About Thomas D. Stoker

Hi. I'm Thomas. And I'm a scientist who never quite made it into the lab.

I'm just a working class boy from a council estate project in the south of England who didn't follow the usual path or stereotypes and got diagnosed late in life with ADHD. Despite the chaos brain I managed to get through university with a degree in the life sciences but never made it to be a scientist, mainly on account of being a terrible student and really not good at lab work.

I was crazy interested in science as a kid but was not good with my hands and broke way too much lab equipment. I could not get the electron microscope to focus and when I used the particle accelerator it gave me slow particles and an F in my lab reports.

I ended up holding down a long career in IT management but was always fascinated by science and psychology. Why do people do the things they do? How come certain things seem to make my ADHD brain more chaotic?

So I basically still read loads about science, medicine, psychology and such like and I experiment on myself with new techniques, diets, herbal supplements to see what works.

I've had a couple of very unpleasant encounters with depression but managed to get completely free of that by the mid 1990s. Thank God! And it turns out I've developed all kinds of coping mechanisms to work around my ADHD without even realising it until the early 2020s.

So I like to share what I find out. Hence this blog and various books that I'm working on. It's all about my real life experience.

I mentioned the fact that I come from a very working class background for a reason. A lot of (most of?) the stuff I read about health and wellbeing seems to come from a very different world. There's nothing wrong with that world but I want to make sure that I also share what I learned with people from a similar background.

It's a well established fact that by every measure - financial, educational, health, mental health, suicide rates - working class men in Western society come out pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order. And interestingly enough, we have a much higher rate of ADHD.

So if you're in that category I don't want to miss you out.

The way I work is that I'm all about the scientific research. If there is one thing that I got from my Bachelor of Science degree, it is how to look up references to scientific journal publications and how to understand them. And that's what I use here. I follow all kinds of scientific and medical publications. I get daily email alerts from about a dozen of them. And if something pricks my interest - about ADHD, about depression, about psychology or herbal medicine - then I read up on it and write about it.

So please have a look. And if you've got any comments I'd love to hear from you - even if you think there's something I've done wrong.

(Yes - I have used AI to create some of my illustrations. I'm not an artist. I wish I was! And that is a genuine artist impression of me but it helps me look a bit younger and lose a few pounds!! 😄)

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