ADHD: beyond success and normality
“I’ve gone down a few rabbit holes lately, especially with ADHD. For example, I’ve tried to find a catalog listing for the diagnostic cassette tape which I listened to when I was about 10. I found the original text of “The Ten Fairy Servants” tale from Gotland, and even was typing in Swedish into Google translate to get the gist of the version. I’ve discovered for myself that the ADHD treatment world is divided into optimists: for example, Dr. Edward Hallowell; and realists— I almost said pessimists, with a leading example of Russell A. Barkley (Hallowell and Barkley actually agree on most things). I’ve looked at articles about ADHD in nomads, listened to talks about ADHDs as hunters vs. neurotypical as farmers (Dr. Alok Kanojia, Healthy Gamer on YouTube), and read an article about whether an ADHD gene comes from neanderthals. Included in some of these later pieces is a social model of disability in which certain traits become disabilities in the context of a society. This is especially evident in that ADHD wasn’t a problem medically until the beginning of the 20th century.
One of the more interesting things I ran into was an article which looks at the literary trend of minimalism and the DSM III, which defined ADD (an earlier term for ADHD): Minimalism's Attention Deficit: Distraction, Description, and Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever by Sophie Jones. Besides picking up a recommendation to read Mary Robinson, I also learned the word cripistemology. Apparently, cripistemology comes from disability studies and is a portmanteau coining of “crip” (disability) and “epistemology” (theory of knowledge). As a page at the American Studies Institute says: “Cripistemology encounters experiences of time, space, and place shaped by practices of survival rather than by an ableist aspiration toward an idealized horizon of recovery.” For me, it means learning how to live, grow, and thrive as I am. This includes using medicine to offset certain deficits, learning strategies (or finding accommodations) for doing things that need to be done, and leaning into those areas where things are easier for me than for those who are neurotypical: taking risks, starting new things, and handling a diversity of tasks.
I had medicine when I was 11, but I had no community of people to help me understand living with ADHD. Medication was seen by the school counselor as something to help me recover from an emergency from their perspective. It would make me (almost) normal and I didn’t need to understand it for it to work. Without my people to help me understand things, I stopped taking the medication, and it took me 55 years to find the community.
I’m not a doctor or therapist and have no interest in that (I’m also not an expert in disability studies, etc). What I am interested in is exploring the shape of my own neurodiversity, looking back on the things I got right, and making my own contributions to the neurodiverse community.
I’ll conclude by quoting something from a favorite short story by Donald Barthelme, one of the so-called minimalists. The story is “The Sandman” from Barltheme’s collection called Sadness. The story is in the form of a letter from the boyfriend of a woman named Susan, who has been going to a therapist (aka, the sandman who steals children’s dreams). Susan wants to quit therapy to buy a piano but the therapist sees this desire only in psychological terms instead of a real desire. In contrast to the therapist’s goal of an “ableist aspiration toward an idealized horizon of recovery,” the boyfriend spells out an alternative trajectory:
“Your perception that Susan is an artist of some kind in potentia, is, I think, an acute one. But the proposition ‘Susan becomes an artist and lives happily ever after’ is ridiculous. […] Let me point out, in case it escapes your notice, that what an artist does is fail. Any reading of the literature (I mean the theory of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something ‘out there’ which cannot be brought ‘here.’ This is standard. I don’t mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a ‘successful artist’ (except, of course, in worldly terms). The proposition should read, ‘Susan becomes an artist and lives unhappily ever.’ This is the case. Don’t be deceived.”
(Sadness, 91, footnote 3 omitted)
I quote this bit because it highlights in a clear way the difference between the goals of medicine and the desire of human persons. Therapy and medicine can be useful, but their ultimate goal is success whereas the desires of the human heart go beyond that.