We live in a time of experts. At least that’s what the experts would have you believe. The problem is that most of the experts aren’t really experts, they’re just people on Twitter. They are book critics on Goodreads, food critics on Yelp and, I’m sorry to say, dummies with newsletters that opine on whatever the hot topic of the day is. New Covid variant? Conflicts in Eastern Europe? Cities they don’t live in and maybe have never visited but they can tell you without a doubt that the crime is high and the food sucks? A movie that is out but they haven’t seen but still have thoughts on because they read the Wikipedia synopsis? They can do it all!
Most of the time this sort of thing doesn’t bother me because I love the power the “Mute” and “Block” and “Unsubscribe” buttons have. A bad op-ed can’t hurt me if I don’t let it and I don’t have to read the article everybody is angry about if I don’t want to. I’ve spent years slowly building up a long list of topics I attempt to filter out of the sites I visit, yet the one that tends to bother me the most is the one I just can’t quit and it’s because it’s a topic that affects me, literally. ADHD.
Now, before I run the risk of seeming like one of those armchair doctors I like to complain about, I give you my credentials: I’m old-school. I was diagnosed with ADD around kindergarten. In case you don’t know my age, just know that I’m old enough to remember when kids—almost always boys because the medical establishment has been failing girls and women by not diagnosing it in them for decades—had ADD with a side of “Hyperactivity” and/or being “really emotional” thrown in. It was only a year or two later when a doctor told my parents that I actually had ADHD, a revised name introduced by the American Psychiatric Association in 1987.
I was pretty much your ADD/ADHD poster child. My parents divorced when I was little and spent my entire childhood in a very messy battle for what, I’m not totally sure. It could have been for custody, maybe money, but I’ve also realized pride probably had something to do with it. Either way, my “condition” was a big part of the fight since both parents had no idea what to do but they both felt they had a better handle on me than the other parent did. One wanted to put me on medication, the other said medication was for idiots. One sent me to a shrink they liked, the other sent me to a shrink they liked. At the same time, the other adults in my life, mostly teachers, kept talking to me or my parents about how smart I was, that I was so creative and all that. But I was also “very sensitive” and had trouble paying attention and didn’t seem all that interested in school. More than a few told my parents I probably wouldn’t be able to hack it in the real world, a couple told them to enroll me in a school for kids with special needs and another told them I should learn a trade as early as possible. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with any of those ideas, but that’s the problem: there were so many ideas and that was about it. The hope was that any of these things could “fix” me or take care of what was seen as a problem. Medication, also, was viewed as a magic bullet situation. Ritalin was supposed to make all the problems go away. When it didn’t, they upped the dose. When that didn’t work, they took me off Ritalin and gave me something else. That led to another medication, and that medication was paired with another medication to help with what I recall one shrink calling depression, but then another said I didn’t have depression, it was anger or anxiety or something else. It’s all a blur because this was basically my entire childhood. And all these years later, at 42, I still have ADHD Now I deal with it on my own terms, by seeing a shrink I like, by meditation, exercise, and, yes, I take medication. Once a month or so I’ll hear somebody saying I shouldn’t take medication, usually they’ll give me some woo-woo reason like “acupuncture and a healthy diet can help better than Adderall” (somebody actually said this to me, hence the quotes) and whenever people find out I have ADHD they’ll usually go “But you are so prolific!” or they’ll ask me how I can read so many books or how I can do any of these other crazy things like sit still for a few minutes and actually listen to somebody talk. I used to think it was condescending, but then I realized it’s all misconception. We really still have no idea how to talk about ADHD, let alone offer up treatments that can help the countless people diagnosed and those that aren’t.
Enter the experts. The ADHD expert has become more common in recent years, first on Twitter, but also on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. I see them all the time. They’re offering tips on how to make apartment hunting easier…with ADHD. They’re telling you that pots and pans banging annoys you because you have ADHD. They’re doing ASMR for people with ADHD. And baby, you bet they’ve got memes. Oh lordy, there are so many ADHD memes. Not only that, but there are even sponsored Instagram ads (always trustworthy!) for companies that promise to “simplify” treatment. After all these years, I’m expected to believe anything involving ADHD can be simple. That’s funny to me.
The thing is, I don’t think this is all bad. In fact, it’s probably a step in the right direction as opposed to where we were when I was a kid when being diagnosed with ADHD could be pretty damning. At least we’re talking about it openly and can see that a lot of people deal with this. But the one thing that social media has helped me understand is something I started thinking about years ago, ADHD isn’t a monolith. You might have it and I have it and Jim has it and Lydia has it and Margo “thinks” she has it and John “Had it and probably still has it, but doesn’t have time to go to a shrink,” but the thing is that it’s different for all of us. And this is where I risk running into the wannabe expert territory I try so hard to avoid, but ADHD is largely influenced by environment. We all grow up differently, we all have different experiences and certain factors really do change how we work with or totally avoid ADHD, whether or not we try and find healthy ways to live even though the chemicals in our brain aren’t moving the right way and also how we talk to others about it or just try to ignore it. But in the end, there is one thing that makes ADHD the same for everybody, and that’s the simple fact that things work against us. The fix is in from the start whether it’s school, social life, work, and relationships. Those things can all be very difficult for people with ADHD. Exactly how and how much depends on each individual case, but, man, it’s not easy.
Yet I find more often than not that we’re still trying to make it seem like it is. Or, at the very least, we’re attempting to perpetuate this idea that there is one type of ADHD and it is a uniform look and feel, that I can only believe all these years since I was first diagnosed has basically mutated thanks to the simple fact that we live in the Attention Economy. You might not have ADHD, but with all the info, all the videos and tweets and “Likes” and Reddit threads and Wikipedia wormholes and Trump saying this and liberal economist guy with a patchy beard and 500K Twitter followers writing a thread about that, all the new shows on Netflix, Hulu and Prime, books, articles, records, and everything else that comes out during any given hour of any given day, I honestly understand if you tell me you feel like you do. I used to get offended by people saying “I have such bad ADHD” when they clearly did not. But now I understand we live in an attention-draining world and if you can’t pay attention, I feel that.

But I still can’t help but feel like things like that tweet from a person with “Writer, therapist, educator” in their profile aren’t really helping things. I don’t say that to pick on any one person. I looked that that specific therapist’s profile and they seem like a very caring person and that goes a long way for some people. I, on the other hand, like a very stoic and borderline mean shrink, but that’s just my preference. Again, we’re all different. I mention this one tweet in particular only because it’s the most recent of a trend I see that I feel does almost as much harm to people who have or think they might have ADHD today as whatever idea of “treating” it that my parents and other adults may have harbored a decade or two ago. I look at something like that tweet and I think to myself, “You know, I could be wrong, but I feel like people that don’t have ADHD also sometimes don’t reach out and…I never thought that meant they don’t care for me.” I see this with honestly just about everything you can imagine and the problem is that it reinforces this idea that ADHD is a thing and it’s that way for everybody and that’s been the same problem I’ve seen my entire life. It’s not and we need to stop treating it that way.
I write all of this because of a very simple reason. I still find myself flinching and worrying that after all these years of being very public about having ADHD and other issues like anxiety and depression, I still feel like I’m somehow screwing myself. Like somebody is going to see “Oh man, Jason has ADHD, we can’t assign him this article or work with him.” It might sound silly given the fact that, well, I’m a writer and I tend to write a lot. Somebody once said to me, “You write so much because you have ADHD.” I just laughed and said, “I write so much because I have a lot to say and I also feel like if I don’t keep writing my entire world will fall apart” and followed it up with an awkward little laugh. I don’t know why I do the things I do or why I feel the ways I feel. After all these years of working on myself, I’m still barely scratching the surface, but I also know I’ve made so much progress because I’ve tried. I’ve worked on myself and I will continue to do so, and part of that is continuing to learn. About myself, but also about how others. The flipside of ADHD becoming such a big topic across social media platforms is I have been able to really better understand and witness how this “disorder” can shape an individual to be just that. This tweet I saw really summed it up:

I like that. It is what it is. A muscle. A work in progress. Everybody, every single human is a work in progress, but some of us just don’t want to do or give up on the work. If there is one good thing about ADHD I’ll say that it has helped teach me to just be myself. I’m who I am. There’s one me and I’m fine even if a neurotransmitter in my brain doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. I’ll just keep working on myself and I’ll keep becoming a better version of the person I was the day before.
Wow. You got my number....just rounding into my sixth decade and only now getting a handle of it. The Way of me. Hyperactivity into ADHD. Sure explains a lot. Has been key into my self discovery and reflection. Therapy + medication + meditation + good habits. Probably easier for me to live with than the people around me.