ADHD Didn't Break Me–My Parents Did

> John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down perfectly captured this when he noticed that schools, another place where authority figures hang out, ruthlessly disciplined any child who tried to assert individuality.

There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.

I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.

Having ADHD is then of course a major disadvantage in environments where there is only one global optimum. Examples include highly regulated and deterministic academic environments (school, undergraduate studies) or corporate environments.

But in human history, environments with a single global optimum have been the exception, not the rule.

People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool. We need these individuals in the future.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39508573

The "Double Empathy Problem" is a great way to conceptualize this, both to educate neurotypical people, but also to get over shame associated with neurodiversity. It's usually brought up in relation to people on the spectrum:

    This theory proposes that many of the difficulties autistic individuals face
    when socializing with non-autistic individuals are due, in part, to a lack
    of mutual understanding between the two groups, meaning that most autistic
    people struggle to understand and empathize with non-autistic people,
    whereas most non-autistic people also struggle to understand and empathize
    with autistic people. This lack of mutual understanding may stem from
    bidirectional differences in dispositions (e.g., communication style,
    social-cognitive characteristics), and experiences between autistic and non-
    autistic individuals, as opposed to always being an inherent deficit.

https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-p...

My experience with my ADHD diagnosis and the 25 years of Adderall that followed have left me jaded at the state of psychiatry.

The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?

To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.

But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?

What you have here is essentially a tragedy.

I totally sympathize with the author as someone who is (probably) neurodivergent but had accommodating parents. Being given space to better understand myself and my value was integral to my success and in being ok being different.

But as a dad to a neurodivergent kid, I impose structure - sometimes to discomfort, never intentionally to pain - because structure is imposed upon us all. I mean, if I could stop time, that would fix most of the issues with my kid’s ADHD. Same if I could make less the impositions of having to do chores, or to eat, sleep, bathe. But there is no easy escape from those things. So, I impose, despite not wanting to, because the imposition is coming anyway.

The person blaming his parents because they tried to do their job of, well, parenting a child with ADHD.

I’ve read that psychotherapy is much more difficult when there is no-one to blame. So it might help for him, until he will have his own kids with ADHD and fail in a completely opposite way.

I would not recommend anyone to blame parents of neurodivergent kids, as it is a very difficult job to do right.

The author focuses on their experience as a teen with ADHD, but having been a parent of three teenagers, and having been a teenager myself, I think that the educational system is generally asking something of teenagers that they (the teenagers) can't yet provide.

But that is minor compared to how badly some classes are taught. Every time I've helped one of my children with a class in which they were genuinely struggling I realized that the instructor was not capable of teaching the material (usually because they assumed the students already knew what they were talking about).

I'm not a fan of single-reason causes but in this case I suspect the harms are explained in this one quote.

    Instead, they [parents] relied on discipline as the only solution:

What did I do? Maybe I punished them(singular). Maybe I took them out of school for a day we spent together.

One solution will be a wrong solution most of the time. Kids are continually a new person and continually need new approaches.

Since society has moved from muti-generation families to just ≤2 parents, it falls on those ≤2 parents to perform the roles of many different adults. We can't ever stop rethinking our methods.

This is blaming the parents for society, and the complaints appears to not be specific to ADHD.

Parents do their best within the knowledge they have. Blaming your parents for the outcomes of society is childish.

Fortunately the author is maturing out of childhood - and discovering as we all do that they are the only person that has the motivation and ability to find their own solutions to their own problems.

Society definitely fucks us up, and most people are trying hard to help improve their little corners, but it's a devil's problem.

Education systems do unfortunately feel so retardedly broken from the inside as users.

> Worse, it left me with a debilitating emotional and intellectual dependency on their approval.

I'm not a therapist, but maybe one can back me up:

The "thing" driving this emotion is essentially hard-coded in the author at this point, from early childhood.

More central than rationally spelunking into the nature of what they currently consider "breakage," the author would be better off acknowledging and accepting (i.e., sitting with) the feeling when it arises as part of their own rich emotional life. This, ironically, will dissipate the negative impact of the feeling over time. (But this doesn't count as "fixing" one's emotional "breakage" any more than accepting that humans have belly buttons makes belly buttons disappear.)

Am I close here?

Edit: get rid of unnecessary and false dichotomy

I must disagree with this very strongly; this attitude of "the problem isn't me, the problem is other people" is exceedingly harmful.

You cannot blame others for their (alleged) inflexibility when you yourself are incapable of flexibility.

Consider: you fly to the UK and try to drive on the right side of the road like you always have. Do you have the right to blame everyone for driving toward you? Or should you adapt and drive on the left side of the road for once? Yes, the rule is arbitrary, but that doesn't make it valueless.

Really feel for the author. My parents intentionally threw up obstacles to my learning because they assumed they knew what was best for me even as they actively rejected people trying to help me. As a result I fell years behind where I should have been and had to catch up quick though it was easy to do so when I was no longer under their control.

I retired from the industry a bit over a year ago, which led to some tension between my wife and I; these kinds of drastic lifestyle changes can be hard on a couple. We ended up seeing a couples therapist who, among other observations, strongly believed I suffered undiagnosed ADHD. So, in my mid 50s, having already in my own mind succeeded at life, I saw a specialist for an official diagnosis. After filling out several detailed surveys and discussing my life's history for several hours it was official--the therapist said that she had rarely been more certain of a positive ADHD diagnosis.

I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Over the years I've developed a narrative that explains away my utter failure as a student, the huge highs and lows of my professional career, my distrust and lack of respect for authority of any kind, and my pride in my achievements as an autodidact. I am a non-conformist I'd tell myself, a rebel, an independent thinker, yes a frequent fuck-up, but also a drug user, a risk taker, and someone who sees the "small stuff" as beneath them.

Now the narrative is becoming: "I have a neurochemical condition that affects attention, impulse control, and executive function which causes me to seek novelty, and drives a need for stimulation and engagement." Honestly, I like that narrative a lot less.

I suppose it's somewhat of a comfort knowing that there is a fairly common condition that goes a long way towards explaining my life, but it does seem to take the personal choice out of it.