I’m not sure I fully endorse this idea, hence short form, but it’s rattling around inside my head and maybe we can talk about it?
I feel like there’s a kind of ADHD (or ADD) expansionism happening, where people are identifying all kinds of things as symptoms of ADHD, especially subclinical ADHD.
On the one had this seems good in the sense that performing this kind of expansionism seems to actually be helping people by giving them permission to be the way they are via a diagnosis and giving them strategies they can try to live their life better.
On the other I feel like it’s terrible in terms of actually diagnosing ADHD. It might help to explain why I think that.
Much of what I see that I’m terming ADHD expansionism looks to me like taking normal human behavior that is ill fitted to the modern environment and then pathologizing it. As best I can tell, it’s normal and adaptive for humans to exhibit various behaviors that that get labeled as ADHD symptoms, like flittering between multiple activities, hyperfocus on things the mind finds important but doesn’t necessarily endorse as important (S1 important things, not S2 important), understimulation, overstimulation, and otherwise finding it hard to focus on a one thing.
All of that sounds like normal, adaptive, forager behavior to me. Some of it became maladaptive during the farming era, but not especially, and now in the industrial era are less adaptive.
Thus I think ADHD suffers from the same issue as codependency does, in that if you start to describe the symptoms you quickly realize 90% of humanity has this “problem” and so I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice by considering it a pathology because it fails to acknowledge that most of these mental habits are just what it’s like to be a normal human and that its our conditions that are unusual and that we are struggling to function within.
I don’t see this as cause to throw out modern industrial society, but rather that we need to think about ways to adapt our systems to better accommodate real humans rather than the idealized ones of high modernism.
On the ground level, yes, we may still need to do much to personally intervene against ADHD-like symptoms, just as we may need to do against our natural tendency towards codependency, but I think there’s something being lost by even talking about it this way. Rather, we need to think of it as how do we cope with being humans engaged in systems that ask us to behave in unusual ways, and see the systems as the broken things, not ourselves. It’s not that everyone has ADHD or codependency; rather, it’s that our systems pathologize normal behavior because they are confused about what is typical.
There’s not much agreement on what to call it when “normal” is harmful, but not so overwhelmingly common as to seem immutable. Agreed that thinking of it as a pathology doesn’t quite cut it, but also “acceptable” seems wrong.
ADHD Expansionism
I’m not sure I fully endorse this idea, hence short form, but it’s rattling around inside my head and maybe we can talk about it?
I feel like there’s a kind of ADHD (or ADD) expansionism happening, where people are identifying all kinds of things as symptoms of ADHD, especially subclinical ADHD.
On the one had this seems good in the sense that performing this kind of expansionism seems to actually be helping people by giving them permission to be the way they are via a diagnosis and giving them strategies they can try to live their life better.
On the other I feel like it’s terrible in terms of actually diagnosing ADHD. It might help to explain why I think that.
Much of what I see that I’m terming ADHD expansionism looks to me like taking normal human behavior that is ill fitted to the modern environment and then pathologizing it. As best I can tell, it’s normal and adaptive for humans to exhibit various behaviors that that get labeled as ADHD symptoms, like flittering between multiple activities, hyperfocus on things the mind finds important but doesn’t necessarily endorse as important (S1 important things, not S2 important), understimulation, overstimulation, and otherwise finding it hard to focus on a one thing.
All of that sounds like normal, adaptive, forager behavior to me. Some of it became maladaptive during the farming era, but not especially, and now in the industrial era are less adaptive.
Thus I think ADHD suffers from the same issue as codependency does, in that if you start to describe the symptoms you quickly realize 90% of humanity has this “problem” and so I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice by considering it a pathology because it fails to acknowledge that most of these mental habits are just what it’s like to be a normal human and that its our conditions that are unusual and that we are struggling to function within.
I don’t see this as cause to throw out modern industrial society, but rather that we need to think about ways to adapt our systems to better accommodate real humans rather than the idealized ones of high modernism.
On the ground level, yes, we may still need to do much to personally intervene against ADHD-like symptoms, just as we may need to do against our natural tendency towards codependency, but I think there’s something being lost by even talking about it this way. Rather, we need to think of it as how do we cope with being humans engaged in systems that ask us to behave in unusual ways, and see the systems as the broken things, not ourselves. It’s not that everyone has ADHD or codependency; rather, it’s that our systems pathologize normal behavior because they are confused about what is typical.
There’s not much agreement on what to call it when “normal” is harmful, but not so overwhelmingly common as to seem immutable. Agreed that thinking of it as a pathology doesn’t quite cut it, but also “acceptable” seems wrong.