Dear Attention Deficit Disorder,
Who are you and where did you come from? Through what cerebral crevice do you snake into our minds and take permanent residence to do your mysterious work? How is it that an ambiguous neural deviation in hypothetically “normative thought” has burgeoned, and will multiply evermore as you are born and raised from myriad causes unknown? And I ask outward to the confounded masses, why is this enigma a fashionable one? Are you being over-diagnosed by psychiatrists (because of vague and broad diagnosis standards, since you do not exist as one finite thing) or does our modern society nurture it (with excessive electronics and a terrible average diet)? You are likely an abstract body of multiple factors, loosely amalgamated, and to understand your trickery, and perhaps your gifts, we must consider your nature and how you are nurtured.
Let me ask you, ADD, do you leach on blood thickening with sugar and chemicals, blossom in the pixel-light of varicolored false-suns, glean an electric fever in the meaningless buzzing song of machinery? We are living in one of the most modern corners of a hyper-modern society, with such a presence of technology in everyday life that we are overloaded with intense stimuli. This inattention has become a part of us and our society; our TVs stay on to fill unbearable silence, digital guns are fired on end like a warzone—man against boredom—in our family rooms, our Facebooks are always up and being watched, like waiting outside for the mail to come in. This is the same society where we have to go to school everyday for eight hours—this has never changed—and sit still for most of the time. ADD, are you exasperated by our culture that demands persistent focus but presents manifold distractions?
ADD, some people do not believe in you, but we can see you. Your presence is easily revealed as a neurologically based condition, which can be viewed in a Positron Emission Tomography scan (PET scan) to illustrate your effect on lowering neural activity in the prefrontal cortex (we know where you live!), which largely deals with one’s capacity for attention and executive function. This activity can be traced back to lower average levels of dopamine, which can be mitigated by the use of psychostimulant drugs (this is another story).
ADD, you are not a disease—you are not the “R word” (which is a terrible word)—or an exact condition for that matter. The word “disability” is so ambiguous, and degrading, given that neural functions and the behaviors associated with them are hindered and not insurmountable in an absolute sense. Our society does not look down upon people with ADD, perhaps because it is a intensified and persistent manifestation of some of humanity’s most universal mental struggles. You are a group of symptoms that can exist in different intensities and ratios. There is a spectrum that presents itself as a ratio of neurological differences and one’s vulnerability to the ADD nurturing factors of a given environment, which entails conditioned differences and blurs the line between normality and disorder.
Some psychologists and psychiatrists believe that you—as an ‘epidemic’—have always dwelled within the human race like an invisible army, and long evaded our notice because psychological study is a relatively new concept; in the beginning, research was not advanced enough to understand indistinct mental differences. Those with ADD began to show their true colors as our society drew it out of them and as we became more aware of psychological patterns in behavior backed up by neural evidence.
You might be well known, but you are misunderstood, as our general impression of your character is often along the lines of: having ADD means you can’t properly perform a task because you are completely unable to focus. In truth, you are not so much an excuse for being occasionally unmotivated, distractible, or lacking desire to perform certain tasks—that is only human—, rather, it more often serves as an explanation for our behaviors for ourselves and for others; that some action or inaction of an individual mirrors certain vulnerabilities which correlate with stereotypical ADD symptoms.
What qualifies certain behaviors as a disorder is their persistence. Can people really have an “ADD moment?” What differentiates occasional ADD behavior from ADD? When ‘neurotypical’ people casually use ADD to explain a behavior, they do not often seem to be serious, but the notion that this can be used as the premises of a joke suggests a widespread misunderstanding of ADD. Many believe that they have ADD because of occasional “ADD moments” and may be self-diagnosed. We are all on the spectrum in some respect and it is fair to say that there is no clear line between a slight disorder and normality; there is uncertainty. Perhaps some of us can have “ADD moments” if managing the symptoms of ADD have become so natural that the occasional lapses can qualify as an “ADD moment.” It is not uncommon for people to go on undiagnosed for years, and by the time they have it under control there is no telling whether or not they have ADD or ever had it. That is not to say it can “disappear” or be cured, at least on a biological level, but that it is possible to manage to the point where it may seem to disappear—a dormant disorder. This is the second kind of invisibility, which makes the prevalence of ADD difficult to measure.
Must we suffer from you to qualify as harboring you; must one suffer to justify any disorder for that matter? Does a person not have a problem if it is being treated? After years of dealing with ADD, with ever-cumulative metacognition, one often develops strategies for managing it. Some may have a 504 plan in school to accommodate their learning differences. Then there is medication, which does not “cure” ADD, even temporarily. When a medication is in action, the symptoms of ADD are neutralized on a neurological level; behind the medicine (which works in varying degrees from person to person, and operates differently depending on your volition), ADD still exists. It does not eliminate it like a cancer that is gone for a moment but keeps growing back.
ADD, you are a part of us and our world. You are simple deviations within our populace, and we must continue to learn about you, question you, observe you. Lets not take your name too lightly or too seriously. Self-diagnosis is a waste of time, so if you suspect that you have ADD, then get diagnosed and find out what you can do about it. Then again, lets not treat ADD like a deathly affliction that can be used to jeer at someone’s intellect.
With attention,
Sean Davidson, Opinions Editor
