Thinking and Rethinking ADHD
This weekend I found a thorough exploration into the history and current state of ADHD in the New York Times. It was a really well written piece that got me thinking. I was immediately drawn to it because of my personal experiences, should I say condition? diagnosis? Is it a feature or a bug? I was one of the kids in the 80s taking Ritalin. I guess I was early to the growing phenomenon. In fact back then they didn’t have ADHD I just got labeled ADD. I can say for sure that the way my attention/brain works is quite different from my wife. I found the discussion of a continuum somewhat useful. It certainly doesn’t feel right to say that my brain is broken and hers works.. But I am not 100% sure it makes sense to put our brains on a continuum. Do we need to have our unique qualities and ways of being quantified and put along a line?
In one vignette someone shared that outside of school they did not feel the need for medication. It was only in the context of school that it made sense. This comment really resonated with me. I was a bit spacy as a kid. I liked to talk to myself as I walked to school. I liked to pay attention to a lot of things, often at the same time. But, I was pretty happy with how my brain operated. It was and is a big part of my identity. I certainly would never want to give this part of myself up. But when I was in middle school it was a real challenge to get my homework done. I struggled to pay attention over the course of the school day. The worst for me was writing. I just did not understand how you were supposed to take a complex jumble of ideas and put them into a string of text. It was the worst when the ideas were interesting, interconnected, and I cared about them.
I really appreciated the way the article talked about ADHD in the final paragraphs. Instead of thinking of it as a medical condition it talked about the ways your brain works and how it aligns with your environment. I think taking Ritalin was the right choice for me in middle school and high school because it helped me deal with some of the structures that were hard for me to navigate. I think that it might have also worked to change the way school was structured. That was not one of the options offered. When I went to college I chose to stop taking it. I was a bit horrified to read in the article that sometimes parents are warned not to let their child stop taking the medication when they go to college. It seems like that is something that needs to be figured out on an individual level. For me, I developed other strategies to deal with some of the anxiety and challenges I faced. I also had more opportunities to avoid the most challenging situations in college. Maybe most importantly as I got older I was more effective at implementing my strategies to align my brain with the world around me.
I think it is important to remember that strategies to make our brains function in a challenging and complex world are not unique to those diagnosed with ADHD. Maybe some people have an easier time because there are more people like them, or more social structures that align with the way their brains work. But all children and adults are working to align themselves with the world they live in. I worry that part of the problem is that this process is portrayed as straightforward and seamless. It certainly has not been that way for me. Sometimes figuring out how to align my brain with the world has led to great joy and satisfaction. Other times it has been incredibly painful.
The other day I was in an elementary school classroom observing a lesson as part of my research work. I watched a small nine year old boy at a computer get frustrated. I saw a small tear roll down his cheek as he looked in dismay at the screen. I could intensely relate to the distress I saw in his face. I have no idea what was upsetting this boy. It probably had nothing to do with attention, or his brain, or anything like that.
It feels like while an ADHD diagnosis may be helpful, comforting, and even empowering, it is also possible for it to get in the way of understanding the individual’s experience. What if instead of finding labels we tried to better understand the way the world makes things hard for people. What if we actually cared about how people were experiencing the world and thought about how we can make the world easier to navigate. Of course we can’t solve all the problems. Maybe a school that met my attentional needs would have been a disaster for everyone else. But taking the time to understand people’s feelings is important; and we can all benefit from developing empathy for those who are finding it challenging to navigate our world.
