In Which ADHD is Not a Fake Disorder Made Up by Teachers Who Want Students to Sit Quietly

So what am I doing NOT writing about dyslexia today given that I announced yesterday that this is dyslexia awareness month? Because..... drum roll please.... October is ALSO ADHD awareness month. That means I'll be posting about both of Squirrelboy's invisible disabilities a lot this month. Since dyslexia and ADHD are frequently comorbid (that is, they often occur together) I guess it's appropriate that they share an awareness month. I can't say for sure that this was intentional, however, since I already knew October is Down Syndrome awareness month and just learned on Facebook today that it's also Dwarfism awareness month. Maybe it's "things with a 'd'" awareness month. Who knows?

I don't have a list of ADHD myths to bust for you today. I want to focus on just one myth that makes me really angry. I have heard so many people say that ADHD is just teachers wanting to pin a diagnosis on a typical, active kid and medicate them so that they'll sit down and be quiet. There are many problems with this, and I'll take them one by one in the following paragraphs.

First of all, this hypothesis illustrates a complete misunderstanding of the way stimulants prescribed for ADHD actually work. For some biochemical reason I don't understand, stimulants have an effect on the ADHD brain that's basically the opposite of the effect they have on a the typical brain. The ADHD brain is constantly working and spinning and thinking of a million and one things. That's why people with ADHD have trouble focusing. It's not really that they can't focus. It's that their brains are trying to focus on too many things simultaneously. What stimulants can do for a person with ADHD is slow down the brain enough to allow the person to choose what to focus on. This is counterintuitive. The typical brain is affected the opposite way by stimulants. If you've ever had a little too much coffee or other caffeinated beverage, you know that your brain can feel like it's buzzing and you're so hyped up it's hard to focus. If ADHD were actually a conspiracy by the education establishment to get typical kids to sit down and shut up, prescribing stimulants to the kids they wanted to control would just be a disaster waiting to happen.

As I and many people with ADHD and their parents can testify, ADHD isn't something that can lead to struggles in school alone. Squirrelboy is among a decent number of children with ADHD who normally only takes his medication on school days. However, his ADHD shows up on other days as well. As exhibit A, I give you Squirrelboy packing his trunk for Boy Scout camp every summer. There's a defined list of everything he has to pack. It all has to fit into a particular style of trunk that everyone is required to use. Despite these two well defined parameters, it still takes him most of a day to pack his trunk. He gets distracted. He forgets where he put a piece of camping gear or a piece of clothing. He panics. He melts down and is sent to his room to calm down. He calms down and finds the thing he was looking for, sometimes with help. Then the cycle repeats itself. This past summer I had him take his medicine the day he packed his trunk. It wasn't perfect, but it was a million times better.

As you may remember if you read my first post, Squirrelboy struggled all the way through elementary school, yet his teachers refused to believe us when we said we thought he had ADHD. If ADHD were a conspiracy of the educational establishment, wouldn't they have been totally on board with our suggestion that our kid might have ADHD? Wouldn't they have been eager to push us to get him an official diagnosis and medication? Instead, he didn't get a diagnosis until he was sitting at a table with just me and still couldn't focus.

Am I saying that the diagnosis of ADHD is never abused and that kids are never put on medication because teachers or other professionals in their lives are tired of dealing with them? Of course not. Unfortunately, kids whose behaviors actually stem from early childhood trauma are frequently diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication. A startlingly high percentage of kids in the foster care system are prescribed stimulants for ADHD. This is a tragedy and needs to be addressed. I'm certain there are also other cases of the ADHD diagnosis being abused. However, abuse of a diagnosis does not invalidate the existence of the condition. ADHD is a real thing. It comes with a lot of disadvantages, but it has a surprising upside as well. I'll explore both a bit this month.