“I Work Twice as Hard to Look Normal”: Lived Workplace Experiences of Adults With ADHD Across Cultures

Background: Research on adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in the workplace has largely focused on symptomatology, productivity deficits, and economic costs, often neglecting the subjective experiences of adults navigating work environments structured around neurotypical norms. While such deficit-oriented frameworks have advanced clinical understanding, they provide limited insight into how adults with ADHD experience, interpret, and negotiate everyday working life across diverse cultural contexts. Objectives: The present study aimed to explore the lived workplace experiences of adults with ADHD across global contexts and to examine how these experiences illuminate processes of disempowerment and empowerment within contemporary organizational systems. The study sought to shift the discourse from individual deficit toward contextual and experience-based understandings of ADHD at work. Methods: A qualitative narrative synthesis design was employed. First-person accounts were drawn from peer-reviewed qualitative studies, autobiographical writings, and experiential reports authored by adults with ADHD across multiple regions. Narrative sources were analyzed using thematic narrative analysis, with empowerment theory serving as an interpretive lens. Results: Five interconnected narrative themes emerged: (1) invisible cognitive labor required to meet baseline workplace expectations; (2) compensatory overwork, masking, and burnout; (3) disclosure dilemmas shaped by stigma and conditional acceptance; (4) structural rigidity and systemic misfit between ADHD cognitive styles and workplace design; and (5) reclaiming agency through autonomy, supportive leadership, and strengths-based role alignment. Despite cultural variation in awareness and policy, experiences of invisibility, overcompensation, and constrained agency were consistent across contexts. Conclusion: The findings suggest that workplace challenges associated with adult ADHD are less a function of individual cognitive deficits and more a consequence of inflexible organizational structures and normative productivity expectations. Empowerment was experienced not through symptom suppression but through recognition, autonomy, and participatory inclusion. Centering lived experience offers a critical pathway for reimagining neuropsychological research and workplace practice toward more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable work environments.