ADHD has been the hot new disorder of the Nineties and Noughties, replacing even depression, the formerly fashionable standby of Generation X. Like any trend worth its weight in beans, ADHD has its celebrity spokespeople, most notably Ty Pennington, who is one of the Queer Eye guys or a celebrity chef or burns people’s houses down or something. Anyway, my point is, you should care about him. He was diagnosed as being ADHD in elementary school by his mother, who coincidentally is also a psychologist who, in addition to being a certified sandplay therapist, focuses primarily on the treatment of ADHD and also is a certified sandplay therapist. Upon reading this, my brain was suddenly flooded with two pop-culture references: Zach Braff’s relationship with his father in the film Garden State, and SNL’s Church Lady remarking, “How conveeenient!” And, of course, sandplay therapy.

The overuse of the drug Ritalin, and the overdiagnosis of ADHD, has long been parodied by people far funnier and more qualified than I. But even those who criticize psychiatrists for medicating students that don’t need medication agree that some students do need medication, that children with ADHD have a serious problem that needs to be controlled.

Thom Hartmann, whom you probably know as the author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, was one of the first to suggest that ADHD was not necessarily something bad in and of itself, but merely maladaptive in the context of our particular culture. On his fantastic website, The Gift of ADHD, he’s got an equally fantastic article called “Whose Order is Being Disordered by ADHD?”, the most awesome parts of which I will now excessively quote:

In the Seventies, when I was Executive Director of a residential treatment facility for disturbed children, I developed a metaphor to explain ADHD to children, a metaphor which I subsequently published in 1991. The metaphor was that hyperactive kids were actually “good hunters,” whereas the very steady, stable, classroom-capable kids were “good farmers.” The hunters, I suggested, would do great in the forest or battlefield: their constant scanning (”distractibility”) would ensure they wouldn’t miss anything; their ability to make instant decisions and to act on them (”impulsivity”) would guarantee they’d be able to react to high-stress and response-demanding situations; and their love of stimulation (”need for high levels of stimulation”) would cause them to enjoy the hunting world in the first place. (At its core, ADHD is diagnosed by evaluating the intensity and persistence of these three behaviors.) I told these kids, however, that they needed to learn the basic “farmer skills,” because the world has been taken over by the farmers. Even our schools were organized by the farmers: schools let kids out in the summer so they can help bring in the crops. And factories and cubicles, of course, are just an Industrial/Technological Age extension of the skill-set useful in agriculture.

The evidence that ADHD may be genetic, and my own experiences over the years visiting with indigenous agricultural and hunter/gatherer people on five continents caused me to even think it possible that my metaphor might also prove to be “good science,” although I have little certainty about whether it’s genetics, culture, or both which so often causes indigenous people to fail when put into European-style classrooms. (I suspect both.)
…
Isn’t it interesting that we have no diagnostic categories for “musically disordered,” or “painting deficit disorder,” or “creative thinking deficit”? These abilities do not produce good, compliant workers for our corporations and institutions, which are the leaders and definers of our culture. Therefore we don’t even bother to measure or try to remediate deficiencies in them.

It is one thing to say that, “We agree as a society that this or that trait or behavior is the best thing for our culture as it is set up, and some other trait or behavior may not be as desirable for our culture.” It is quite another thing—a huge step over a very dangerous line—to say, “God or nature or science have demonstrated that this trait or behavior is absolutely good, and that trait or behavior is absolutely bad.”
…
If only we could get rid of those rabble-rousers, the neo-Darwinians suggest, then the rest of us could have a civilized life! Get rid of those who couldn’t make it in school (Thomas Edison was thrown out of school in the third grade, as was Ben Franklin); get rid of those who are incompetent at factory or office work (Vincent Van Gogh never held a job for more than two months); clear our gene pool of those who have no respect for legal authority (George Washington was sentenced to death by the King of England for treason).
…
Instead of trying to rid ourselves of ADHD children, our society would be far better served were we to ask, “How can we acknowledge and honor the individuality of each of our children, and provide settings in which each can develop into a happy, effective, and caring adult?” Were we to provide education that acknowledges the differences in the way people learn, we might soon be tapping a source of creativity that could be useful to our entire society. But to do that would require that we open ourselves up to the possibility that the kinds of skills we reward today may not be the only worthwhile skills—and that would open the question of whether the way we organized our society itself was the only or best way to create a society.

When such questions are on the agenda, ADHD children look much more like a symptom of a society which itself may be severely dysfunctional.

The idea that ADHD is actually quite beneficial in a hunter-gatherer context is one that has been picked up by others, but usually isn’t taken to the same radical conclusion that Hartmann takes it to: that we should change our society to better suit our natures, rather than drugging ourselves and our children in a fruitless attempt to change our natures to better fit our society. But then, that’s nothing new. Since the dawn of civilization, the main motivation for figuring out what “human nature” is has been finding out how to mold it into something that better serves those at the top of the hierarchy. The only difference now is that where once mind-control drugs were a dystopian dream, now they are a stark and horrifying reality.