Article

Attention

Comment

Psychology

2 February 2024

6 min read

Paying attention to ADHD– is it really just a fad?

Media fixation with ADHD caught Henna Cundill’s eye, so she decided to investigate its struggles and superpowers.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

From a darkly shadowed face, a single illuminated eye stares.

Brands&People on Unsplash.

In a feat of irony, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (commonly known as ADHD) is now getting a lot of attention. For example, between 28 and 31 January The Times newspaper published one article per day about ADHD. Intrigued, I looked back over the past few months, and I found that The Times has averaged 8 to 10 articles per month which are either partly or exclusively about this topic. These range from celebrity diagnoses to handwringing over the “troubling rise” in incidents of the condition, to concerns about parents gaming the system to get their children disability payments or extra time in exams.

With all this media hype, it is little wonder that some commentators are inclined to dismiss ADHD as a fad. Scroll through the comments beneath each article, and you will reliably find the rallying cry of, “We didn’t have ADHD in my day!” followed by the patient responses of those who try to correct this fallacy.

While the high public profile of ADHD is new, the condition itself is not. As early as the mid-1700s a Professor of Medicine called Melchior Adam Weikard was describing patients who were “unwary, careless, and flighty” – behaving in ways governed by impulse, and showing poor skills in punctuality, accuracy, and having an inability to complete tasks, to the detriment of their mental health. His description is of its day. For example, and somewhat amusingly, Weikard (himself German, but at this point living in Russia) also described his patients as follows:

Compared to an attentive and considerate person such a jumpy person may act like a young Frenchman does in comparison to a mature Englishman.

Even so, Weikard did not unconsciously adopt all the prejudices and stereotypes of his context: he broke firmly with existing medical consensus when he diagnosed these patients as having a “dysregulation in cerebral fibres” – rather than attributing their difficulties to astrological misalignments or demon possession.

By characterising ADHD as a brain-based condition, Weikard was ahead of his time, and we’ve come a long way since then. This is not the place to chart the whole biography of ADHD, suffice to say that when someone rolls their eyes and declares dismissively, “We didn’t have ADHD in my day…” – they are either over 300 years old or not talking like a mature Englishman, even if they read The Times.

The negative side of the condition as being in a constant fight with one’s own thoughts and senses – these are doughty opponents, they always know where to find you, and they only sleep when you do.

Another thing that is not new, despite what cynical commentators might seek to imply, is the treatment of some aspects of ADHD with medication.

Doctors have been prescribing amphetamines to patients with ADHD since at least the 1950s. Yet now those medications are in short supply. Contrary to the media hype, fewer than 1 in 10 people with an ADHD diagnosis take prescribed medication, but for some of those who do it can be a lifeline – calming down a washing machine mind that is stuck on constant spin.

One acquaintance of mine has taken to anxiously touring the local pharmacies, driving to neighbouring towns and villages, desperate to get her prescription filled.

Another is passing her own tablets on to her son, whose prescribed supply ran out sooner. Sharing prescription medication is, I am duty-bound to add, an illegal practice – but it is hard to expect a parent to medicate themselves whilst seeing their own child struggle to attend school, to complete exam papers and to just generally feel (and I quote) “like a normal person.”

People who have ADHD sometimes describe the negative side of the condition as being in a constant fight with one’s own thoughts and senses – these are doughty opponents, they always know where to find you, and they only sleep when you do.

This is not to overlook that there are positives to ADHD too – it is often pointed out that the condition entails a degree of “superpower.” A person living with ADHD may have an incredible ability to focus on one difficult problem to the exclusion of all else, and thus solve it, perhaps devising creative solutions that elude those with a more pedestrian style of thought.

Also, it is common for people who live with ADHD to be dynamic conversationalists, with high social intelligence and empathy, priming them for success at tasks like broadcasting and debating. Many elite athletes also live with ADHD and say that they able to strive for excellence due to their restless energy and resilience in the face of tough training regimes.

Given the mixed bag of struggles and superpowers, there is a raging debate about whether ADHD should even be considered as pathology, or just as a neurodivergent way of being human. I suspect there is no right or wrong answer to this – for each person who lives with ADHD it depends on their own experience and how they feel it helps or hinders them to live the life they choose. Neither is it a binary choice: more than one of my own acquaintances who live with ADHD has described themselves as being in a “love-hate relationship” with their neurodivergence.

ADHD challenges me to unfold my mind too – to become ever more aware and appreciative of the fact that there are many ways to be human.

Neurodiversity, like any kind of diversity, challenges the way we live to together in communities, choosing or refusing to show empathy towards those who are perceived as ‘other’. There are several places in the Bible where human interconnectedness is likened to the human body – made up of many different parts, with each member dependent on the other for the wellbeing of the body as a whole. In one of his letters, St Paul wrote, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? Or if the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?” Society needs problem solvers, communicators, high achievers, even while society also needs people who can structure, plan and maintain consistency – and above all, society needs these different neurotypes to work together with a certain amount of mutual understanding and trust.

Reflecting further on the body metaphor, Paul also wrote this: “If one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it.” It is estimated that about 5 per cent of people in the UK has ADHD, so it is likely that includes someone you know. The majority don’t take regular meds, but if you are connected to someone who is usually reliant on these, the next few months may be a time of particular stress and anxiety, as the current medication shortage is expected to continue into late spring. This affects not just those living with ADHD, but all of us, as we live together in our families, communities, and networks. Not everyone chooses to be open about having an ADHD diagnosis, but if they are, now might be a good time to ask them how they experience this condition, both with its positives and negatives, and how you can support them if they are managing without their usual prescription.

The body metaphor, and Paul’s teaching around it, reminds us that diversity is no accident, God has always been attentive to those who feel divergent or far from the centre, as Jesus affirmed when he announced his ministry would be for the poor, the prisoners, the disabled and the oppressed. The psalmist too, observes that God’s attention and concern for us is so complete, that one is “…hemmed in, before and behind” – even if one strays to the very ends of the Earth, or drives to the pharmacy in the next village. Thus, while the media circus may be new, we can be sure that God has always been attentive to those with ADHD, and wider society is called to be likewise.

Writing for The Times, Esther Walker describes ADHD as “…the health story that keeps unfolding.” Well, certainly every time I unfold my newspaper, there it is again. But ADHD challenges me to unfold my mind too – to become ever more aware and appreciative of the fact that there are many ways to be human: usually complex, sometimes difficult, often brilliant, and always interconnected.

Article

Attention

Culture

Weirdness

Wildness

26 November 2024

6 min read

Take a walk: the world is weirder than you think it is

Psychogeography and the dark alleyways of the mind.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

A backlit person at twilight holds a hand out towards the camera, holding some fairly lights

Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash.

This article, by Blake Collier, first appeared in Mockingbird. Published by kind permission.

Entre chien et loup.

The phrase literally means “between dog and wolf” and has most immanently been used to describe the twilight hour where day and night intermingle before night fully takes hold.

Jean Pruvost, a linguist who has studied the expression, gave some background on ‘entre chien et loup.’ He says it comes from a Latin phrase, intra hora vespertina inter canem et lupum, that dates back to at least the seventh century. And it refers to the time when the daylight dims and you could mistake a dog for a wolf.

One could imagine before the advent of electricity and modern public lighting how ambiguous this time of day could be as the landscapes around your small village were being consumed by the darkness — the human eye not fully able to calibrate fully for day or for night, hence the inability to distinguish between a friendly pet and a looming threat.

This is what is popularly known as liminal space in our current epoch. This liminality is always present, however, not just at dusk. As we move through the worlds we inhabit, whether natural or built, we are constantly finding ourselves within transition or transformation. Psychogeography is a broader term that is often used to investigate the liminal movement of bodies through space. In its most simplistic form, it is how our mind interacts with and processes the physical landscapes that we inhabit and how those landscapes affect our mind. The actual history of the term is much more complicated — honestly, convoluted — however at its core it is scratching at the nebulosity of things like entre chien et loup.

At the outskirts of a city or town, one begins to see the fraying of the edges, those areas where we have yet to fully enact our illusory control over the land.

About seven or eight years ago at the height of my running prowess, I got up one Friday morning very early and started a ten-mile run I had planned around nearly the full border of my hometown of Canyon, Texas. I did not know if I would make it the whole way, but the intent was there and the map was set. However, something interesting happened as I began plodding down my route. Those lines that show up on our maps often engender varying qualities of trails. Most of the time I was hitting asphalt and sidewalks, but when you are following a broad circle around a town, it’s not uncommon to find ambiguous stretches between incorporated and unincorporated parts of the town. Somewhere within the first mile or two, one of the “roads” I had included on my path ended up being nothing more than a worn trail through prairieland behind a group of houses.

I bring this story up because, though I did not know it then, I was enacting a psychogeographic practice. Iain Sinclair, who is probably one of the most well-known proponents of modern psychogeography, walked the M25 around London in seven different treks over a time period. The M25 is a 125-mile loop around London and is considered one of the busiest highways in the world. As he ambled along the highway — sometimes on asphalt, sometime “around” the trace of the highway — he would take note of what he saw, and he eventually wrote the book London Orbital. This practice allowed him to see London in a new way because at the outskirts of a city or town, one begins to see the fraying of the edges, those areas where we have yet to fully enact our illusory control over the land. They have neither been captured by urban sprawl nor have they been renovated and gentrified. These lacunae are ambiguous regions between the built and unbuilt (or decayed). Once again, we are placing ourselves intentionally into places where we attend to the ley lines which connect the physical markers to the perceived or imagined topographies of the places where we exist.

To put it bluntly, being intentionally attentive to surroundings can trigger investigations into the seen and unseen powers that hole up in our built environments and the natural world that pushes back against it.

The path through the prairieland I spoke of earlier ended at a concrete curb and a recently repaved residential street that ran right next to a Catholic church, almost like the church was posting itself on the fringes of the town to warn of impending threat, or perhaps giving a welcome sight to a weary traveler. I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

Yet it is exactly this work of attending to where we live and reacquainting ourselves with it that is, I believe, at the heart of this purposeful ambulation through space. Our lives fall into banality most of the time. We take everything for granted and we see our lived environment through that myopic lens. But take a walk on the outskirts of where you live, without a phone or music or any other technological mediation, and just look around the space and pay attention to how it embroils your emotions. I can nearly guarantee that you will find the place you live is much weirder than you thought it was, and you might even learn a thing or two about what your place values. I knew that Catholic church was in that general area of that path, but I didn’t realize how that path would empty me out before its hallowed presence.

However, as I thought about it, it made sense that in this community the Catholic church would be found on the edges of the town. There are somewhere around ten other churches in a town of about 17,000 all of which are Protestant. However, if you go just ten or eleven miles west to the town of Umbarger, the roles are reversed. There is still one Catholic church, but as far as I know no Protestant churches. Merlin Coverley, in his book tracing the history of psychogeography, finds that “contemporary psychogeography as closely resembles a form of local history as it does a geographical exploration.” One could take the observations from their ambulation and dig into their place’s past to see why this might be the case. However, this is very much the chien of this psychological study of environment.

What about the loup? Psychogeography has always had connections to the occult and the weird. Coverley continues later in his book,

“Here, then, we find all the features ascribed to psychogeography today: the mental traveler who remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination is allied to the urban wanderer who drifts through the city streets; the political radicalism that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day is tempered by the awareness of the city as eternal and unchanging; and the use of occult symbolism reflects the precedence given to the subjective and the anti-rational over more systematic modes of thought.”

All of this is to say that what we might find out about the place we live in when we give ourselves to its fringes and walk its shores might have a darker tone which implicates local politics and powers. Perhaps we will even find ourselves confronted by a metamorphosis which changes the very way we live, work, and move in these places.

Sinclair’s earlier work Lud Heat in 1975 set out to remap London by way of connecting London’s churches built by eighteenth-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and their odd loci to numerous prominent murders like the Radcliffe Highway Murders and those by Jack the Ripper. There is a thread that ties some of the imagery Hawksmoor used in his churches to ancient Pagan symbolism. To put it bluntly, being intentionally attentive to surroundings can trigger investigations into the seen and unseen powers that hole up in our built environments and the natural world that pushes back against it.

If nothing else, this study of the ambiguous transgressions between mind and place helps us bring a new profundity to our existence. It psychologically brings us back to a place where our intellectual, physical, and technological prowess cannot protect us from the hairs that stand on the back of our necks. Because everything, if attended to perceptively, can be seen as a dog or a wolf. And that should give us great pause in the everyday grind of our lives.