A short time ago I mentioned on Instagram that I didn’t believe in ADHD. This, of course, raised the ire of many people and because of the brevity required on that platform, I knew that at some point, it would be best to address my personal beliefs about ADHD in a longer form. Now that I’m on summer break and am sitting at an actual keyboard, I am willing to do just that.
First of all, of course I believe that there is an actual debilitating disorder called ADHD that causes major social and academic disruptions for humans, because, you know, science. The American Psychiatric Association agrees with me here and they even know how many humans suffer from this actual disorder. 8.4% of children and 2.5 % of adults according to research cited from 2018.
And see, THAT’s the part where I have trouble. I’m cool with the science and data. What I’m not cool with is the far more than 2.5% of adults who say they have ADHD. Many of the ones I know even claim to have been officially diagnosed and say they’ve taken medication to control the symptoms. Of the people I’ve met who claim to have ADHD, my guess is that a lesser percentage of those ever suffered from a disruptive and debilitating version of it.
How could that be? I mean, some have a prescription from an actual doctor. Sure, that’s tough to argue with when you’re looking the person in the eye and they’re telling you that the medication helps them to focus. But I also am privy to some of the ways humans are diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD when they are students.
I went through education courses, teacher certification and student teaching in the public K-12 system in America during the early 1990s. One day, early in my student teaching, I was standing in the hallway by the art room door with my mentor teacher awaiting the arrival of the next 6th grade class. I heard a commotion, saw a blur of movement and a 6th grade dude in a full sprint jumped up in the air, landed on his knees about 10 feet from the door and slid down the hall in front of us. He was screaming the mentor teacher’s name and after he entered the room the teacher looked at me and whispered “ADD”. (Back then it was commonly just “Attention Deficit Disorder”. It became more popular to add the “H” later on.)
Students like this young man were wild and free and seemed to march to the beat of their own drum. If they were engaged by the assignment, they were focused and adept. If they were bored, they would disregard the rules and find ways to entertain themselves. While my mentor teacher was really good at managing this student’s boredom, she also made it clear to me that many teachers and administrators simply want students to quietly follow the rules. Students who present problems like this little guy, were often sent to the school nurse with the strong suggestion that they be tested for ADD or ADHD. This urging would pass along to parents who wanted their child to do well and they’d take students to their family physician to get medication prescribed.
In situations like this, the difference between a normal child having difficulties being still, following instructions, waiting their turn, etc. and a child who needs medication comes down to a judgement call by the physician. Is this behavior more than “normal”? Evidence that weighs in to this decision largely comes from the parents and school administrators who present behavior as “evidence”. It is easy to see how a child who gets under a school administrator’s skin for a while can be diagnosed and prescribed pretty quickly.
So that’s my experience with how I’ve seen some students earn the label of having ADHD and getting medicine. Your experience is likely different and that’s OK. You may have had so much trouble in school that you couldn’t pass classes. You may be part of the 2.5% as an adult who needs medication in order to function as a helpful citizen. If so, I believe in you and your disorder.
What happens is that some of us think differently. Some of us learn differently. Some of us engage better with oral instructions or written instructions. Some of us need to see it acted out as an example. Others of us may just decide early on that the current structure of public education is outdated and ineffective. We may see that it doesn’t serve our best interests even before we learn how to effectively vocalize that thought. The unspoken message we may receive is that learning is supposed to be this particular way with everyone and if that doesn’t work well for you, then you are not normal. There must be something wrong with you.
Then you hear that there’s this thing some people have that prevents them from academic excellence. It’s called ADHD and some of the symptoms sound like a summary of your day. You can’t focus on uninteresting tasks? You hyper-focus on all the wrong things? You have a long list of things you need to do but you find all sorts of unrelated things to focus on until the last minute? You get distracted easily? You lose track of time or zone out when you are doing things you love? And then you’re like, “Dude! That’s me! I must have that!”. Many of us then self-diagnose with ADHD.
I appreciate hyperbole for humor and I practice it often. I am guilty of saying to friends that I have ADHD in humorous situations. In the same way, I may tell friends that I have “social anxiety” and they may tell me that they are “depressed”. This is a thing we do. It is not necessarily a good thing, especially if it could devalue the meaning of a real, medical diagnosis in a person who truly suffers from a disorder. Of course, there is a difference between feeling depressed and actually having Depression. There is a difference between feeling nervous in social situations and having Social Anxiety. I have never been to a Psychiatrist, heck, I’ll barely go to a Physician, and I’ve never been diagnosed with any of these disorders. Most of my friends haven’t either. But we all recognize that we have some mild versions of the symptoms of the actual disorders. Outside of these friendly discussions, we should not speak so carelessly about mental health.
When careless talk extends beyond close friends having a chat, and bleeds over into social media posts, you get a whole extra percentage of people who claim to have ADHD. THIS is the ADHD that I don’t believe in.
I forget things. Simple things. Tell me what you want me to order in the drive through line and I’ve forgotten it as soon as it hits my ear drums. No joke. I have no idea what you just said. A simple thing I need to remember to take with me to work tomorrow? There’s a 100% chance I’ll forget it without a note. Got some directions for me? You better write those down or there’s no way it’s ever going to happen. I also focus on things to a point where every other thing around me is diminished. I get totally lost in a creative act or activity. Time doesn’t exist. Yet, if I’m doing other things, like talking to you, the least little thing may distract me. If you’re telling me a boring story, it’s certain that I’m having three other conversations in my head while trying to focus on what you are saying. Ask me to do a meaningless task? Not gonna happen. If I have an uninteresting task to do by a deadline, I’ll do just about anything but work on that task until the anxiety related to not doing it is greater than the anxiety related to doing it. Once that tipping point is reached, you couldn’t budge me from competing the task with a bulldozer.
If I were in 6th grade and causing a problem for my teachers, any of the above things could get me diagnosed with ADHD and medicated. I will further argue that if that had happened, I would not be the productive and creative human I am today.
No two people learn and function in daily life the same way. I do not accept the label “normal” in most things. Our individual differences are what make us great. I do not want to live in a world where everyone follows instructions and does what they are told. I do not want to have college students who followed all the rules in K-12 education. In fact, I have spent many years teaching college freshmen, sophomores, juniors and even seniors to disregard some of what they were taught in their previous educational institutions. New ideas, creative ideas, world changing ideas do not come from people who follow rules and adhere to conventional thinking. This is the point where it would be easy to send you on a Google assignment on the eduational background of Albert Einstein. As a young student, he had many of the non-normal educational symptoms that are now associated with ADHD. Was he normal? Heck no. And I argue that neither are you.
Albert Einstein, Doug McAbee and you all have something in common. We learned strategies to help us adapt to the way we think and process information. I learned to write lists and notes to remember things. I am currently surrounded by sticky notes and lists written on the backs of envelopes at my computer desk. When I had trouble sitting still and listening to a teacher drone on about some nonsense that was not currently engaging to me, I learned to doodle in my notebook margins. While many see this as evidence of a person not listening, I have developed it as a way of remembering the oral information. This direct visual association with oral information became a major pathway in the development of my creative practices. Einstein was also a problem solver and that’s eventually what he developed into a career of asking better questions and proposing better answers. I’m sure you’ve also developed your own successful strategies and those strategies have led you to be the fully functional human you are.
But what if young Albert had been sent to a physician and prescribed behavior altering drugs? What if his problem solving skills had been dulled medically? Would he have ever entered the university? Would he have ever become a physicist? And would I have become an artist? Or a professor?
There are most certainly people who are unable to function successfully in academics and social systems without the help of proper medication. I believe that some of those people who were diagnosed as ADHD need the help of medication in order to be productive citizens.
I do not believe there is evidence to support that every child who has been diagnosed with ADHD actually has a disorder that requires medication in order to function in life. I believe that the range of what constitutes “normal” in education is a very wide spectrum, rather than a narrow sliver of what our modern educational institutions prefer.
So there’s that. I’m happy that you were interested enough to make it this far. And if you did, you probably have some opinions about this and they’re probably just as valid as my own. I’d love to hear them if you feel like engaging.
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