I was five in 1992. My twin brothers were three. We lived in a pink house on a corner out the back end of Kingaroy in regional Queensland. We had a deaf, white cat. I was tasked with naming him, and with the sobre seriousness that defined my childhood personality I called him ‘Mitchell’, which my wife now thinks is hilarious.
It was the year my parents drove half a day to Brisbane to be told my younger brothers had something called Asperger’s Syndrome. The syndrome was barely ten years old as a concept. Few people in Queensland, let alone Kingaroy, had ever heard of it.
Asperger’s Syndrome was joined by a litany of neurodevelopmental disorders that plagued the 1990s. All of them confusingly started with ‘a’. ADD, ADHD, Autism. There was enormous fear about over-medication in society at large. The now widely defunct ‘Special Education Units’ at schools began to bulge. Teachers needed dramatic and constant professional development to learn how to cope with their ‘special’ students.
The hallmark traits of Asperger’s fall into two broad categories: difficulty with social communication and restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests. There is a strong relationship between Asperger’s, Autism and ADHD as they are all neurodevelopmental disorders, and diagnoses often overlap. One of my brothers received an ADHD diagnosis at the age of eight, but when medicated experienced dramatic weight loss without much improvement in attention, so my parents abandoned it.
My parent’s primary concern, of course, was the well-being of their children. Any diagnosis was a tool to access medication and resources to help them function. We don’t like to talk about this for self-evident reasons - my brother’s condition is severe. They struggled to get to the end of year nine. They will never work. They are unlikely to have families of their own or find a romantic connection. Thanks to the NDIS they are more independent and have access to more resources than ever before, but they require a carer, and my parents provide a consistent level of additional care.
So I bring a lot of baggage to the most recent trend in mental health fashion. ADHD, propelled by TikTok and Instagram, is everywhere, particularly for adults and particularly for women. The prescription of ADHD medication is at a record high in Australia, the UK and the US. There’s a medication shortage in the United States.
Many more are self-diagnosing. Capitalism has stepped in to take advantage. Productivity products like planners, to-do pads and playlists are now advertised as ‘ADHD friendly’. The tag #adhd has received more than 17 billion views on TikTok. One study found that over half of the videos featured misleading information.
If you become hyper-focused while working on a project, or daydream, or don’t like tags on your clothes, have episodes of burnout or fatigue, zone out when someone is talking… apparently, you could have ADHD.
This slipperiness of the diagnostic language means symptoms begin to collapse into a haze of general dis-ease and dissatisfaction. It’s everywhere. I feel conflicted about the non-medical term ‘highly sensitive person’ as a kind of ‘soft’ Autism that has proliferated many dinner party conversations. The more heinous sin is the claim of ‘neurodiversity’ by those who have self-diagnosed using social media.
Yes, we all exist on a spectrum of neurodiversity, and some have milder (but no less legitimate) symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders. But when I hear a person describe themselves proudly as ADHD or Autistic and they have rich, meaningful social lives, stable jobs, and an inner strength and resilience that has propelled them through life’s struggles… I have a lot of feelings.
For the person inside of it, I can recognise it as an attempt to find inner scaffolding in how they relate to the world. But at its worst, it reads as an obnoxious desire for mental health merit badges. Why not give yourself a diagnostic glam-up rather than put up with a banal anxiety disorder?
I know it’s more complex than that. Of course, with the ADHD publicity spike, many people who genuinely need help have finally found it. Is there any harm that outweighs that benefit?
For the disabled community, who have been maligned and mistreated for so long, language matters. How we talk about correctly identifying someone has extreme power. Not only in the touchy-feely sense of self-identification (although that is powerful), but in the division of valuable governmental resources that assist those who are most vulnerable. To co-opt the language of that community for our own exploration feels rude at best, and it’s a behaviour we police for other minorities.
But many disagree with me on that point, and eloquently. Maia Szalavitz, who identifies as being on the Autism Spectrum and having a heroin addiction, says: ‘…recognizing that neurodiversity exists among people who don’t meet diagnostic criteria helps humanize those of us who do. After all, if our experiences are completely distinct from the lives of others, doesn’t that make it harder to empathize with us? If our feelings and sensations are totally alien and unlike those of neurotypical people, isn’t that the definition of dehumanization?’
I’ve personally come up against linguistic gatekeeping within minority cultures. I posted only a fortnight ago about my bisexuality and mentioned my discomfort at not being ‘queer’ or ‘oppressed’ enough to fully identify myself as being part of the LGBTIQA+ community.
The diagnostic taxonomy of mental health disorders is also more slippery than we’d like to admit. A diagnosis can feel comforting for those who can recognise something is wrong in how they relate to the world. But of course, a diagnosis can shift dramatically from doctor to doctor or year to year. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association removed Asperger’s Sydrome from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, placing it under the umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Does that mean my brothers became less Aspergic? Of course not. They have been consistently human, consistently themselves. Societal institutions (schools and medicine) have attempted to ‘correct’ their behaviour. In some cases, that’s been life-saving. In others, it’s been disastrous.
A social model of disability would point to society being at fault, not the individual. It is not irrelevant that most social media users rushing towards ADHD diagnosis are adult women living in the shadow of COVID. In a patriarchal, capitalistic society is it any wonder that they have searched for language to recognise themselves?
The world is increasingly neuro-hostile, a fabulous term coined by Katherine May. We are constantly distracted by devices explicitly and expertly designed to steal our attention. It’s no wonder so many feel paralysed, distracted and burned out. Finding medication is not always the answer (says the man who is on anti-depressants). We shouldn’t learn to cope with 60 hour weeks, a stream of addictive content on our phones, and general angst about the world ending. We should feel alarmed and uncomfortable at the end of our tether. There’s nothing wrong with us. It’s the world that’s fucked.
Instagram, TikTok and the diagnostic manual weren’t in Kingaroy in 1992. Or a few years later, when we got our first gaming console and spent weeks playing Crash Bandicoot, Abe’s Oddysee and Metal Gear Solid. Nothing seemed particularly wrong then. We were boys playing video games. Before anybody else got involved.
For a concise, great article on the difference between distractibility, ADHD and anxiety, check this out.
This article had a follow-up with a bunch of different responses. Check that out here.
A response, on self diagnosis: https://open.substack.com/pub/replyallmen/p/on-self-diagnosis?r=2lfs26&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
From my a daughter, diagnosed at 28 with ADHD and type 1 Autism:
He makes some valid points, but also some very dangerous ones also.
Because by the sounds of it he’s very much blaming the rise of adhd and autism bc social media and how we are addicted to our phones.
While I agree self diagnoses can most certainly be quite dangerous. It’s also the only way some can really learn and eventually get diagnosed by a professional. If they choose to do so.
But he’s also under minding the fact that studies change. We gain more knowledge as time goes on. Yes misinformation exists and can be very dangerous. But it’s up to the individual a lot of the time do the research into it. Because if you think you have something then you should research it.
There is more studies being done on adhd and autism more now than ever. Because I can guarantee you 20 years ago if you tried to get me diagnosed with adhd I would’ve either been slapped with Asperger’s as a diagnoses or ADD. Or maybe they wouldn’t have been able to pick up on any of it. They might’ve just shrugged it off as me having a active imagination and just needing a bit of extra help.
Comparing stuff to 30+ years ago isn’t helpful in the slightest because everything has changed. And there is still so much we don’t understand about our brains, let alone the female brain.
Hell, there are myths out there that have been out there for hundreds of years that are constantly disproven.
Like the only cavemen men being hunters and gatherers, that’s been disproven. As it was both male and female.
There is so much still to learn especially when it comes to neurodivergency. So it’s honestly articles like his, that are while his intentions are good, they do more harm than good.
And as well fact that there are almost an extra 3 billion people on this earth since 30 years ago. So that also would contribute to why medication is at an all time high.
And covid was the biggest eye opener in so many different ways, because it made people realise that hey, maybe they are different. Maybe the reason they are so burnt out and so exhausted all the time is because they’ve been pretending to be someone they aren’t and breaking away from that is honestly extremely hard. Because Society as a whole demands, so much of you and demands you act a certain way. But we don’t and people are realising for the first time in human history that they don’t have to act the way society says they should. They can do things that make them happy.
Now his own issues with coming out as Bi is completely understandable as bisexuals so often have so much prejudice against them. A lot of the time more so than just people who like the one sex.
I can understand why he might feel that way, but he needs to accept that change is going to happen wether he wants it to happen or not.