Blackness x Neurodiversity V: The Disappointing Discourse About the “Reality” of “ADHD”
We seriously need to find a new way to talk about “ADHD,” and I’ll attempt to do exactly that.
For the past year, I’ve been neck deep in neurodivergent Twitter, and it’s been quite an interesting time.
I’ve seen ‘what if a white person’s Tourette’s makes them say “nigga”’ discourse.
I’ve seen “moral OCD” discourse.
And I’ve seen ‘is this my rejection sensitive dysphoria or my “unconscious” racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness?’ discourse.
To name a few.
I was both unprepared and incredibly prepared for all of it thanks to spending a little over a decade on Facebook, Adam4Adam, and Grindr trudging through some of the wildest amounts of racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness I’ve experienced in my life. The twist of pathologizing one’s racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness under the guise of it being side-effect of one’s being autistic was new to me, though.
At the time, I had only been fully out as autistic online for a few months; however, because I was used to racism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and gaslighting from other places on the internet as well as in my real life, it was easy for me to see through all of the bullshit, much to many people’s dismay.
One enduring part of neurodivergent discourse on Twitter is the war some self-identified ADHDers seem to have with ADHD TikTokers who allegedly “romanticize/infantalize” ADHD and make it “a quirky personality trait” and not the incredibly debilitating “mental illness” some on ADHD Twitter allege it to be.
I have never seen any of these alleged videos from ADHD TikTokers who allegedly “romanticize/infantalize” ADHD and make it “a quirky personality trait” (much the same that I didn’t see any video evidence when this allegation was lobbed against Autistic TikTokers either), so do with that what you will.
That said, as an “ADHDer” myself, I’ve come to talk about what life has been life for me, a poor queer non-binary Black “ADHDer” who has been un-medicated my entire life.
First, you have to understand the difference between how allistic people think and how autistic people think:
Allistic people are linear thinkers.
Autistic people are systems thinkers.
We are both capable of being bored, being hyperactive, being inattentive, intently focusing on topics, having special interests, being passionate about things, losing ourselves in something for hours before we realize how much time has passed, etc.
And how intense it can get is fundamentally affected by how we think and process information.
Another great way to understand the difference between how allistic people think and how autistic people think is:
Now, none of this is to say that one way of thinking is inherently better than the other. To do so would be ableist. It’s actually what’s fundamental to ableism. Why? Ableism argues that analytical/linear thinking is inherently better than system thinking because ableism argues that being allistic is the “correct” way of being, and being autistic is inherently “disordered” (which is why being autistic— as well as “non-normative” or “disruptive” behaviors and emotions — is pathologized as proof of “mental illnesses”).
Something else important to know about “ADHD” is this:
Despite decades of intensive research, there is still no conclusive evidence that enables any of the major categories of mental disorder, including schizophrenia, depression,anxiety and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), to be considered a neurological condition in this way. The fact that there are some subtle group differences between people with some diagnoses and ‘normal controls’ in aspects of brain structure orfunction does not demonstrate the presence of a neurological disease. None of the findings are sufficiently specific or capable of differentiating between a person who is thought to have a particular mental disorder and one who is not.
Diagnosis is still made on the basis of behaviour, thoughts and feelings that are reported by the individual or those around them and that depend, of course, on judgements about what is ‘normal’ and what is not.
There’s also this fact from Mad in Denmark:
Articles, textbooks, and expert interviewers repeat genetic and neurobiological claims even though they cannot be replicated, use medical language and scary metaphors to describe ADHD, commit the ecological fallacy, and fail to mention the strongly supported environmental and social components of behavior, even though these have shown said to play a role in study after study. It’s no wonder the public thinks ADHD is a medical illness that causes behavior, rather than just a descriptive label for that behavior. And it’s no wonder the public doesn’t think you can do anything but prescribe medicine.
And this isn’t even getting into the fact that most “ADHD” meds, and psych meds in general, are not made for most people. Or the fact that how “ADHD” is diagnosed and studied is racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, misogynistic, ableist, and eugenicist.
And as Gary Greenberg says in his interview in The Atlantic:
What is the difference between a disorder and distress that is a normal occurrence in our lives?
That distinction is made by a clinician, whether it’s a family doctor or a psychiatrist or whoever. But nobody knows exactly how to make that determination. There are no established thresholds. Even if you could imagine how that would work, it would have to be a subjective analysis of the extent to which the person’s functioning is impaired. How are you going to measure that? Doctors are supposed to measure “clinical significance.” What’s that? For many people, the fact that someone shows up in their office is clinical significance. I’m not going to say that’s wrong, but it’s not scientific. And there’s a conflict of interest — if I don’t determine clinical significance, I don’t get paid.
None of this is to say that the mental and emotional distress people are experiencing that is disrupting their lives isn’t real.
It’s to say that calling mental and emotional distress “mental illness/disorders” is not only not scientific, it’s also proven to be wrong to call mental and emotional distress “mental illness/disorders” by the very same research used to claim they are so by the very same experts telling us they are.
And I think that how a person processes, navigates, is impacted by, and endures the distress and trauma they experience — coupled with whether they’re autistic or allistic (non-autistic), and how each style of thinking (systems thinking and linear/analytic thinking, respectively) show up differently in every individual person— explains why there’s so much variation in how people experience and are affected by “ADHD,” and why not all people who have “ADHD” are autistic despite any “overlap” (that can easily be explained by the fact that all humans behave in similar ways since we’re all socialized in incredibly similar ways the world around, even though we don’t all think, feel, hear, taste, etc. in the exact same way), and the fact that “ADHD” and “autism” can be diagnosed simultaneously nowadays (which makes sense considering the trauma and distress autistic people can experience over the course of their lives because of how hostile society is towards autistic people).
Now, with that said, let’s put this into the context of my life.
There’s an incredibly famous clip of a debate on discrimination between James Baldwin and Paul Weiss on the Dick Cavett show in 1969 that’s recently gained more popularity because of the documentary I Am Not Your Negro on Baldwin (that I highly recommend watching if you are at all serious about anti-racism politics and praxis), where he says:
You talk about making it as a writer by yourself [but] you have to be able to turn off all the antenna with which you live, because once you turn your back on this society you may die. You may die. And it’s very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you are afraid of the world around you.
And I’ve been thinking about it for months.
Part of the reason why that quote has been on my mind for so long is because that quote almost perfectly explains part of the complexity of being a queer non-binary Black neurodivergent writer in the year 2021 as it relates to me. There’s so much information to process at all times that it’s harder now for me to zone out and focus on just writing and developing the stories I want to tell. The more I learn about the world, the more I learn and grow as a person, the more I change my stories to reflect my new understanding of the world. Which is a good thing.
Unfortunately, my desire to create an inherently inclusive, equitable, and just society; my goal of changing how stories are told on screen, and who gets to tell them; my perfectionist tendencies; and my insatiable curiosity makes it hard to write as the characters I create after a while since I either outgrow them or grow apart from them (and have to learn to write from their perspective again).
The other part of why that quote sticks with me is it helps to describe what “ADHD” is like for me as a queer, non-binary, Black, AMAB, autistic person who grew up (very) poor in NYC and I working to become a paid screenwriter.
Being a deeply traumatized writer with multiple intersecting marginalized identities ostensibly means that I have to pay attention to every single detail of the world, especially and in particular the things other people either don’t notice or don’t want to notice (especially in themselves and the people they love and respect).
Not just because it’s how I learn to world build and create dynamic, humanized characters; it’s also because as a human who exists in a racist, white supremacist, anti-Black, misogynistic, queerphobic, transphobic, ableist, colorist, ageist, etc. world who is targeted by almost every system of oppression, “hyper empathetic,” and a victim of many forms of abuse, I have become conditioned to be hyper-aware of the world around me. And it’s hard to both pay attention to all the tiny details and be able to write because the two seem to have a tenuous alliance that scarcely produces quickly writing (which is why I often sit with ideas for an incredibly long time before writing anything).
And because (a) the world is constantly changing, (b) I’m constantly learning and unlearning things, and (c) the stress and anxiety of trying to keep up with everything while also trying not to be crushed under the weight of the trauma and distress raging inside me, it can hold me back from making decisions and doing things that can better my life. And I have a lifetime’s worth of examples where I didn’t act in my best interest because I made decisions out of fear and/or in response to whatever traumatic memories or feelings I was re-living.
There have also been times where being able to quickly process a lot of information, learn a lot of things, and multitask have been incredibly useful for me as well in all areas of my life — both personally and professionally.
I think this desire to have discourse around whether “ADHD” is inherently good/more good than bad or inherently bad/more bad than good — which I think is mostly driven by rich cis het allistic white people and orgs that benefit from pathologizing being autistic and divergent thinking— is fundamentally useless. It’s much better to think about digergent thinking in a neutral way. It can be helpful or not depending on many different circumstances on any given day.
Allowing people, especially autistic people, a space to unpack the ways in which racism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, misogyny, queerphobia, transphobia, ableism, colorism, ageism, capitalism, etc. have conditioned us to think negatively about and, often, be completely in the dark about divergent thinking and the ways in which mental and emotional distress impact our thinking process is immensely helpful in unpacking and processing the trauma and abuse we’ve endured and continue to endure in the societies and communities in which we live. Trying to force us to pick between whether we see it as only a burden or only a superpower only serves the purpose of upholding ableism, and it is inherently antithetical to the neurodiversity movement.
