On the Advantage and Disadvantage of ADHD for Life

And what it has to do with New Year's resolutions.

Photo by Dmitry Demidov

Last year, at something of a personal nadir, I haltingly told my doctor I was desperate, that sometimes I simply could not make myself do basic adult things I needed to do, sometimes with serious and embarrassing consequences. I said I had struggled with focus and completing tasks my entire life, that everyone I had ever been close to had told me I should get evaluated for ADHD. (I was careful to add that this was long before it turned into a TikTok trend.) I expected that would be an initial conversation that would lead to more evaluations, but to my surprise, he asked me a few questions and prescribed me a low dose of a stimulant. When I was outside the office I found myself, also to my surprise, sobbing with relief.

Months later, I picked up a book called ADHD 2.0 from the wall of my local bookstore’s most popular titles. I had planned to read more about ADHD but hadn’t gotten around to researching books, so I decided I’d make it easy and start there. Normally I would be skeptical of a pop-psychology book on a bestseller wall that one might assume proffers just-so stories about brains or evangelizes a trendy narrative on top of what is probably inconclusive and contested research.¹ I think part of my resistance to seeking treatment came from being a historian of social science and knowing how strongly such narratives are shaped by cultural and political ideology—the psychology discipline being both one of the worst historical offenders and currently one of the most popular bases for flimsy, Thought Leadery theories of everything.² In addition to an inchoate, irrational fear of medication and a moralizing self-critique, I had a reflexively social constructionist view of ADHD: it had to be that I grew up in a chaotic, unstructured environment, or was addicted to screens, or didn’t sleep enough, etc etc.³