Busy Philipps has long been known for her authenticity and humor, and the star’s latest project finds her getting candid about a deeply personal issue: ADHD. Philipps didn’t receive her diagnosis until adulthood, and she’s recently teamed up with Supernus Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the medication Qelbree, to share her ADHD journey and raise awareness about how women can handle their symptoms.
Like so many medical issues, ADHD is too often misunderstood and underdiagnosed in women, and there’s been a growing movement to recognize how it can manifest differently across gender lines. Philipps, who has a devoted social media following and hosts a podcast, Busy Philipps is Doing Her Best, and a late-night talk show, Busy This Week (which just premiered its second season on QVC+), is the rare celebrity who feels like a friend, making her an ideal ambassador for a condition that can be challenging to discuss.
Busy Philipps sat down with First for Women to discuss the highs and lows of navigating ADHD, her experience as part of the cast of Freaks and Geeks (“Between that and Dawson’s Creek, I had the market covered on seminal teen shows from the late ’90s!” she says with a laugh), her precious friendship with Dawson’s Creek costar Michelle Williams and much more.
First for Women: How did you become involved with this campaign, and what did your journey to getting diagnosed with ADHD look like?
Busy Philipps: Like many women, I wasn’t actually diagnosed until my own kid went through it. My daughter was 10 or 11 and was having some learning differences at school. We took her to a specialist to check out what was going on, and as he was going through the checklist for ADHD, my ex-husband and I started looking at each other because every single thing that he mentioned applied to me.
I then went to my own doctor and got my own diagnosis for ADHD, and ended up trying a bunch of different treatment options. I landed on Qelbree, which is a non-stimulant once-a-day medication used to treat ADHD in adults and kids 6 and older. Once I found that, the symptoms started to ease up a lot. The opportunity to work with Qelbree felt so great because this was a thing that I’d been talking about publicly on my podcast and my Instagram since I got my diagnosis. I’ve heard from so many women about their own experiences and how they felt the exact same way I did.
We know that boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as girls. It’s wild when you think about it, because they’re not actually twice as likely to have it, they’re just twice as likely to receive that diagnosis. We really need to educate people and spread information so that women and girls can see themselves reflected and seek treatment and figure out if they have ADHD, even if it presents a little bit differently.
When I’m working with brands, I try to make sure that it’s an organic partnership because otherwise I won’t really be interested in talking about it. Doing interviews about ADHD is a lot, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel really strongly about the fact that we can impact and change the perception of what it is and what it means for women.
Lea Winkler
FFW: What were some of the challenges you dealt with before your diagnosis?
BP: I know how terrible I felt for a long time. I felt like there was something wrong with me, like I was constantly running behind. I didn’t understand why it was so much easier for everybody else. Why couldn’t I keep things straight? Why was I missing important dates? Why was I double-booking myself all the time?
I had a calendar and wrote things down, but it wasn’t until getting that diagnosis and finding the treatment that really worked for me that I was able to look back on the time in my life before the diagnosis and give myself a break, which I think is so hard for so many women. It allowed me the freedom to not feel bad about myself. I really struggled with low self-esteem, and internalized so much of this as an issue that was about me, that there was a deficit in me. But there’s not a deficit in me. My brain just works differently.
Lea Winkler
FFW: You have two kids, Birdie and Cricket. How has ADHD impacted you as a working mom?
BP: I’ve always been fairly productive, even pre-diagnosis, because I work very hard at it, but after getting diagnosed, these last several years have been the most productive of my career. I’ve been able to do so many projects that I’ve wanted to do for such a long time and hadn’t been able to. Before I had a diagnosis and a treatment that worked for me, I couldn’t prioritize things. I couldn’t figure out a way to fit everything in.
One of the best parts about post-diagnosis and treatment is being able to prioritize things and show up for my kids and be really present with them, because I know that I’m handling all of the rest of my work and what I need to accomplish. Now I sit down with Cricket to play a board game or do a painting, and I don’t have that moment where I’m like, “Oh, shoot, sorry. I just have to make this call. I forgot to call this person back.” Now I know that all of those things are handled and I’ve been able to organize it in a way that makes sense.
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FFW: The second season of your talk show, ‘Busy This Week,’ just premiered, with Michelle Williams as your guest. The two of you have been close friends ever since meeting on the set of ‘Dawson’s Creek.’ How have you kept your friendship so strong over the years, in an industry that can be so fickle?
BP: It’s funny, I think that Hollywood gets a bad rap. It’s not hard for me to maintain close friendships with people, whatever industry they work in. When Michelle and I met, we both felt seen and like our friendship was a deep soul connection. In finding that type of connection, all but both of us really made it a priority to work to maintain it. I try to do that with all of my friendships and I know she does as well.
The friends that you surround yourself with and the people that stay in your life are the ones that make you as much of a priority as you make them, and this is especially true as you get older. The most important piece of friendship is knowing that you deserve something reciprocal. You deserve to have a friend that shows up for you in the same ways that you show up for them.
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FFW: You had your breakout role in ‘Freaks and Geeks’ over 25 years ago, and the show remains a cult favorite. At the time you were making it, was there a sense that you were a part of something unique?
BP: I do feel like while we were filming it, we were aware of how special it was. It was an era in television where there was a proliferation of teen shows, but we always felt—and most of us in the cast were teenagers ourselves—like we weren’t making everyone else’s teen show. [executive producer, director and writer] Judd Apatow, [creator, writer and director] Paul Feig and [director] Jake Kasdan treated us with so much respect. They let us have so much creative input and really validated our experiences as creative people.
I don’t think it’s surprising that so many of the cast members have gone on to big careers, because at a really impressionable time in all of our lives, in our first big job, we were working with people who gave us the message that our ideas were just as valid as anyone else’s. A lot of times when you’re on a set the writer or director runs the show, and you’re just the actor. I remember on one job a writer said that as an actor I was essentially like a talking prop, which was brutal. That’s not what you want to hear as an actor. My experience on Freaks and Geeks was the opposite of that. We were really valued and treated like we were part of the creation of the show in so many ways, and it was super empowering. That made it feel different.
I love that people still find the show. I was out recently and a couple people came up to me and were very excited about Freaks and Geeks. It’s so sweet. I love that teenagers still watch it. It has a timeless feeling. Since it’s a period piece, you can’t really tell that it was filmed in the ’90s, and you’re almost like, “When did this exist?”
© NBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection
FFW: How did you make the leap from acting to hosting your own talk show?
BP: It started back in 2016 or 2017 when my Instagram and the stories I posted became very popular. I really liked connecting with my audience directly. I’d been an actor for so many years at that point, having started when I was a teenager. I was looking at the entertainment landscape and wondering how to apply what I’d been doing on Instagram. The idea for a talk show was generated from that, and I knew there were very few late-night shows hosted by women. I wanted to do a late-night show rather than a daytime show and I wanted there to be representation for women in that space.
I did Busy Tonight on E! for four nights a week from 2018 to 2019. It was so great. The benefit of having been on both sides of the talk show couch is that I’m well-aware that when you’re an actor or performer and you’re going to promote something, it’s a job and it can be stressful. We wanted to make it fun and representative of what we wanted to see as women in a late-night show. I think the show was successful, but after it was canceled, we were shopping it around and trying to figure out a different place for it to live, but then the pandemic happened.
Cut to two years ago, I was working with QVC on another project and they were about to launch their free streaming platform, QVC+, and I had this idea of, “Why don’t you guys do a late-night talk show? And why don’t I do it for you?” That was how it all went down, and it’s been great. We’re wrapping up filming the second season and we have really amazing guests this season.
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