Is ADHD a Disorder?
Recently, Matt Walsh, a popular conservative journalist, has taken a firm stand on ADHD. From his posts, it seems he doesn’t believe that it is a legitimate disorder. Check out the following screenshots from his Facebook feed:
My knee-jerk reaction to this was anger. I have a child with ADHD. We’ve known from day 1 (well, maybe closer to day 30) that she was neurodivergent. At four diagnoses and another one pending, she’s winning the contest for “most diagnoses in the family.” Is one of her diagnoses just make-believe?
To be fair, it’s hard to separate out the pieces of her. What is personality? What is ADHD? What is sin? What behaviors and thought patterns come from one of her other diagnoses? There’s just no way to dissect a human being like that. So I am going to break down Matt Walsh’s contentions one by one, to see if there is validity to his opinions.
So here are his basic assertions:
1) You don’t have ADHD. You’re just distracted by (probably) your phone.
2) You don’t have ADHD. You just haven’t put in the effort required to develop the ability to focus.
3) The behaviors labeled as ADHD are part of the normal spectrum of human personality and don’t constitute a disorder.
The first thing I question is who he believes his audience to be. The answer to that, obviously, is “adults.” He is telling adults that they have a problem with distraction—not a stretch of the imagination to think that might be true—and that they aren’t willing to do things that require a high level of focus. Points #1 and #2 may be true of many people. Some people are distracted. Some people don’t bother to do anything that requires sustained mental effort. But does that mean that no one has ADHD? That it’s all distraction and laziness?
Point #3 asserts that the behaviors labeled as ADHD are normal, especially, he says in another post, for children. Here is what he posted in a screenshot taken directly from the CDC website:
The part he left off (my screenshot, highlighting mine):
This is directly above the section he posted in his screenshot. The point is that ADHD is not describing normal behaviors. It is describing behaviors that are “inappropriate for developmental level.” Of course small children will have difficulty paying attention. Of course small children will lose things, become distracted, and make mistakes. But the heading specifies that those things are not what is meant by ADHD. When you have a teenager who can’t converse without getting lost in her own mind, tell me ADHD isn’t real. When you have a teenager who loses things on a daily basis after a lifetime of hyper-responsibility, tell me ADHD isn’t real. When you’re living with me and my kid, tell me ADHD isn’t real.
The CDC website goes on to explain that ADHD is not just defined by the symptoms of inattention that Matt Walsh incompletely presented. There are other characteristics that must be present for a diagnosis. (1) Symptoms present before age 12, (2) Symptoms present in multiple settings, (3) Symptoms reduce the quality and function of life, and (4) No other disorder explains the symptoms. And there is an entire additional section that talks about hyperactivity.
Far from being a lax catch-all intended to medicate children into submission in school, ADHD has actual clinical symptoms. Furthermore, brain differences have been identified between ADHD brains and non-ADHD brains (see this article). ADHD is a real thing, a scientific thing, and a disordered thing.
If ADHD is real, does that mean no one is distracted by their phone? Does it mean no one is lazy? Does it mean everyone who thinks they have ADHD has ADHD? Of course not. Some people are lazy. Some are distracted. But by presenting ADHD as he has, Matt Walsh has done a disservice to those who have a genuine disorder and rely on medications or therapies to help them. By asserting that the root cause is laziness and distraction, Matt Walsh makes it harder for people with genuine ADHD to be accepted. After all, if people with ADHD are just lazy and distracted, if they are simply not willing to work hard, then that’s their own fault, or, if they are children, it’s the parents’ fault, isn’t it? And given that his following is largely conservatives and church-goers, when people listen to him and assign blame, that will make it even more difficult for people with ADHD and parents with kids with ADHD to find acceptance in the church and the culture.
A far better stand to take would be the one that asserts that institutionalizing children from the ages of five to eighteen is inhumane. The overmedication is used to make children sit still for hours on end in an institutional setting. Can we address that instead of tossing more blame toward people with genuine disorders, Mr. Walsh?
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Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash