped in ADHD stuff and there's tons of stuff here I have never heard of because it's not the mainstream ADHD stuff for white males.
Dusty Chipura: Exactly. Yeah, it's so interesting because in doing this work, I see it be 50 50 like absolutely there are some people who say like, oh, my ADHD got better during pregnancy and like I had great pregnancies and I didn't struggle with anything and I felt the most clearheaded I've ever felt. So like for some people, the impact of estrogen is actually really helping them. But then for other people, it's exactly the opposite and they're having a worse time. You know, they say to me like, I wish this had been around when I was pregnant because pregnancy was like so traumatic for me. Right.
William Curb: So what are some things that you have really noticed from your clients that you work with ADHD that is your thing that people wish they knew more about this before? What are the things that they really wish they knew?
Dusty Chipura: One of the things I really noticed is that people with ADHD tend to go one of two ways with pregnancy. Some people with ADHD are very perfectionistic, right? I find this to be true even just to my clients. Like some people with ADHD are like, they almost like overcompensate. They've got like that anxiety response or they've got sort of like that need for like control or perfectionism where they like kind of like they need to know everything and they need everything to be like, you know, they need to be on top of everything and they're almost like kind of like too obsessive, like almost kind of like, I don't want to say like neurotic, but like very anxious, right?
William Curb: Yeah.
Dusty Chipura: Or kind of go the other way and they're like the sort of person who's like overwhelmed and they don't know how to keep track of stuff and everything's kind of like a big swirl mess, right? I think your pregnancy experience is going to depend on like which direction you go because if you're the more person who's like anxious and you need to know things and you want everything to be done right, I think you're really at risk of like stressing yourself out. I think there's this big issue with people trying to like do pregnancy right, like do all the right things because there's all these rules, right?
And so, you know, I'd be interested in seeing if there was a way to see the split on this between like peer ADHD and like Audi HD, I think that would be really interesting, but like there's all these rules. Don't eat this, don't do that, do this, don't do that. And like a person trying to do everything right could really drive themselves crazy, right? I don't know if you saw like I did that how to ADHD episode with Jessica recently and we were talking about what happens before you get pregnant and she was talking about her journey going through like IVF and that's one of the things she said, right?
She was trying really hard to do everything right because there's all these guidelines and you're going to get different information from people, right? Like when I was pregnant, my OB was like, oh yeah, like, you know, you can have a little bit of sushi now and then, right? But if you look at the internet, it's like, don't do that. And so again, there's that overwhelm. The rules aren't clear. There's different information from different sources. And if you're one of those people who's really fixated on doing everything right, you're at a propensity, I think to stress yourself out a lot to go down rabbit holes, right?
I think we have that greater capacity to go down rabbit holes and maybe distress about like a lot of particular outcomes that couldn't happen. Even to get way ahead of yourself and be like, I'm not going to be able to do this because what if this happens? What if that happens? This happens, right? And so that's going to add a lot of stress on your plate and again, kind of feed into that overwhelm. On the other hand, I've had people who went into labor and they didn't have their hospital bag pack. They didn't have anything ready because they like just had trouble, you know, they kept knowing that they needed to get around to it, but they didn't get around to it.
There are a lot of things that you need to know about pregnancy to keep yourself safe to help make sure your baby's growing correctly. But there's probably a lot of things you're going to want to know about labor. And then there's a lot of things to know about newborn care. And if you're more like kind of the type of ADC or that's maybe more inattentive or more disorganized, you may feel like not prepared and a bit overwhelmed by all the different things and keeping track of all the stuff, right? There's so many appointments. There's so much to do. And yeah, that's a lot to manage cognitively, right?
William Curb: Yeah. Also, what we were talking about earlier too, is not just having the baby, you then bring the baby home and you have to have your home ready before the baby comes because there are, you know, so many things.
Dusty Chipura: Yeah. Well, and there's like a lot of safety things, right? There's also like a lot of safety things during pregnancy that you might not be used to doing, right? Again, I said this like in the episode with Jessica, but she was on pelvic rest. And this is really pelvic rest, a really common thing that we do for various conditions in pregnancy that could lead to sort of outcomes we don't want. And so because she was on pelvic rest, she wasn't supposed to lift anything heavier than five pounds, but my daughter ran to her and she like picked up my daughter without thinking, right? And I was like, oh my God, don't pick her up, right? But like I did the same thing during pregnancy. I was working at a liquor store lifting box.
So I would like pick up these heavy boxes and people will be like, what are you doing? If you've lived your whole life being able to do certain things and now you're not supposed to do those things, you have to be carrying a consciousness and awareness of like that you're doing something different, right? And we know that a big part of ADHD is that lack of self-monitoring, that inability to like, you know, if we're distracted, if we're in our heads, there's a good chance that you might take an ibuprofen for a headache, especially before you're showing, right?
And there's not that physical or visual reminder that you're pregnant. You might say yes to that, like deli meat or whatever, right? Knowing and remembering and staying on top of all the things can be really, really overwhelming. And on top of that, there are some like medical things to know, like for example, that people with ADHD are at higher risk of PPD, but also studies have shown that ADHD impacted birthers, whether they knew they had ADHD at the time of the birth and whether they were on medication or not, their babies were at greater risk of preterm birth, preeclampsia and NICU admissions.
And we don't know why. We don't know if it's causal or correlational. But if you have ADHD, you are more likely to have a NICU admission, a preterm birth, preeclampsia, that has something to do with having ADHD. That has nothing to do with whether you're on meds or not. And so what is that about, right? We don't know yet, because nobody's really looking at it. But even just having ADHD could create pregnancy complications.
William Curb: Yeah, which is something you need to know. My wife was talking to one of her aunts earlier this week, actually, and they mentioned something in their medical history. And my wife was like, I should have known that because that requires me to take more prenatal vitamins. How am I finding this out, nine years after I gave birth the first time?
Dusty Chipura: Exactly. Yeah. And this is the work that Alex Bacon and I are doing. So Alex Bacon is our registered midwife in Vancouver. She's the former president of the Canadian Midwife Society. And so like the whole thing that we're advocating for is the idea that like neurodivergence is something that should be on people's radar and should be screened forward by birth workers. And really, I mean, I think that neurodivergence is something that should be on people's radar in general, right?
When we're talking about inclusion, equity, diversity, right? Like we're starting to see it more, this idea that like neurodivergence is one of those things that can factor into how people show up in all kinds of ways and like what we need to know about people. But like whether you are employer, you know, you're hiring somebody, you're going to want to know if that person has ADHD or autism, because like there might be some needs that they have that are different or they might show up different. And if you are a doctor and you have a patient who has ADHD, or even like a dentist, right?
It's crazy to me that people don't know this because yeah, like if I'm a dentist, if I'm a doctor, if I'm any kind of medical health professional, and I have a client with ADHD, I need to know because like that person might struggle to get to their appointments more, that person might struggle to like fill out their paperwork more, that person might, you know, have various different kinds of issues that could lead to worse health outcomes if I'm not accommodating them, right? And I think that there are very like real impacts.
I know that I've had doctors and dentists and other medical professionals that I've stopped seeing because of like rejection sensitivity, or I just could not get to the appointments on time and I got too many missed appointment fees, paperwork that I should have filled out that never got filled out. Like there's all these layers of what it is to be like a patient that I think are impacted by ADHD. And if a medical professional doesn't understand those implications and can't accommodate, just like they would accommodate any other disability, well, that person's going to have a worse health outcome. I absolutely think that's true for birth workers, whether you're a midwife or an OB.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. Working with your brain differences within the medical community is hard, just in general, because of a lot of what we would perceive as like, like this paperwork, like if I don't fill this out, they're going to be mad at me. And I've had appointments where you know, they're like, Oh, why did it take you so long to schedule this follow up? And I'm like, I feel really bad talking about this now, you know, being like, I don't want to like, it's hard for me to schedule appointments. I'm like, Oh, well, you just make the call. It's not just that for me. It's more.
Dusty Chipura: There's just more challenges. And we have the framework, we have the disability framework in the medical community to accommodate, say someone with other kind of physiological or neurological or intellectual disability, right? Like there's types of disability we recognize would make it harder for a person to but we don't apply those to like ADC or to autistic people, right? And one of the things that Alex said to me, there's a term, but basically this term is used in the medical community. And it means like, this person's a bad patient, like, I don't know if it's treatment resistant, but it's a term that gets tossed around in the back end of the medical community, right?
We wouldn't hear it as patients, but doctors might say to each other, and it basically just means that like, this person's a flake, and they're not going to follow through. Right. And so if we didn't know that that patient had ADHD, or that person had ADHD, we might see them as being difficult on purpose. A person named Alexis Quinn wrote this book called Autistic and Expecting. And that's one of the things that the author talked about in the book was the double empathy problem in being autistic and having care providers. This idea that the care provider might misinterpret you as being difficult or unlikable or rude.
And if that care provider is perceiving you that way, well, what's the level of care that they're going to give? Right? If they don't like you, if they think you're kind of a hassle, like, I'm sure we would love to think that, you know, all care providers provided equal standard of care regardless. But like, the reality is like, you know, bias is going to come in there. If you've got a patient or a person that you're caring for, and they are challenging to you, and they don't show up for their appointments, they never come prepared. Or you go to their house and their house is messy. Right?
This is something we need to also think about in terms of like, when we're talking about intersectionality, well, it's not just white people who are ADHD, right? Or autistic, at least in Canada here, in Canada, we have a really big problem with indigenous mothers being criminalized at birth. And there's actually a practice that we're trying to stop. But like, it's still happening where like, even before these women leave the hospital with their babies, sometimes they get their babies taken away by child protective services, because they're sort of flagged as unfit parents for some reason or another. And a lot of that is egregious. But we have like a history of colonial violence in Canada of an innocent mother is being separated from their babies. Okay.
So let's say now, that you've got an indigenous mother with ADHD, and she's got a baby, and you've got a social worker or a nurse coming to do a home care visit. And that new mother's apartment is like, super messy, because she's got ADHD, right? So if we have any kind of a worker walking into a situation where the home is messy, the person's missing their appointments, they're not filling out paperwork. Well, if that person is also now like, black or brown, there's an increased likelihood that that care provider might say, Oh, well, maybe the child's not safe, or like attribute it to something more serious, right? And so luckily for me, I'm a white person, I have privilege. My home was a total disaster when my baby came home.
But nobody in the hospital was looking at me sideways, just because I didn't fill out some paperwork or I missed appointment or my house was messy. But they could, right? And I think that statistics show and like, history has shown us that they are looking that way at black and brown women and black and brown birthers. And we see that in the system of child removals in Canada from indigenous women. So like, what chance does an indigenous woman with ADHD who's not getting any support have, right? She's already got all these strikes against her. She's already got people looking at her sideways. So this kind of stuff, like understanding how neurodivergence shows up in the patient care provider relationship, absolutely so important.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I can't imagine the pain of having your child taken away, like that is. And for nothing that's wrong with you, just how they perceive you.
Dusty Chipura: Yeah, this was the term that Alex told me that doctors have when they have a patient who is like, they perceive to be difficult, right? And how often is that term being applied to people with ADHD when they really are doing their best?
William Curb: Yeah, ADHD from the outside does not look, it just looks like you're not trying often. It's like, even if you're trying really hard, it's like, well, it's like, why don't you just do the thing? What if I could? But yeah, I think your point about the intersectionality of ADHD also really applies because, yeah, also, white, I, I know I get away with a lot of my ADHD. I'm viewed more as eccentric rather than a problem because of how I do things.
And it's, I mean, this is why I always get so mad about ADHD as a superpower thing, because I'm like, that applies to white men. If you can get away with not doing all the things, ADHD can feel like a superpower where you're like, hey, yeah, I don't have to do 90% of this other stuff that other people have to do. Yeah, maybe that would make things a lot easier for you.
Dusty Chipura: Well, and even the stuff like if a white man is having a problem with a customer service issue, and he gets angry because he's got emotional dysregulation, he's liable to get results, right? If a black woman with ADHD gets angry, like she's liable, you know, to be seen as stereotypical angry, loud black woman, right? Even how our more negative aspects of ADHD manifest, I think, you know, we have to think about the societal lens that they're being perceived through and recognize the ways that like these different marginalized identities are just going to keep adding on to difficulties that people experience.
And so with pregnancy in particular, I think that how you're pregnant and how you labor, like it really does matter, it matters for bonding, right? If at the end of the day, I have been asked, like, well, why does this matter? Why does it matter that we're talking about ADHD pregnancy? Well, there are ideas out there that there are some more attachment issues between ADHD parents and children, right? There's a lot of talk about anxious attachment. And there's been some suggestions that like an ADHD parent might be more disorganized, they might be more distractible, distracted, unfocused, and can that impact attachment issues for a child. And a child who has ADHD is going to be more rejection sensitive, maybe more emotionally sensitive.
So it's maybe even more important that you're attuned with your child, okay? And we know that a lot of ADHD adults have anxious attachment, okay? And we know that it's 71% heritability rate. So there's, I think there's at the very least, there's something to consider there. And how you give birth will impact your ability to bond with an attached to your infant. And if you have a traumatic birth, if you have a birth that was terrible, you are going to struggle to bond more with your infant if you are struggling with breastfeeding, and you're not getting the support that you need, and you're overwhelmed, and you're not sleeping, those kinds of things can absolutely impact bonding.
And we want to make sure we know now that bonding is one of the most important things that has to happen for like infant and child well being, right? And that like everything that happens before the age of five can really have such a big impact on the brain. So why wouldn't we care about the experience that a birther is having that is going to lead to the first few days and weeks after life, right? That's going to set the whole tone.
William Curb: Can you speak to what anxious attachment style is?
Dusty Chipura: In layperson's terms, yeah, so my understanding of attachment, and I know that like attachment can sometimes get conflated into like, oh, everything is everything is attachment. But sort of the theory of attachment is this idea that like, some of your foundational relationships that you had with your caregivers or parents is going to sort of form the basis for how you try to connect with others, right? And so there's secure attachments, secure and healthy attachment where you know that your emotional physical needs are going to be met. So as a young child, you experience a feeling of safety, you experience a feeling of having your needs met both emotionally and physically, right?
So you're not neglected physically, but you're also you're attuned to your parent, your parent is attuned to you when you want attention from your parent, you're going to get it. And an attunement is attunement and attachment is like something that has really been scientifically validated, like children and babies want eye contact, they want touch, they want their cries to be answered. And when they get those things, they tend to develop into adults with a healthy and stable sense of self esteem and sense of self.
And that healthy and stable sense of self esteem and sense of self, then helps them to have healthy relationships with other people where they can perceive better when they are being disrespected or when something is off in the relationship, they are able to healthy boundaries, they have a clear sense of like where they end and the other person begins. So they can make better choices around what's okay for them, as well as showing that better in their relationships. But when that attachment process gets interrupted, now we've got all these different kinds of insecure attachment.
So there could be anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, disorganized attachment. And what I often hear said about people with ADHD, there's a lot of people with ADHD have what's called anxious attachment. And so that's where our needs weren't being consistently met by our caregiver. And so we become really like fearful of losing our attachment to someone like we don't know that it's always going to be there.
And that comes from like this really, really core place where as infants, our needs weren't consistently met, right? And so as adults, we grow up being afraid to lose relationships, right? We're literally anxious about losing that relationship. So whether it shows up in romantic relationships, friendships, or anywhere, anxious attachment manifests as always being afraid that the other person is mad, always being afraid that the other person is going to leave you. What does this sound like? Sounds a lot like rejection sensitivity, right?
Yeah, if you're always worried that you're going to lose the relationship, you're not going to be able to set healthy boundaries, because you're always going to sacrifice your wants and needs, you're never going to risk losing the relationship. So you're going to let your boundaries be crossed, right? You're going to be taking a lot more responsibility for the other person than is really healthy. Because again, you're going to feel like it's your job to make sure that everything's okay in the relationship, because at the heart of it all, you are more afraid of losing a person and their attachment to you than anything else. And so that's going to supersede you being able to have your own healthy personality, your own healthy boundaries and centering your own needs. And so the idea behind attachment is that it starts in childhood, and it has sort of like an unconscious like ripple effect out to our different relationships.
And there is some critique that like, people are attributing too much to attachment these days. And like, I get it, like, you know, we latch on to something culturally as an idea. And then we like totally run with it. And we, you know, we start seeing like little anxious attachment ghouls creeping in every corner. And for sure, like not everything is due to your attachment style. But I think there's something to be said here for like anxious attachment, rejection sensitivity, having multi generations of ADHD adults, you know, in a family before we knew what ADHD was, how that might show up in someone's parenting as distractibility, emotional volatility, all that stuff, right?
William Curb: Absolutely. Yeah, you can totally see how we run with things and it becomes everything. But then it's like pendulum swings a little too far one way.
Dusty Chipura: Yeah, and at the end of the day, if my sort of concerns around bonding and attachment are unfounded, which for some people they may be, at the end of the day, I think there's something to be said for a good pregnancy and labor experience in and of itself. Nine months is no short amount of time. A lot of distress can happen in nine months. A lot of things can be impacted in your life, in your career, in your well being, in your relationship. And I think that if you can have a good pregnancy experience and look back on it fondly and feel good about it, like, I think that's a worthy end unto itself.
William Curb: Yeah, I mean, it's just like environmental policy. If it turns out we're wrong. Well, the only thing we did is we made the world a better place. You want to be able to look back and be like, Yeah, I did what I could. Like, this is also making me roll back in my head to what we were talking about in the beginning too, about how people will get in their head about trying to be perfectionist about this. And what my thing with as a parent has always been is like, I can only do the best that I can do, I will never be a perfect parent. In fact, that would also be bad.
Dusty Chipura: They need some adversity to overcome and they need to build resilience, right?
William Curb: But yeah, so I think there is a lot to say, though, that even if you're not gonna be perfect at this, it's still worth looking at trying to do.
Dusty Chipura: I think one of the things that inspired me to do this work is I saw a lot of people in various Facebook groups for like women with ADHD saying like, I want to have a kid so bad, but I don't think I could go off my meds. I'm so scared to go off my meds. I'd love to have a child, but I just I don't believe in myself or trust in myself as a person with ADHD. And like, I thought that was like super sad. And I think I'm a big fan of people having kids. I think if people want to have kids, they should have kids and they should have the support to feel that they have a chance to be a good parent, right? Is it harder to be a good parent with ADHD? Honestly, I think so.
I know it is for me. I think I need support. What I've learned in talking to other parents with ADHD, like, yeah, we have some challenges to overcome, but that's not to say that it can't be done. If they desire to be a parent, I want them to feel a sense of hope that they can. I don't think it's fair that they feel like their ADHD or their medication use precludes them from being parents because like, man, there are some really bad parents out there who never stopped to ask themselves if they would be good parents. And if people want to be parents and they care enough to be asking that question, I think they deserve a chance. And they deserve to feel like they can be.
William Curb: Well, and I think there is something to be said that the ADHD temperament kids love that. Like, like, oh, we were talking about this afternoon, when I go to my daughter's lacrosse game, I know I'm going to be swarmed by the other siblings that aren't playing lacrosse because they're like, you're an adult that will talk to us and you'll interact with us and make jokes with us, even though all our parents are over there on that side, but we're going to go swarm to you because we know that you're going to be silly with us.
Dusty Chipura: Totally.
William Curb: Is there anything you'd like to leave the audience with?
Dusty Chipura: If you're listening to this and you are a pregnant person with ADHD, I've tried to create some resources. One is on my website. If you go to Vancouver for ADHD coaching.com, there is a notion template that I've made that you can use on notion that is like a pregnancy workbook with a lot of information and support. If you're not really like a notion person and you're not techie, you can also download this workbook as a PDF and you can print it. You can always like hit me up if you need support. I really think that people with ADHD who are pregnant who want support, I want to give them as much support as I can. So hit me up.
William Curb: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know I learned a ton of stuff, so I'm sure people are really going to appreciate this.
Dusty Chipura: Yay, thanks Will.
This Episode's Top Tips
It’s important to recognize the gap in ADHD research related to women and pregnancy. This means that you need to be aware of what the current research suggests. This also means that you will have to be more of an advocate for your needs during pregnancy because it’s possible that you will be more informed about ADHD and pregnancy than your caregivers.
With that in mind there is a need to prioritize building a support system, including healthcare providers knowledgeable about ADHD as well as community support for emotional and practical assistance.
There is a likely impact of ADHD on pregnancy-related executive functions, such as organization and time management, and so it will be important to develop and employ strategies or tools to mitigate these challenges (this is where a support network can come in extra handy).