ADHD: THE LIE WE HAVE BEEN SOLD
3 MAY 2022 (19 MIN READ)
I’m not going to make the argument that attention issues are not real—far from it actually. I will argue that attention issues are very much real, but our handling of them in Western society not only makes them significantly worse, but also misunderstands the root causes of them. And when you misunderstand the root of the issue, the issue can never be fixed. We are currently giving people a band-aid in the form of crack to help cover up a wound that needs deep attention and love to cure. I am by no means a doctor, but what I am is a deeply confused, shocked, and concerned thinker who has spent the good part of three years coming to terms with what my own “ADHD” really is and how the common way of handling it almost killed me. But before I go on about the underlying ingredients of ADD/ADHD, consider my own story:
Growing up, I could never pay attention in class, which led me to be borderline failing constantly. Eventually, I made peace with this attention issue and just accepted that I had to work harder than everyone to make ends meet. Once I got to college and I saw a professional about it, I got diagnosed with “severe” ADHD, and was immediately put on Adderall. Once I started taking the medication, it felt like I finally had the right pair of glasses on. I could focus whenever I wanted and the As came chasing me like flies on honey. Even deeper than that, I genuinely felt happy for the first time ever, and because of that, like life finally figured itself out for me. This pill symbolized a silver bullet for all the ailments in my life. Then, about a year later, I was deeply suicidal and hated everything about this evil blue pill. What the fuck happened?
Put succinctly, complete desensitization from my soul and heart, as well as repressed trauma exploding through the surface. Initially, I just wanted to pay attention to the things I hated to do, but through a year of being on ADHD medication, I became the things I hated to do. The creative side of me completely withered away and my love for romantic mythology ceased to interest me. All I began to care and stress about was how well I was doing my schoolwork and preparing for job interviews that deep down I did not even care about. With each day I took that pill, I could see myself slowly turning into the robot that modern capitalistic society wanted me to be: a soulless being who only cares about his monetary position. Due to this constant duality I was facing, I began to be in a ton of pain about who I was becoming, so I started to reach for other drugs to numb me out. In other words, I needed other drugs to make me feel ok about the robot Adderall was turning me into. This made me increase the dosage of my Adderall to counteract the effects of the downers I was also on, creating a daily habit of handfuls of uppers and downers. I could no longer stand who I was beyond the drugs, so in every sliver of sobriety I experienced, I actively did not want to be here. Thankfully, I got sober and off the drugs, including my ADHD medication, and I am now happy to be alive, but amidst the sobriety, a whole other beast presented itself to me: repressed trauma.
My attention issues were still pretty terrible once I got off the medication, which made me go back to my old patterns of accepting that I just have to work harder than everyone else to get the same results. However, once I started working with a trauma practitioner who helped me release a lot of trauma from my childhood, I suddenly started being able to pay attention better than before, even the times when I was on Adderall. This led to the alarm bells going off in my mind. How much of ADHD boils down to repressed trauma plaguing the body and psyche? If we spend our formative years feeling unsafe in our environment, due to abuse, bullying, etc., then we train our brain to be always looking for threats. In other words, if we did not feel safe growing up, then chances are we will constantly be scanning for threats until that wounding has healed. And how the fuck can you pay attention if you are always on edge? You can’t. The minute I started feeling safer in my body, the more I could trust the present moment, which allowed me to focus a lot better than before. I don’t know if I can firmly say that all attention issues stem from repressed trauma, but I can firmly say that a good chunk definitely do. Most psychiatrists will quickly hand people struggling with attention stimulants, refusing to check what’s under the hood. In essence, giving people amphetamines because they are too lazy to treat the real issue. This strategy leaves people with a shitty, toxic band-aid that keeps the demons at bay. But what happens when the demons cannot be contained anymore? Most just up the dosage of stimulants, making the issue infinitely worse. Even if the number of trauma caused ADHD is low, which I don’t believe at my core it is, we are still giving these people a ticking time bomb, as I experienced, which almost cost me my life.
The rest of this article will dive deep into the underlying causes of ADHD and why medication is not always the answer, as well as how we can find our way out of this attention crisis as a collective.
HUMANS IN CAGES
In Johann Hari’s fascinating, must-read book, Stolen Focus, he discusses the use of psychiatric medication to make animals feel comfortable in their cages of either factory farming or zoos. He uses this disturbing reality to draw a parallel to the prescription of stimulants to young kids who cannot pay attention. My understanding of this comparison is that to make kids with attention issues fit into the mold of what society wants for them, they must receive a potent drug to make them not only accept the conditions, but thrive on them. In other words, they learn to love the cage of modern society. Although trauma definitely plays a role in attention issues, which will be expanded on in the next section, another basic truth exists here: children are not designed to be robots preparing for standardized tests. The beauty of childhood is to deeply explore one’s egoless form and become fascinated by aspects of their soul’s calling. I remember when I would spend hours alone, designing movies in my mind and not concerned about anything else in the world. I’m deeply glad that my parents did not put any pressure on me to be an academic star, or else I would not have been able to become enthralled by this side of myself. Currently, we are telling children that this creative side has to take a second seat to rigid academic work. Some, who are pressured by their parents and don’t seem to mind this lifestyle thrive. On the other hand, the kids who are artists or athletes, or just creative in general, feel as if something is wrong with this way of living—deep into their bones.
For all the rigid thinkers reading this article, I am going to head into spiritual territory now, but just give it a chance and I promise you will get something out of it. In all of our bodies, there exists something that knows what’s right for us. No matter what the fuck you believe in, this fact rings true for everyone. This voice attempts to steer us clear of danger or bad habits, guiding us towards our highest expression. I still cannot completely figure out where this voice stems from. Could it be God? Could it just be a rational side of yourself? Could it be the God inside you? As of now, I am leaning towards an inner God, a piece of you that knows what your purpose is on this earth and what you need to do to fully access it. Throughout time, this inner voice will constantly remind you what you should be doing, either to access your highest interest or carry it through. However, as the whispers turn into screams, the more your psyche becomes irritated, leading to the mental health issues we are societally fixated on today. In terms of ADHD in schools, I believe a lot of it stems from the inner Gods telling kids that this is not what their purpose is in society, far from it actually. If a child is destined to be an artist or anything creative, their childhood years are the most important in deepening that connection, making the current school system the worst thing that could happen to them. The inner God knows this better than anyone, and they do not hold back, making you feel as if what you are doing is not serving your highest interest, which leads to an increasing inability to pay attention to what does not remotely serve you.
Giving some evidence to this bold claim, in schools where students are allowed to design their own curriculum, choosing what field of the world to focus on, ADHD magically vanishes. Here, students are allowed to give full autonomy to their inner Gods, chasing whatever serves their highest interest, rather than being forced to sit down for hours attempting to memorize useless things that do not serve them. Because of this, their inner Gods are happy, and the screams settle down into gentle, loving whispers. The kids become freed from the cages that the normal school system locks them into. And due to this freedom, they do no longer require a pill to make them fit into a certain mold.
In my opinion, ADHD medication has served as a chemical antidote to the poisoning of society. This poisoning boils down to making children, or anyone really, have to shift away from their sole purpose in life in order to fit into what society expects of them, but even deeper, to learn to love the mold that has been created for them. We cannot honor each of our own unique gifts if we are not allowed to explore them, especially as children. And the more we continue this destructive societal habit, the louder the internal screams of society will grow, increasing our collective suffering as a whole.
UNPROCESSED TRAUMA
Let’s begin this section by considering an alarming statistic about trauma and ADHD: “Those who endured four or more adverse childhood events were three times more likely to use ADHD medication.”¹ In other words, childhood traumas vastly increased the susceptibility towards being prescribed ADHD medication. If we break this down further, this means that ADHD symptoms are more likely to arise the more a child has experienced trauma. And what are some of these symptoms exactly? An inability to focus, erratic behavior, and hyperfocusing on what seems interesting. At its core, childhood trauma stems from an extended period of time where we did not feel safe in our environment. This can mean having abusive parents, both physically or verbally, or even living in a dangerous neighborhood, where you don’t know whether your next walk out the door may be your last one. It can also consist of having unreliable parents who do not meet most of your needs. If we grow up in this sort of unsafe, unpredictable environment, then we train our brains to always think that we are in danger, having to constantly scan for threats. This unfortunate habit leads one to fundamentally distrust the present moment, and feel consistently unsafe in their own bodies. Because of this deep somatic sense of unsafety, most who experienced childhood trauma use their intellectual mind to escape painful feelings in the body. This constant thinking to escape hard to deal with emotions makes it hard to pay attention, because one cannot be present that way. Since this is the type of experience that childhood trauma leads to, how can one who has experienced it be expected to pay attention, especially for things that serve no interest to them? In short, they can’t. And the little blue pill that helps them to do so only represses the trauma, which becomes a recipe for disaster.
People dealing with the aftermath of childhood trauma need to learn how to feel safe in their own bodies, which can only be done when accessing a state of relative peace. Once they learn to feel safe in their bodies, they can slowly start to face the feelings they have been repressing. This gradual process of learning to feel safe with negative emotions in the body is the only way to overcome trauma. The problem with giving traumatized people amphetamines is that it disallows them to connect with their bodies and puts their nervous system in a constant state of overdrive. Thus, not only does it delay the necessary steps one needs to take to heal themselves, but it makes it harder in the long run due to creating a further dysregulated nervous system. When we are a traumatized child in an unsafe environment, we tend to constantly be in a state of either hyper arousal from fear, or an inevitable exhaustion after the fact, creating a baseline state of fight-or-flight mode in the body. To overcome this, traumatized people must learn how to stay ahead of the fight-or-flight, regulating their nervous systems in the process, contributing to their overall feeling of safety. Amphetamines throw you into a constant state of flight, avoiding what needs to be done to feel safe in the moment internally, and throwing your nervous system into a complete state of shock. Following the effect of the drug comes a crash, reflecting the similar pattern of hyper arousal and a crash as a traumatized child. How can one heal if they are repeatedly going through the same patterns? They cannot.
We can’t keep handing out ADHD medications to traumatized children, or people still suffering from childhood trauma, especially now. COVID has led to a new wave of deeply traumatized children, either through the lockdowns or having to go to school with most of their faces covered. Within the lockdowns, children could not engage with the sole thing that makes them fulfilled: free play with other children. Without this free play, children are inevitably going to be dealing with a great deal of pain, and also, they are most likely going to struggle paying attention. And in terms of the masks, imagine if when you could finally go play with your friends, you could not see their faces, leading you to have no clue about anything they were thinking, creating a dystopian reality that leaves you deeply confused and questioning whether anyone really likes you or not. I believe that the sacrifice of the wellbeing of children to cowardly satiate our irrational fears is one of the worst moments of modern society. And making matters worse, as a collective, on average, we have no clue how to deal with the mental damage we have caused, so we just hand out pills to make things a little easier. To atone for our sins, this habit has to stop now. We must address the trauma that we have inflicted on the next generation or we will all be paying the price in the future, when society starts to reflect the average mind of a young person.
Making matters even worse, the well, or the life source, with which society draws from is deeply poisoning our ability to pay attention.
A POISONED WELL
A water well serves as the nourishing source for the livelihood of a community, providing them with the life force they need to survive. And what happens if the well becomes poisoned? The community consuming the water all fall deeply ill. The sources of “nourishment” that society draws from in today’s day and age are similar to that of poison, contributing to a disease riddled populace, especially when it comes to mental health. In other words, the well with which we draw from is poisoning our bodies and minds, specifically the food we consume and the things we do to pass the time. In terms of the food we eat, the average American diet consists of excess refined carbohydrates, trans fats, and sugar, which not only cause all sorts of physical disease, but they damage the mind as well. Let’s consider America’s favorite breakfast, which my friends and I happily devoured every morning before school: a big bowl of sugary cereal with skim milk. This meal hands you a massive sugar spike and then an immediate crash; there is no sustainable nutrition at play. If one starts their day this way, then they are setting themselves up for a huge mental crash when they are expected to pay attention at school or at work, making it quite difficult to perform well. And since most kids in America are eating this way, how the fuck can you expect them to pay attention? Making matters worse, most food these days are riddled with pesticides, food dyes, and chemicals, which are proven to not only damage one’s ability to pay attention, but also can lead to emotional breakdowns, such as angry outbursts. To add another problem to the mix, the effects of excess pollutants in the air are starting to cause brain inflammation and damage to neurons. So, not only is the food we eat damaging our mind, but the air we breathe as well.
For the part about how we spend our time, consider the amount of time we spend on social media these days. Most people my age are spending around four to five hours a day on their phone, which is mostly filled with social media usage. Those younger than me I tend to notice spending even more time glued to their screens. Within these hours of consumption, we voraciously sift through massive amounts of hyper-stimulating short-form content. What this habit does is train our brains to prioritize immediate gratification and reject anything that requires full attention and focus. In other words, it makes it harder to consume long-form content, such as reading books, and also makes it more difficult to focus on one specific task for an extended period of time. Thus, in combination with the damaging food we eat and air we breathe, the way in which we choose to spend our time is also destroying our ability to pay attention. And going back to my discussion of the inner God in us who has to express their gift, how can they do this if we cannot sit down and engage in focused work? They cannot, which makes them increasingly frustrated, leading to the manifestation of mental disease. Put into more cookie cutter logical terms, how can we not become mentally unhealthy if everything we do is making it harder for us to carry through the one gift we can offer to society?
THE WAY OUT
In order to give ourselves a fighting chance against the attention crisis we are facing, we must deeply honor our gifts, process our trauma, and make the well with which we draw from less poisonous. In terms of honoring our gifts, we need to remove the cage with which modern society expects us to be in, and see what’s really in highest alignment with ourselves. A part of this is definitely on us to explore outside of what we know, but that cannot do enough; there has to be a systematic change to the way we educate children. Rather than focusing on a vast array of useless, boring topics, children should be given more time to freely explore what their interests draw them to. I’m not arguing for a complete removal of subjects such as math and history, but I am arguing for less importance being placed on them and more being placed on serving the highest interest of the child’s expression, meaning that if they love ballet, then they should spend most of their time doing ballet, rather than focusing on stuff that does not matter in the long run. If you lie in the boat of an adult who still does not know what their gift is, reminisce on what you loved doing as a child that you maybe could not fully explore, because the answer lies there. Once you realize what that thing is, fucking go for it, and I promise that the screams of your inner God will quiet down into blissful, positive remarks.
Next, for processing your trauma, there is no easy life hack to get through this. In my time doing all sorts of crazy stuff to better myself both physically and mentally, trauma work has been by far the most difficult, but it has also been the most rewarding. I recommend working with a trauma practitioner to guide you through this process, as it is quite impossible to get through without any guidance. Again, this may do something at the individual level, but a societal shift has to take place to make any progress, and this starts with the treatment of children. Rather than handing crack to kids who cannot pay attention, they should first be assessed for any trauma they may be enduring at home or at school. I do not know how exactly this can take place, but in an ideal world, trauma practitioners should be stationed at every single school. And before any ADHD medication is given out, a trauma informed psychologist should be able to approve if they really need it, or if they have to go through trauma work first.
In terms of cleaning the societal well with which we draw from, we must start fighting for an accessible, healthier diet, cleaner food, and cleaner air. I can sit here and tell you to buy organic, nourishing meals, which use complex carbohydrates, high quality protein, and healthy fats, but that is not accessible to many in modern society. If you have the means and the time to eat this way, then go for it, but if you don’t, this is where another societal shift has to take place. Clean, healthy food should not be a luxury; it should be a way of life. Again, this starts with kids, offering healthier meals at schools, so they not only pay attention better as a result, but they also learn the habit of eating healthier foods, making their desire to constantly eat fast food and candy wither away. If we stop training the younger generations to accept unhealthy food as a way of life, then they will stop demanding it from the world, creating a new wave against the popularized unhealthy way of consumption. With regard to those who do not have the time or money to eat healthy, just like many cheap, fast food stores are stationed around cities, healthy, accessible quick meal offering places should be stationed around as well. This may sound like a pipe dream, but it would make the biggest difference.
Before ADHD medication is given out, one must consider if the patient has been given access to exploring their gifts, has unprocessed trauma, or has access to a healthy lifestyle. If these three points of criteria are out of whack, the issue may not require medication, but rather a deep change of lifestyle. If these things have solved themselves but one’s attention is still causing issues, then medication can be offered as a solution. I personally do not believe it is a solution for anyone, but I am happy to be wrong on that one as long as people are getting those other needs met before they start taking amphetamines. And in regards to the working class mother who has five kids and cannot afford time to deal with these aspects of life, I also understand why medication is the right solution. But this more so reveals to me a massive problem we are facing in today’s day and age—that society is so poisoned that someone requires a potent, damaging pharmaceutical because they do not have the time to process their trauma or honor their gifts. I do not have any concrete solutions or the resources to solve this specific issue, but I will never stop fighting to find one, and neither should you.
¹ Ruiz, Rebecca. “How Childhood Trauma Could Be Mistaken for ADHD.” The Atlantic (2014).
