When Grief Hits Different: Understanding ADHD and Loss

In this conversation with Dr. Sasha Hamdani—a board-certified psychiatrist, author, and mental health advocate known for her work on ADHD and destigmatizing neurodivergence—she reflects on losing her father and how grief uniquely impacts neurodivergent brains: dismantling routines, reshaping focus, and at times unlocking unexpected forms of healing and creativity.

The Reality Check Nobody Prepared Us For

Picture this: You're already juggling a thousand thoughts, struggling to keep your daily routine intact, when suddenly life throws you the ultimate curveball—losing someone you love. For people with ADHD, grief doesn't just knock you off your feet; it completely dismantles the fragile fsystems you've spent years building to function.

“I just feel like it took me so much longer to find my footing than other people. Even other people in my family who are neurotypical—I just couldn't quite get there.”

Why ADHD Makes Grief More Complex

The Executive Function Breakdown

When you have ADHD, your brain already struggles with executive functioning—the mental skills that help you plan, focus, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks. Add grief to the mix, and these already-fragile systems completely fall apart.

“If there are already holes in terms of your executive functioning and your baseline functioning in general, like your ADLs—sleeping and eating and doing all these other things—all things that you have managed to Frankenstein into a routine, it falls apart,” Dr. Sasha Hamdani explains. “And you have to restart. It’s like every day I was reinventing the wheel.”

The Focus Fragmentation Factor

Here’s something crucial that extends beyond just ADHD: this struggle affects anyone who deals with fragmented focus, whether from anxiety, trauma, or other conditions. As Sasha points out, “I think it’s anybody who has difficulty with focus at its baseline. It doesn’t have to meet criteria for ADHD. I think you’re going to deal with this.”

The Surprising Creative Surge

In the depths of her grief, something unexpected happened to Sasha—she became intensely creative. “I literally in that time I was miserable, number one, but I was probably more creative than I've ever been in my life. I was just profusely writing, profusely creating constantly, because I think my brain just wanted something to be distracted by.”

This wasn't just casual journaling. In the first four days after her father's death, she wrote obsessively—on cardboard boxes, notebook pages, anything she could find. “People are going to think I'm making a manifesto,” she laughed, describing the chaotic outpouring.

Six months later, she discovered something remarkable in those “wild writings”—the foundation for a screenplay about grief that became a crucial part of her healing process.

Creating Sacred Spaces for Grief

The Power of Compartmentalization

One of Sasha's most valuable insights is the need to create dedicated spaces for grief processing. “I think some people get to it via therapy, where you find that isolated, carved out time. Some people get to it creatively. Some people do it by helping others that are grieving,” she explains. “It's just a way to carve out some organization for grief so it doesn't disorganize the rest of your life.”

This isn't about suppressing grief or shoving it into a box—it's about giving it a proper container so it doesn't seep into every moment of every day.

Permission to Process Differently

The key word here is permission. Sasha had to give herself permission to write obsessively, to take longer to heal, to process differently than the neurotypical people around her. For those supporting someone with ADHD through grief, this permission becomes crucial.

Practical Strategies for ADHD Grief

Know Your Baseline—and Your Limits

Before crisis hits, it's worth identifying what your baseline functioning looks like and where your vulnerable spots are. Sasha wishes she had thought about that ahead: “I would have honestly delegated more help—I would have known what to ask for of my partner, of my family... because otherwise I'm going to drown. And that's what happened.”

Build in Buffer Time

When returning to work after loss, Sasha had to completely restructure her schedule. “I had to start building in buffer time between appointments... I need 10 minutes between a patient where I'm not doing anything, because most of that time I had to collect myself again.”

Accept the Extended Timeline

Perhaps most importantly, she learned to accept that her grief timeline didn't match others'. “Even other people in my family who are neurotypical—I just couldn't quite get there” in the same timeframe. This isn't a failing; it's a different neurological reality that deserves accommodation, not judgment.

Beyond ADHD: A Universal Truth About Diverse Grief

While Sasha's experience centers on ADHD, her insights reveal something broader: grief affects everyone differently, and those differences often relate to how our individual brains are wired. Whether you have ADHD, anxiety, trauma history, or any condition that affects focus and executive functioning, your grief experience, even more than that of others who are more neurotypical, may not follow an expected timeline or trajectory.

The Healthcare Perspective: When Patients Grieve

Sasha also touched on something many healthcare providers miss—how ADHD can affect a patient's ability to manage complex medical instructions, especially during times of stress or loss. She described having to create executive summaries for patients, writing things down explicitly, because “you don't trust your brain as well as you should have.”

This has profound implications for how we support aging individuals with ADHD, or anyone dealing with complex medication regimens while processing loss.

Finding Your Own Path Through

Sasha’s story doesn't end with tips and strategies—it ends with transformation. That chaotic writing in her darkest hours became a screenplay. Her struggle to process grief became a way to help others understand their own experiences.

“It was so healing for me, because it was almost like in that writing, I got to process my own grief, and I got to pull away from it for a little bit instead of it seeping into every single second of every single day. I made a space for it.”

Grief Doesn't Have to Be “Normal”

If you're reading this while navigating loss with a neurodivergent brain, here's what Sasha’s experience teaches us: Your grief doesn't have to look like anyone else's. It might involve writing on cardboard boxes at 3 AM, or needing three times longer to “get back to normal,” or discovering that traditional therapy approaches don't work for you.

The goal isn't to grieve “correctly”—it's to find your own way of creating space for loss while slowly rebuilding the systems that help you function. Sometimes that means accepting help you've never needed before. Sometimes it means giving yourself permission to process in ways that seem unconventional.

And sometimes, it means trusting that even in the messiest, most chaotic expressions of grief, there might be something healing waiting to emerge. A lesson that can apply to everybody.

The Power Of Writing

Sasha reminds us that writing can be more than words on a page. It can be a practice of seeing ourselves more clearly, of tracing the shape of our inner world when it feels blurred by illness, stress, or grief. Journaling makes the invisible visible. It turns feelings into language, giving us a way to notice, name, and gently hold what we are carrying.