Why Do We Personify ADHD?
It’s not an entity living inside us, but sometimes it helps to imagine it as one.
“That wasn’t me, it was my ADHD”— it’s a common theme I see echoing across the internet, and one I use in my own life, too. When I have a particularly scattered day, I say it’s my ADHD acting up, as if it’s a petulant child throwing tantrums inside my brain.
One essay I found recently made the argument that you should treat your ADHD like a bad pet, that you have to feed it and care for it. While I agree with this approach, I don’t really think it’s ADHD you’re feeding and caring for — it’s you.
Medium is full of advice articles about managing your ADHD, but one thing I notice is that most of the time, what they’re calling ADHD is actually shame. They’re writing about dealing with the shame of being different, the shame of having needs.
Like this one by Sarah Dopp on setting aside one workday each week where she can freestyle, doing whatever she feels like doing “as a Gift to my ADHD Brain”. This is great advice, giving yourself time and space to just spiral, explore, and play. Arguably, every human brain needs this, the sensitive among us maybe more so.
Dopp’s success with this tactic comes from acknowledging and honoring her needs, even if people think it’s weird, even if it’s technically not something she “should” be doing.
Writer Judith Valentijn addresses this in “What Happened When I Stopped Forcing My ADHD Brain to Be Normal”:
I realized that it isn’t my ADHD brain that is the problem, the problem is all the shoulds.
We feel immense pressure to conform, as people who stick out so much that we have been called disordered for it. Our differences are so pronounced they have been diagnosed, and this results in a ton of shame, anxiety, and depression.
What we refer to as “my ADHD” are often the byproducts of this othering, and we justify having needs and limits by labelling a part of ourselves with a diagnosis.
In a paper called “My ADHD and me: Identifying with and Distancing from ADHD”, researcher Mikka Nielsen analyzes the narratives of ADHDers to explain where this story comes from and why we use it so much.
She argues that we simultaneously identify with ADHD as a “way of being human” and also distance ourselves from the behavior connected to it, with both of these reactions rooted in the idea that ADHD is a brain disorder (despite the fact that we have found no definitive biomarkers in the brain that we can use to diagnose ADHD).
We live in the age of neuroscience, Nielsen explains, and this affects how we see ourselves — “we understand personhood as ‘brainhood’” and our selves as “neurochemical”:
“..the human being (and human suffering) is being understood through a neurobiological lens, and…this way of thinking establishes certain criteria for how to think about and explain human behavior and self-understandings.”
She cites philosopher Ian Hacking who says diagnoses are “creating new ways of being human that was not available before the particular diagnosis was recognized.”
It’s an interactive meaning-making project I see happening everyday on social media — the diagnosis informs the understanding of self, and in turn, the self that’s publicly expressed reinforces or even creates new understandings of the diagnosis.
This process expands rhetorical understandings of diagnoses, and contributes to something called “bracket creep” — the expansion of diagnostic categories and the number of people captured within them, according to Mary Horton-Salway and Alison Davies.
This medicalizing of human behavior is so prevalent on the ADHD internet that it’s become a meme in itself:
While medical anthropologists would argue that all diagnoses are socially constructed, psychiatric diagnoses are especially so, and the internet accelerates and amplifies this process on a massive scale.
All the symptoms of ADHD are based in social norms of acceptable behavior, and it’s diagnosed through subjective observations, usually based on how disruptive an individual is in their classroom, workplace, or family.
These social norms are shaped by capitalist values, American exceptionalism, the neurobiological age, and our definition of normality; as much as researchers like to consider themselves objective, we can’t separate our concept of ADHD from our culture or our place in history.
So, why do we identify with ADHD and at the same time, distance ourselves from it? Nielsen writes:
“the clinical diagnosis is transferred into an identity marker to play with, relate to, and mirror oneself with.”
This is done as a reaction to stigma — where some people try to hide the stigmatized parts of themselves, others react by taking pride in them, according to Erving Goffman (who basically wrote the book on stigma in 1963).
Distancing, on the other hand, is a form of externalization, a common technique in therapy that separates a person from their behavior to avoid the possible negative effects on self-image that can come from blame.
Nielsen recounts stories of people who describe “experiences of ADHD as something ‘other’ that acts through them, something that takes control, and determines actions.”
But, as one of her participants explains, “It can’t be an excuse, but it’s an explanation.”
This externalization doesn’t mean that someone is trying to skirt responsibility when they use this tactic, but rather, that they are personifying and labelling a part of themselves in order to better understand and manage their behaviors.
ADHD is far from the only diagnosis where we see this technique manifesting— it’s pretty common in narratives of chronic pain, as anthropologist Byron Good describes:
“The pain has agency. It is a demon, a monster lurking around, banging the insides of his body. At the same time, pain is a part of the subject, a dimension of the body, a part of the self.”
Writer Sonya Huber expresses this externalization in her essay collection, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, when she writes:
“Pain’s song sounds like this: What is this? What next? Who am I? What does this mean? The pain throbs and pulses like the magnetic lights of aurora borealis over a frozen landscape. I try to intuit the logic and feelings of the pain. What makes pain tick, and where is its weather steering?”
Beneath those tweets that joke about ADHD as inner demon or ADHD as uncontrollable force, I see these questions, too. We are all just trying to know the unknowable, to put a name on our pain and integrate it into our stories.
We turn ADHD into a character, separate our brains from our selves (even though they are one in the same) and this allows us to construct a personal narrative that’s protective, that explains, that comforts.
This is useful, but at the same time, I think we have to be careful not to forget that it’s not ADHD that we are feeding, protecting, and caring for — it’s ourselves.
Medical diagnosis can be a helpful tactic in a world that doesn’t take pain seriously otherwise, but it can also be a trap if we rely on it too much. You can’t explain away every single stigmatized human behavior with medicalization — at some point you have to start demanding that society explain itself, too.
Personifying my ADHD helps me talk about it, but I don’t think it’s my bad pet or a kidnapper holding me hostage. It’s me, in all my messy glory, and my needs are legitimate regardless how I label them.
