Busy Philipps and Daughter Were Diagnosed With ADHD Together
The actress said the diagnosis changed both of their lives.
When Busy Philipps took her daughter to a doctor to be evaluated for ADHD several years ago, she didn’t expect to come home with two diagnoses. But according to the actress, who spoke to Us Weekly Wednesday, both she and her daughter found out they had ADHD that day. The 44-year-old recalled scheduling an appointment for Birdie, who is now 15 years old, to address some trouble she was having in school: “And literally in the evaluation, my ex-husband, Marc [Silverstein], we were looking at each other, because everything the doctor was asking Birdie and talking about, I was like, ‘But that’s me. That’s what I have.’”
Prior to their mother-daughter diagnoses, Philipps said she always felt like “there was something wrong” with her. She had a hard time completing tasks, with lots of “big ideas and not a lot of follow-through,” and often found herself running behind, double-booked, canceling on people, or mixing up her kids’ playdates. These repeated daily struggles severely impacted Philipps’s self-esteem for years, leaving her feeling as though all of the other parents were more on top of their lives and schedules than she was. “The fact is, as women, as moms, as parents … we must keep a million things straight,” Philipps said. “It makes you feel bad because you feel like you’re messing up.”
But putting a name — ADHD — to what she’d been experiencing “changed [her] life,” the Girls5eva star remembered. She started taking a non-stimulant called Qelbree, which helped her tackle the “best and most productive” years of her career thus far and allowed her to better understand her own “internalized chaos.” Not to worry: Birdie is also doing well post-diagnosis, although Philipps joked that her daughter was somewhat annoyed that her own mother had stolen her ADHD thunder. We’ll go ahead and chalk that one up to kids being kids.
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