Neil Speers on his ADHD diagnosis and music, part one

00:01

Oh, there we are. Now it has finally worked. Welcome to In Conversation With, Season 3, Episode 9. We’re in conversation with Neil Speers out of Calgary. How are you doing today, Neil?

Mostly good. Living the dream of a professional musician in this day and age, having fun figuring out the medical system.

I understand you’ve had a little bit of medical news recently. As of today, when we talked earlier, you had mentioned something about it. I think it was a couple of months ago, last time I had a good talk with you. Can you give us an update on what that’s all about?

I’ve recently had an official diagnosis of ADHD, something I’ve been trying to find my way through the system to actually get a diagnosis. I’m only 65, so never too late, I guess. But it does explain most of my life.

Like you said, it takes forever to get through the system and get this. How long did that process take? What made you think you might have this diagnosis?

01:37

It’s a musician I work with. Right now, I’m his music producer for songs he’s writing, and we can talk about that later. He’s heavily ADHD, the hyperactive end, whereas I’m more the old-style ADD, which is now called inattentive. One day we were talking and he said, “You should probably see about getting a diagnosis done, because I think you are ADHD.” I was like, “Me? No, I’m not ADHD.”

Then I started looking into it because it had my curiosity. Every little survey I took said, “You’re ADHD.” So I started talking to the doctors. My doctor said, “I don’t think you’re ADHD, but we’ll do this test.” Then it was, “Oh, you’re borderline ADHD.” This went on and on, and finally I got a referral to a psychiatrist who does it.

First I got a referral to a clinic that does diagnosis for $1,500. I said, “Well, thanks, no.” I talked to my doctor and he said, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Doctors.” But we love him.

03:19

He referred me to another guy, and it took about six months to get in. We talked, and he was trying to attribute it to a long history of depression. I’ve been dealing with deep depression for the last 10 or 12 years. I said, “No, the symptoms we’re talking about have been there since I was a teenager, as far as I can remember.” We went back and forth, and I had to get a little more assertive about getting a proper diagnosis.

Then he asked if I could bring my partner in. Shelly said, “Sure, I’ll come in and tell him.” We sat down, they talked for about 10 minutes, and he gave her a little survey to fill out. He looked at it, looked up at me and said, “You’re ADHD.”

04:37

Every time Shelly looked at anything about ADHD, she’d go through the list and say, “Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil. Oh, not that one, but Neil, Neil.” Eight out of ten, check.

At 65, how does that change your whole perception?

It’s partly nice, because now I can understand some of the things I’ve done in my life, why I haven’t done certain things that would probably be good for me, and why I’ve done other things that aren’t so good for me. But I’m also a little pissed that I haven’t found out till now. I could have used this information 20 years ago.

05:41

When we were growing up, what is now considered ADHD was just, “Oh, he’ll grow out of it,” or whatever else.

Oh, he’s a class clown, or “Boys will be boys.” Although women can be just as bad, but they’re classified differently, which is also very stupid. It’s been an interesting thing.

I took some coaching with a group that does coaching for ADHD. It’s normally $150 an hour, but if you’re not making much, they have people who sponsor people to be treated. I got free coaching for eight sessions. I had to laugh. This was six or eight months ago when I started. In the first session she said, “Congratulations, you’re absolutely normal for somebody with ADHD.”

So nothing is normal there for ADHD.

Apparently not.

It’s been an interesting time of self-discovery, learning how to do things that work for how I can progress.

07:28

Then there’s the whole part about my depression. I’m still feeling the after-effects of withdrawal from all those drugs because I had to get off them to get on this new drug for ADHD. That hasn’t been as pleasant, and I’m still dealing with that.

I’m glad you can talk about it, at least. I’m glad you’re off medications that weren’t necessarily working for you. In your notes here, there was a time of suicidal feelings.

As I may have mentioned in the note, I’ve had one day of actually feeling suicidal in my life. I’d been prescribed a drug to help me sleep. It was an antidepressant, but it wasn’t as effective for that as some of the newer drugs, though it was supposed to help you sleep. It wasn’t making me sleep. I was starting to feel really anxious. One day I thought, “I have to go for a walk.” I lived down near a creek, and I realized I couldn’t go down to the creek and walk along the path because I might throw myself in. It was a really strong compulsion. I’d never felt a compulsion like that. I thought, “What is going on?”

09:17

I headed the other direction, up onto a big hill where there’s no water. I was walking along and thought, “Wait a minute. This must be the drug. That’s the only thing that’s changed in my life.”

It’s not that I would ever condone doing controlled substances, shall we say. When I was younger, I did imbibe in a few different ones, including LSD, and I didn’t really like it. What I learned from that was that LSD is a drug where there are levels. You can feel certain effects up to a certain level, and as soon as you cross that, because you’ve had just a little bit more, suddenly you’ve gone off the charts. You’re seeing things in the air, things are happening around you, you feel like you’re going insane, absolutely going insane.

I got that, and my friend said, “Wow, are you seeing those shapes in the air?” I went, “Oh, it’s just the drug.” It actually wasn’t bad after that. I think that was a good lesson for me for times like this. With the drug that made me suicidal, I thought, “It wasn’t me, it was this drug.” Needless to say, I stopped taking it instantly, phoned the doctor to get a new appointment and try something else. That was really eye-opening.

11:04

I’ve been around people who are suicidal. Two members of my family have been suicidal, so I understand those impulses as an observer. That was the first time in my life I’d ever had a feeling like that. It was pretty scary. It’s a very scary feeling when you’re that desperate, or when your mind has convinced you this is the only way to solve the issue you have.

We’re glad you’re still here. It seems like we’ve known each other for 150 years. It hasn’t really been that long, but it seems like it. I believe 2004 or 2005, somewhere around there. I think I’ve still got the shirt from one of those shows.

Oh, do you? I don’t have any of those left. I really wish I did.

Next time I’ll wear it.

Thank you, I appreciate that. You came out and did my festival out in Canmore, Mountainstock, and you came up two years in a row. That was very kind of you. That’s where we’re going to move into your music, because at the time you had Breakfast at Epiphanies out.

Yeah, thank you. I play that on Mental Health Radio as much as I can because I enjoy it. “Luna” is a great song, I love that. Was it “Bacon and Hotcakes”?

Yeah, the instrumental. That’s the name for it.

13:01

What are you doing now in music?

As I mentioned, I’m doing production for a friend. I’m recording the instruments as an engineer, and I’m playing a ton of instruments. For the first time I’ve recorded myself playing banjo. I’m not a banjo player, but there was a song that desperately needed a banjo the day we were recording it. I was playing bass, there was a drummer, we were playing off each other, and Ross was playing guitar. When we were done, I looked up and said, “That song needs banjo.”

14:38

When it came time to mix and do the final production record, I phoned a friend of mine. He and his son have three banjos, and they lent me one for a few days. I learned how to play what we’ll call pseudo-banjo. There are two major techniques, and I used the one that suited the song. That was really fun. I learned some chords on it. I understood the basics because it is a stringed instrument, and I’m pretty good at understanding them. I gave it back, and then I threatened to buy one myself. I’m not sure if I’ll have a house to live in if I do, though.

Okay, we’re going to be closing this, because I definitely think this is a two-parter. We need more Neil on here. But I have to get to the one thing about your email that really got me curious: battling squirrels.

Yeah.

Ah, yes. ADHD is much like the movie Up, where the dog is talking about something and then goes, “Squirrel!” If you have ADHD, you know that one so well.

15:19

That’s a whole process of learning where it’s actually a good thing to be like that. What I’ve heard from various people is that back in the days before civilization, people who had ADHD were probably the best hunters because we could focus so strongly. But we’d also be super-aware of a sabre-toothed tiger coming through the grass. Those skills would have made a very strong skill set for a hunter.

There are benefits to being ADHD, not a lot, but there are benefits. The ability to focus on a project until somebody drags you off to eat again. Being able to be productive really strongly is good. Being able to notice things other people don’t notice. Being able to problem-solve at a higher level than the average person. You don’t have to be ADHD to have those skills, but those seem related to a lot of people who have ADHD.

17:01

A lot of famous inventors, politicians and business people have strong ADHD, and they were able to use those skills to help them develop their lives.

Unfortunately, having squirrels around you constantly doesn’t work very well for modern life as a worker bee. It makes being a worker bee next to impossible. So it’s pluses and minuses. If you want to be a productive member of society and work at a regular job, ADHD is not a handy thing.

With medication, you can certainly do better. If you learn certain skills and how to work with them, then it’s manageable.

18:08

One of the things my coach and I were talking about, as we were wrapping up, was how to handle certain situations. She said, “Well, you’re a problem-solver by nature. I can tell. Even if you didn’t have ADHD, you’d be a problem-solver. So when you hit something that’s a problem because of your ADHD, just treat it as a problem to solve.” I said, “Well, okay.” Did I follow enough squirrels there?

Oh yeah. That’s what I was curious about, what battling squirrels means. I know you live in Calgary, and I thought it might be a forest issue with squirrels, so I had to ask. I was curious. I want to thank you for coming on today. I want you back on, because I’d like to do another episode with you. Give me a brief synopsis on what’s coming in the future for Neil. Got a record in there? You got…

19:17

I’m planning to do some more recording. I haven’t decided quite what direction yet, because I do want to get back into the music I was doing in the days of Breakfast at Epiphanies, singer-songwriter. I’ve been doing a lot of rock and blues. I did a lot of blues, but I think singer-songwriter was more successful for me. I think it had a wider area of ability to give me different [unclear]. I can take an individual song, the sounds of it, and it’s not locked into a smaller ball, as it were.

So it’s that, or I might just start recording jazz covers. I’ve been studying jazz in a deeper way, learning a lot of new tunes. That’s fun, when I can get myself sat down long enough to work on a tune.

20:35

We’re going to do a little shameless promotion for you, hope you don’t mind. If you’re interested in Neil and his work and projects, he has lots of ways for you to reach out. [First website URL unclear] is for websites and marketing, online marketing. NeilDSpeers.com is his music. PurebredMutt.ca is the record label for Mr. Speers. Neil D Speers is also on Bandcamp, where you can listen to all his music.

Neil, once again, thank you for coming on. We must get together and do a part two.

That sounds good. I look forward to it.

All right. Once again, you’re in conversation with Neil Speers, right here on Mental Health Radio. Have yourselves a happy mental health day.