‘Anyone who knows me didn’t look a bit surprised when they heard I’d been diagnosed with ADHD’

When Louisa Ní Éideáin was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, she had what she calls the most ADHD reaction ever: the mother of two young sons decided to ratchet up her already hectic life. “I went, okay, this is interesting news, better write a few songs about it and start working on a script!” The result is Dopa-Mean Girl, a cabaret that she’s performing at Dublin Fringe Festival next week. A bilingual musical comedy about getting an ADHD diagnosis later in life, it’s essentially her journey “slightly camped up and amped up”.

People with the condition, which affects the way their brains respond to dopamine, can struggle with impulse control, organisation and focusing. ADHD Ireland estimates it affects about one in 20 people, yet until she was in her mid-30s it had never crossed Ní Éideáin’s mind that she might have it. “I’d always thought ADHD was unruly little boys climbing trees when they should have been sitting down in school.”

The impact of pandemic lockdowns and having children caused Ní Éideáin, who was 38 when she was diagnosed, to reconsider. “On the outside, things were relatively together. I had systems to manage everything. That worked when it was just me, but with small children the systems don’t hold up. It all felt a lot more overwhelming. And with Covid, suddenly there was no childcare, but I was still expected to do a full day’s work from home. I was also supposed to undergo IVF, and that got cancelled. I had all this stuff swirling around, but I thought everyone’s brain was that busy. Then I read an article about a woman with ADHD which struck a chord.”

[ Dublin Fringe Festival: Full coverage here ]

She found herself asking people about their thought processes – “Do you have a song that plays in your head when you see certain objects?” She mentioned the possibility of ADHD to a psychologist friend. “She was far too professional to give a diagnosis, but she didn’t discourage me. She said, ‘If you think it would be helpful, maybe explore it.’ So I did.”

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Ní Éideáin was diagnosed with what she describes as “the hyperactive flavour”, adding, “Anyone who knows me didn’t look a bit surprised when they heard that … I’ve always had hundreds of hobbies and been into everything. I’m, like, ‘I’m going to be a concertina player,’ and that’ll last a month or two, and then I move on to something else.” She hasn’t taken medication but remains open to it in the future, mentioning a friend who also received an ADHD diagnosis as an adult and said medication changed her life. “She said, ‘This is why life has seemed so much easier for everyone else. I had no idea your brain could be so clear.’ It made her incredibly sad that for years she didn’t have that and just kept telling herself she should have been able to manage the way other people did.”

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Ní Éideáin has a positive attitude to her own ADHD but stresses that it’s not all “quirky, fun times. People with ADHD have higher rates of suicide; women are often misdiagnosed as having anxiety, and then could have the wrong sort of treatment.”

She had already been looking for ways to express her creativity – “I’d written a terrible novel” – and decided to use her diagnosis as fuel. She had studied English and music at University College Dublin and had always enjoyed performing. While living in New York some years ago, she took improv comedy classes at Upright Citizens Brigade, the alternative theatre cofounded by Amy Poehler, and had started doing sessions in dive bars. “You get such a dopamine hit from the fact that it’s live.” Looking back through an ADHD lens, she can see how the structure of long-form improv suited her so well. “People with ADHD are very good at thinking on their feet, so even though I was terrified beforehand, once I was on stage, and picking up on what everyone was saying, I could make the connections quickly.”

Dopa-Mean Girl brings her love of writing, performing, comedy and music together. “But just because you get a diagnosis, you don’t have to tell anyone. You don’t have to go on stage and sing songs about it! That’s an optional extra.”

The show originally began as a proposal to the Seen & Heard festival, an annual showcase for new staged work across all genres. “I cannot speak highly enough of Seen & Heard,” she says. “That’s where I met my wonderful director, Franziska Detrez. She said, ‘I really like the idea of your show. Do you need a director?’ To be honest, I didn’t really know what a director did, but guessed I needed one. And then she brought in our lighting designer, and suddenly it turned into a team.” Ní Éideáin loved the process of putting the show together. “Having something new to learn absolutely feeds my hyperfocus.”

She and her husband, who is French, are raising their sons, aged six and two, through Irish. “It’s chaos in the mornings, people shouting ‘shoes!’ in different languages at each other.” Because she lives through Irish, it was important to her that the show be bilingual. “If you don’t speak Irish you’ll be fine. If you speak Irish you get the little DVD extras, but you won’t miss any large plot twists or anything if you don’t. Using two languages is a nice way of conveying what it’s like having a brain that is always doing two things at once.”

Dopa-Mean Girl isn’t her first time performing in Irish. Two years ago she went to an Irish stand-up night at Club Chonradh na Gaeilge and liked it so much that she took to the stage at the next event. What age are the audiences, I ask – the Arts Council said recently that there’d been a huge decrease in the number of younger people at events supported by the organisation. That trend isn’t reflected in Irish-language events, according to Ní Éideáin, who says Irish stand-up comedy attracts people of all ages. “You will have gangs of younger people. The language is the uniting feature. To anyone who thinks the language isn’t living, I say, come to stand-up as Gaeilge and you’ll see a room full of people laughing at a joke about something that was in the news that week.”

Doing stand-up has enabled Ní Éideáin to meet other comedians and performers, and she’s eager to take every opportunity that presents itself. Under the name Mild Things, she and the comedian Aideen McQueen have begun to collaborate on comedy songs by rewriting existing pop lyrics. Ní Éideáin’s ADHD diagnosis changed her life in ways she could never have foreseen. “Once you start doing the creative things your soul desires, once you open that pipe, it’s very hard to close it back up again. You start seeing ideas and opportunities everywhere. I love that feeling.”

Dopa-Mean Girl is at Smock Alley Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, from Monday, September 11th, until Saturday, September 16th. Craic Den Comedy Club hosts Irish-language stand-up at Whelan’s on Sunday, September 10th and 17th, also as part of the festival