ADD and expectations
I watched a video on ADHD in women and how it presents differently than in men, plus how society views women and women’s role affects how women with ADHD are treated. ADHD is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It’s frequently diagnosed in young boys and young men, more rarely diagnosed in girls and women. Frequently if girls and women are diagnosed with it at all, they get an ADD label instead: Attention Deficit Disorder. Female humans are less likely to show hyperactive behavior and when they do, it’s less likely to be attributed to that disorder.
I have mixed feelings about ADHD and ADD. These diagnoses show up when people have trouble fitting into someone else’s expectations for behavior. Children are expected to sit down in school and pay attention to the teacher. They’re expected to focus their attention on the teacher and not on each other; they’re supposed to learn and remember lots of skills and facts. Periodically they take tests that require spouting facts and demonstrating skills in socially acceptable ways. The whole process is rife with opportunities to go sideways, so teachers are vested with authority to rearrange students, skills, and facts, theoretically to help learning. In practice teachers demand attention relentlessly, and students learn a great many unofficial things.
No kid ever kept their attention solely on what the teacher wanted them to learn. Beside the obvious distraction of other students, each person has their own interests, wants, and needs: hunger, fatigue, boredom, excitement, sheer desire to bounce around and tell jokes. This leads to power struggle. The teacher must keep some semblance of order to convey any information. When the students want to learn it, they do so, quickly; when any one of them decides not to, there are problems. The teacher has to continue on for those who learned it, while helping those who didn’t understand and quelling those who revolted. Just figuring out whether misbehavior comes from lack of understanding or boredom or resistance, requires detective skills. Most teachers don’t have time to do much of that. They’re in a power struggle with those above them, as well, and must continue the curriculum to keep their jobs.
All this boils down to: students are expected to sit and take in information, without interruption, for long periods of time, with few breaks and no autonomy. All of society bears down on them: you must stay here, you must listen, you must commit it to memory, you must figure out how to solve the problems on the page not the problems in your life, you must go here and do this now, go there and do that then, not a moment too soon or too late, and above all, do it quietly. These are not realistic expectations for anyone!!!
I get that children must learn, in order to become functional adults. I see that there are reasons for ADHD and ADD diagnoses; society needs norms in order to function as a group. There will always be expectations, along with methods of encouraging and enforcing compliance. The society demands things of me that I struggle to do. There is guilt. There is shame. There are embarrassment and apologies. I fit the profile for ADD, in my case accompanied by a lower energy level than the average, the opposite of hyperactive. What I want is less judgment and more leeway in expectations, less anxiety and more understanding.
