Loyle Carner has been talking about his ADHD for a long time, well before it became a common thing for public figures to discuss. He spoke about it in interviews back in 2016, and it has run through how he describes his music, his childhood, and the project he is arguably proudest of ever since.
The South London rapper, born Ben Coyle-Larner, was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. What makes his account useful is that it isn’t a tidy one. He talks about the diagnosis as genuinely double-edged, and he is unusually specific about the parts that were hard.
“I thought I was a crazy kid”
Carner has described growing up feeling separate from the people around him. “There was an element of feeling very different to a lot of my peers when I was growing up,” he has said. School was difficult in the way it often is for children with undiagnosed or newly diagnosed ADHD: not a failure of effort, but a mismatch between how his attention worked and what a classroom asked of it.
He credits some of the best parts of his childhood to ADHD, and some of the lowest points too. That refusal to flatten it into either a gift or a burden is a thread through everything he says about it.
The medication that made him “a zombie”
Carner was prescribed Concerta, a long-acting stimulant medication, to help him focus. For him, it didn’t work. He has described the experience bluntly: “I was a zombie on it. I wasn’t making jokes, I wasn’t creative, I wasn’t eating, I lost weight.”
It was that experience that led him to a conclusion he has repeated in different forms since: “I realised that ADHD was the worst and the best thing I had and I needed it.”
Carner’s experience with medication is his, not a general rule. Stimulant medication is well-evidenced and helps a great many people, but finding the right medication and dose is a process, and some people don’t get on with the first thing they try. That is a reason to work with a prescriber, not a reason to avoid the conversation.
Cooking as regulation
The turning point in Carner’s account came from his mother. She asked him when he felt most at peace. His answer was physical activity, football in particular. She steered that instinct towards the kitchen, and it stuck.
“It’s all encompassing, cooking,” he has said. “You’re distracted by lots of colours of spices and everything but the kinetic energy all feeds back into the same thing – what you’re cooking.” It is a good description of why a hands-on, sensory, time-pressured task can hold an ADHD mind in a way that sitting still cannot.
Chilli Con Carner
In 2017 Carner started Chilli Con Carner, a free cookery school for teenagers with ADHD. The name is a pun on his own. The idea is straightforward: give young people who are told they can’t concentrate a task that proves otherwise, in a setting where their wiring is an asset rather than a problem.
He has described the effect on the young people who come through it as undoing “negative wiring” – the accumulated sense, built up over years of school reports and frustrated adults, that something about them is broken. For a lot of them it is the first time an environment has been built around how they work instead of against it.
Why his story is worth reading
Carner’s account is valuable precisely because it isn’t a straightforward triumph narrative. Medication didn’t suit him, but he found that out by trying it properly with a prescriber, not by dismissing it. School was hard, but a diagnosis and the right regulating activity changed what came next. And he has spent years since making the point that ADHD is not something to be fixed or transcended, but understood and worked with.
If any of this sounds familiar – the feeling of being different, the classroom that never fit, the search for the thing that finally settles your mind – our free 3-minute screener is a reasonable first step, and our directory lists accredited private clinics across the UK.
See also our companion piece on ADHD and music, and other well-known people who have spoken about their diagnosis.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice or a diagnosis. Quotes are drawn from public interviews and are attributed to their original context. If you recognise something of your own experience here, our free 3-minute screener is a place to start, and our directory lists accredited private ADHD clinics across the UK.