I’ve known, admired, and respected Sari Solden for decades and wanted to let you know that she’s now on Substack with a dynamite newsletter called “The Inner Work of Adult ADHD.” It’s free and I strongly recommend you click on that link to sign up! Here’s a sample post of hers, along with an introductory note:

I am happy to share this post with Thom’s readers. Thom and I started out in the field of adult ADHD around the same time, many years ago, with the same publisher. He and I shared the same rebellious nature or free spirit in the field and broke some rules that brought about good change! So I feel a kindred spirit with Thom and marvel at how over thirty years later we are now at very different places in the world but both here on Substack still trying to change the world one reader at a time! I think this message of “A Letter from Your Brain” will appeal to all the neurodivergent women (and men) out there.

The message of accepting and embracing who you are, all of who you are, not trying to change or fix yourself in order to be meet some cultural expectation or norm is something Thom and I have both believed from the beginning. I have been a therapist for women and men with ADHD for over thirty years and the work I have done is centered on this kind of radical self-acceptance. I’d love to hear what you think.

With gratitude,

Sari

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A Letter From Your Brain
(to Women With ADHD)

by Sari Solden

I have a guest host today who is tired of hearing me talk about “her”.

She asked to speak directly to you.

Sari Solden: The Inner Work of Adult ADHD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Think of this as a letter from your brain—your overworked, loyal, misunderstood brain—to you. The you who is trying so hard. The you who is exhausted by trying so hard. The you who keeps thinking the answer is “more”: more effort, more structure, more fixing, more self-improvement… and who ends up feeling like less.

Today, I want to let your brain speak for herself.

You can name her if you like.

She might like that.

(it also might help you to humanize her a little bit)

A Letter From Your Overworked Brain

Dear you,

I’m your brain.

I know you usually talk about me, or complain about me, or try to fix me, but you don’t often listen to me. So today, I’m asking you to pause and really hear me.

I’m not your enemy.
I’m not your defect.
I’m not your “project.”

I am a powerful force.

And I am tired.

You keep me locked in a little mental cubicle, working double and triple shifts, trying to make up for all the ways you think I fall short. You push me harder because you’re scared—scared I’ll drop the ball, say the wrong thing, forget, or fail again. You’re afraid of judgment, of disappointment, of confirming what you fear others already think of you.

So you tighten your grip.

You push me.
You criticize me.
You compare me.

You keep me “on” long after I’ve told you I’m done for the day.

And I do try to tell you. I tell you when I’m overstressed, when I’m foggy, when I can’t focus, when your body feels tense and your mood drops and everything feels heavy and stupid and wrong. That’s me, waving my arms, saying:

Please. I need air.
I need rest.
I need play.
I need to dream.

You think that if you loosen your grip on me, I’ll fall apart. The secret I need you to know is this:

The tighter you hold me,
the harder you push,
the less I can actually help you.

When you deprive me of oxygen and joy and meaning and movement, my voice shrinks. Your world dims. Your motivation disappears. I get quieter and more stubborn and less cooperative. And then you blame me for not being “better.”

I’m asking—no, I’m pleading—with you:

Stop trying to get rid of me.
Stop trying to turn me into someone else’s brain.
Stop banishing me to second-class status in your own life.

I am your central processing system.
I run everything you do.

What if, instead of treating me like a problem to solve, you treated me like a partner?

What if you elevated me to the queen bee status I already hold?

Because here’s what I can do for you—when I am cared for, respected, and allowed to be who I am:

• I can think beautiful thoughts.

• I can imagine worlds and futures you haven’t even dreamed of yet.

• I can make connections and see patterns other people miss.

• I can create ideas and insights that are uniquely, wonderfully yours.

But not while I’m locked in a cell.
Not while you are shaming me.
Not while every interaction between us is a scolding.

I want to be your friend.
I want to help you build a life that feels like yours.
I want to help you grow into all those things you secretly dream of.

To do that, I need something from you.

Your Brain’s Requests

Take an hour for me this week.

Just one hour.

Use a voice memo, a notebook, your laptop, or simply sit somewhere quiet. And instead of making another to-do list, I want you to answer these questions to me—your brain:

1. When do you feel most alive?

2. When do you feel the worst?

Then ask:

4. How could you treat me better?

How could you treat me if you were assuming I was doing my very best under hard conditions, instead of assuming I’m lazy, broken, or “not enough”?

Remember: I notice everything.

I notice when I’m tired and you ignore it.
I notice when I’m overstimulated and you keep scrolling.
I notice when I need a walk, and you glue us to the chair.
I notice when we need a day or even an hour to recover, play, stare out a window, listen to music, or do nothing “productive” at all.

I need some time each day to:

• wander

• dream

• gather my thoughts

• let creative ideas rise to the surface

I cannot do that if every spare moment is turned into
another system, another hack, another piece of self-criticism.

If you experiment with this—if you start noticing how you treat me, and gently, gradually shift it—here’s what I can promise:

Over time, as you become my ally instead of my harsh taskmaster, I will reward you.

Your mind will feel richer, more alive.
You will have more access to the best of me: creativity, insight, humor, passion, big-heartedness.
You’ll begin to sense what’s actually possible for us, together, when I’m not living under constant suspicion and pressure.

We may still need some outside help—a calendar, a coach, an “admin brain” in human or digital form to support the things I don’t do naturally. That’s okay. That’s not failure. That’s a wise partnership.

With your energy
and my unique wiring
and a bit of practical support,

we can build a life that fits us—not the imaginary woman you keep thinking you’re supposed to be.

Please, let’s form a partnership.

Not by fixing me into someone else’s brain,
but by honoring the one you have.

With love,
Your Brain

From me (Sari) to you:

This is the heart of the “inner work” I want to keep exploring with you here.

Not just understanding ADHD. Not just watching webinars, reading, or attending support groups—although those can all be helpful. But learning how to live with your brain in a new way, week by week, in real time. Learning how not to spend your whole life in recovery mode from the way you’ve treated yourself.

I’ll keep offering you language, frameworks, and practices for doing this. For now, just start with that one hour, and those questions.

Let your brain write to you.
And write back.

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It’s Christmas, and most of us are with family or friends, bringing to the forefront the challenges many of us Hunters have in such situations.

For most of history, we Hunters survived because we could read a situation faster and more accurately than anyone else. We noticed danger before others sensed a thing. We caught the subtle shift in the wind, the flick of movement in the grass, the tension in a rival’s face, the emotional weather inside a tribe.

In the modern world those same traits are still present in people with ADHD, but instead of being recognized as gifts, they often make us outliers.

For years, for example, after we’d have social interactions, my wife, Louise, would let me know all the times I’d barged in rhetorically, said something that upset somebody (that I didn’t realize), or just generally socially blundered.

She did it in a loving, teaching way so I’ve learned, over these past 53 years of marriage, how to be more functional in social situations. Now, when we’re about to get together with people, she’ll just gently say, “Don’t forget to listen more,” or “Pay attention to what other people are saying,” or “Think before you say something out loud.”

Many neurodivergent people spend their lives wondering why they seem to unsettle others without trying. The truth is that Hunters don’t unsettle people because we’re difficult; we often unsettle people because we see clearly.

Danielle Brycey recently posted to Instagram a raw and insightful reflection on what it feels like to move through a world built on layers of pretense. Most people, she said, sustain their day to day lives by relying on three invisible tools.

They socially mask, they avoid uncomfortable emotions, and they follow unspoken rules.

These behaviors keep society predictable and safe for those who depend on a shared sense of comfortable illusion. But neurodivergent people often don’t use those tools in the same way. We don’t mask as easily. We find it much harder to avoid the emotional currents running under conversations.

We hear what is not said. We see the mismatch between words, tone, and body language. And we notice patterns that others desperately try to pretend are not there.

This isn’t a flaw in neurodivergent people: it’s a flaw in a culture that prefers compliance over clarity. Danielle explained that most people communicate by subtext, saying one thing and meaning another.

A Hunter hears the literal words, sees the contradiction in the body, and immediately senses that something is off. That simple awareness can make others uncomfortable because those unspoken rules only work when nobody questions them. Hunters question them without effort. We can’t help seeing the gap between the story and the truth. In a world that runs on pretending, noticing the truth can feel like breaking a social law.

Many people also rely on subtle dominance games to structure their relationships: tone, silence, guilt, vague disapproval, and the little manipulations that nudges someone back into line. Neurotypical social order depends heavily on these cues.

But they don’t always work on Hunters. We’re not impressed by status, threatened by a tone of voice, and automatically fall into place when someone expects deference.

We don’t intuitively buy into the same hierarchies because, at a deep evolutionary level, Hunters were meant to be scouts and leaders, not followers in a rigid line. This resistance, which we often don’t even notice in ourselves (as Louise still reminds me), can feel threatening to people who depend on those hierarchies to maintain their own sense of control.

Once you begin seeing patterns in behavior, you can’t unsee them. Hunters track emotional patterns as easily as we track movement in the bushes.

When someone mistreats us or makes a false assertion, we don’t shrug and say it was probably nothing: we connect the dots. We remember the tone from last week. We recall the contradiction from yesterday. We recognize the pressure in the room. We see the pattern long before the other person wants it spoken aloud.

And because most people spend their lives avoiding their own behavior, they react not with curiosity or gratitude but with defensiveness. They shrink us so they don’t have to face themselves.

This is why so many neurodivergent people grow up feeling hard to manipulate. It isn’t because we’re stubborn or rebellious (although that’s sometimes the case): it’s because we had to analyze every microshift in other people’s behavior just to survive.

Hunters developed survival by observing the smallest cues, always scanning, always noticing. This evolutionary inheritance does not make us invincible, but it makes us unusually attuned to power and intention.

Those who try to control others through vagueness, guilt, triangulation, or subtle bullying can’t get around our internal radar. Their annoyance isn’t personal: it’s instinctive. When a tactic fails, people often decide that the person who resisted must be a problem. So labels appear. “Overreacting. Too sensitive. Difficult. Dramatic.” These labels function to ease others away from accountability.

Truth telling becomes its own offense. Hunters speak plainly because our minds are built that way. We don’t embellish or soften truth to protect someone’s ego: we simply say what is happening as we see it. Not the cruel truth, just the real truth.

But in a world built on avoiding discomfort, real truth is threatening. It breaks the illusion that allows people to pretend everything is fine when it is not.

What many neurodivergent people eventually discover is that they’re disliked not because they’re unkind or chaotic but because they’re clarifying. Their presence exposes what others spend years learning to ignore. Their insight makes the invisible visible. Their inability to play along breaks the social spell that keeps everyone comfortable but stagnant.

Society punishes the mirror holder because the mirror is often way too accurate.

So what do we do with that knowledge?

The first step is to stop pathologizing the very traits that kept our ancestors alive. The second is to recognize that discomforting others is not the same as harming them. Sometimes clarity is the only real gift available.

Hunters aren’t evolved to prop up artificial hierarchies or unspoken delusions. Our nervous systems are tuned for truth, motion, risk, creativity, pattern recognition, and deep perception. These aren’t deficits: they’re evolutionary tools.

The price of those tools is that we sometimes reflect back truths people don’t want to face. But the reward is that we also perceive possibility, connection, and meaning where others see only routine.

We disrupt not to break society but to make room for honesty and authenticity. And that, I’d argue, is exactly what this moment in history needs.

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I’ve been trying to understand more deeply how ADHD shows up in everyday habits, and I came across a HuffPost article about something called “tossing.” It struck me because I recognize it in myself, and because it seems to capture a piece of ADHD that doesn’t always get named.

It has to do with how I organize mostly papers; Louise has said for years that I don’t have a filing system, but instead have a piling system.

The idea is this: when things build up—papers, bills, clutter, tasks—and I feel overwhelmed, instead of sorting it, deciding what stays, what goes, I sometimes just toss the whole pile.

It feels like an act of relief, a way to avoid the discomfort, but later I often regret what I threw or what I still haven’t sorted. The article suggests that this pattern may signal a core symptom of ADHD.

Reading that, I felt seen. Because “tossing” isn’t exactly procrastination, though it’s related. It’s more reactive than intentional.

The HuffPost article quotes Oliver Drakeford, an American psychotherapist, who explains that tossing can be “automatic, reactive behavior” that helps someone with ADHD to escape anxiety or overwhelm when faced with chaos or too many things demanding attention. It’s less about making a thoughtful decision and more about trying to quiet mental overload.

For me this shows up in the “DOOM pile” (Didn’t Organize, Only Moved”) on my desk: the pile of stuff I didn’t organize but moved somewhere else so I felt less guilty. Receipts, loose papers, that project I meant to finish, the cleaning supplies I borrowed etc.

Sometimes I look at it and think, “I’ll deal with this later.” Then later becomes tomorrow or next week. And then I start feeling bad about the mess. At a certain point I think, what if I just throw it all away, even if I need some of it later, just to feel that relief. And I sometimes do. Not always the best choice. But in that moment it feels like survival.

What interested me is how tossing seems to connect to emotional states as much as cognitive function. The article points out that tossing is tied to experiential avoidance, meaning avoiding not just tasks, but the uncomfortable feelings that come with them, including anxiety, uncertainty, overwhelm.

The clutter or chaos isn’t just physical: it’s emotional. It triggers something in me that wants to escape. Tossing gives temporary relief. But in the long run it doesn’t resolve the overwhelm. It just postpones it, maybe even amplifies it because things get lost, decisions have to be revisited, and guilt builds up.

Thinking about this in light of my own Hunter/Farmer narrative, tossing looks like another manifestation of the Hunter wiring trying to cope in a Farmer-structured world. The Hunter sees too much, senses too much, has too many mental tabs open.

When life piles on, instead of patiently sorting, I act—often impulsively—to reduce the load. The Farmer mindset would want structured order, manageable routines, slow but steady processing. When the Farmer systems are missing, tossing becomes one way the Hunter tries to protect him- or herself. It simplifies when complexity feels like chaos.

But I also see that tossing is sometimes a clue, an early warning. If I’m tossing more than normal, it tells me I’m overstimulated, under-resourced, maybe emotionally taxed.

It’s not laziness; it’s a signal. And recognizing that helps me shift course. Maybe I can limit how many items accumulate before I have to sort. Maybe I can use small chunks instead of trying to system-organize everything at once. Maybe I can tolerate the discomfort instead of reacting to it.

I don’t think tossing should be pathologized wholly. It’s a coping strategy, imperfect but understandable. What needs to change is how I and the people around me respond.

If I understand that tossing is not just carelessness but tied to ADHD’s overwhelm, I feel less shame and more agency. I can try to build rituals or habits around preventing big piles from forming. I can try to name the emotional trigger when I feel overwhelmed. I can give myself grace.

Seeing this behavior named feels important because it gives words to something many of us do but don’t talk about. It helps us reframe tossing not as a sign we’ve failed, but as something we can notice, something we can work with.

Maybe for others reading this—if tossing sounds familiar—it’s a chance to observe without harsh judgment, to experiment with what helps: small tasks, short windows, emotional check-ins. And to remember that ADHD isn’t just about what we can’t do. It’s also about how we try to do what we must—sometimes by tossing, sometimes by organizing, but always by trying.

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In the world of psychiatry and neuroscience there are occasionally studies that change the conversation in ways that ripple out into politics, education, and culture. A new study published this month by Swedish researchers is one of those moments.

It turns out that medication for ADHD doesn’t just help people finish their homework or make it through a workday without missing deadlines. It actually changes life outcomes on a scale that borders on astonishing. People who take ADHD medication are significantly less likely to attempt suicide, less likely to abuse drugs, less likely to get into car accidents, and less likely to end up committing crimes.

It’s not a small effect either. The study, which followed nearly 150,000 people diagnosed with ADHD, found a 17 percent reduction in suicidal behavior, a 15 percent reduction in substance misuse, a 12 percent drop in traffic accidents, and a 13 percent reduction in criminal activity among those taking their medication compared to those who did not.

Put bluntly, these drugs are saving lives not only of the people who take them but of those who share the roads, the neighborhoods, and the homes with them.

To those of us who understand ADHD not as a disorder but as a different wiring of the human brain, these findings make perfect sense.

If you grew up in a hunting culture ten thousand years ago and you had the traits that today get labeled ADHD, you were the one who noticed the shift in the wind that signaled prey nearby or danger approaching.

You were the one who couldn’t sit still by the fire for long because movement was life and scanning the environment was safety.

You were driven by bursts of energy and drawn to immediate reward because in a hunting context, waiting too long often meant going hungry.

Those instincts were adaptive and necessary for the survival of the tribe. But then the agricultural revolution forced those same brains into rows of crops and rows of classrooms, and suddenly the hunter’s mind was recast as a problem to be fixed.

What this new research shows is that medication doesn’t erase those hunter traits. It doesn’t transform a hunter into a farmer. Instead, it functions like scaffolding in a world built for farmers. It gives the hunter brain the ability to move through the rigid schedules and demands of industrial society without crashing into every wall along the way.

When the study reports fewer traffic accidents, that isn’t because stimulant medication makes someone a duller or slower driver. It’s because it narrows attention just enough to keep the hunter’s mind from drifting during long stretches of highway or getting pulled off course by the thousand flashes of stimulation in a crowded city street.

When it shows reduced rates of drug misuse, it’s because people with ADHD have brains wired for novelty and dopamine, and when those brains are stabilized by medication, they’re less likely to go chasing risky thrills that can destroy lives. When it shows reductions in suicide, it’s a reminder that a society designed for farmers can be crushing for hunters unless they are given tools to bridge the mismatch. Medication, in that sense, isn’t a chemical straightjacket but a life raft.

This is an important shift in how we think about ADHD and treatment.

For decades the cultural story has been that ADHD drugs are handed out like candy to restless kids so they’ll sit still in school. The implication is that these medications are about compliance, about enforcing conformity, about smoothing over difference. Critics sometimes argue that giving medication to an ADHD child is the equivalent of clipping the wings of a bird so it won’t fly away from the coop.

But the Swedish study points to a different truth. These medications are not about turning hunters into farmers. They are about giving hunters the ability to survive in a world dominated by farmers without self-destructing. That survival, the data now show, extends beyond classrooms and into every aspect of life: relationships, safety, and longevity itself.

One way to think of this is that stimulant medications like methylphenidate or amphetamines are not suppressing the hunter’s drive. They are allowing the hunter’s radar to be dialed in, preventing the constant flood of distraction from overwhelming the system.

In prehistoric times the hunter could afford to act on every snap of a twig, every flash of movement in the trees. In a classroom or behind the wheel of a car, that same hyper-reactivity can be disastrous. What the medication provides is not sedation but selectivity. It helps the hunter mind choose which signals to follow and which to let pass. That kind of precision doesn’t erase the gift of the hunter’s wiring. It allows that gift to be used productively instead of destructively.

The implications for policy and culture are huge. If medication helps reduce crime and accidents, then ADHD treatment is not merely a matter of personal health but of public safety and social stability.

We should be talking about access to diagnosis and treatment not as a niche mental health issue but as a broad public good. Just as vaccines reduce the spread of disease beyond the individuals who get the shot, ADHD treatment — including non-pharmaceutical interventions like the ones I suggest in my books — reduces harms that ripple outward into society.

Yet in many places, stigma, cost, and lack of access mean that millions go untreated. In the United States, for example, the debate over ADHD often gets tangled in moral panic about over-diagnosis or pharmaceutical profit, while countless children and adults who would benefit are left unsupported.

The Swedish study should force us to reconsider that framing. If treatment lowers suicide, addiction, crime, and accidents, then failing to provide it is not neutrality. It is negligence.

There’s also a deeper lesson here about how we as a culture value different kinds of minds.

If you look at the data one way, you might conclude that ADHD is inherently dangerous and requires constant chemical control. But if you look at it through the Hunter-in-a-Farmer’s-world lens, the story shifts.

The same traits that increase risk in a farmer’s world are the ones that would have been prized in a hunter’s world. Impulsivity becomes rapid responsiveness. Distractibility becomes broad environmental scanning. Sensation-seeking becomes a willingness to explore the unknown.

The tragedy is not that these traits exist, but that our social structures punish them. Medication is not erasing them. It’s providing a translation layer so they can coexist with the demands of a world that too often has no patience for difference.

It is worth remembering, too, that even within farming societies hunters have always been among us, often with spectacular, even world-changing impacts.

They have been explorers, entrepreneurs, artists, warriors, inventors. They are the restless minds that push boundaries and refuse to accept stasis. The cost of that restless drive can be high, but the benefit to human progress is undeniable.

The fact that medication reduces destructive outcomes does not mean that untreated hunters are doomed or broken. It means that society has created conditions so misaligned with their wiring that intervention is necessary to prevent unnecessary suffering.

Rather than viewing that as proof that hunters are flawed, we might take it as proof that the farmer’s world is intolerant of the full spectrum of human possibility.

The Swedish researchers were careful not to overstate their findings. They noted that correlation is not causation, and that more study is needed to parse exactly how and why medication produces these outcomes. But the scale of the data makes it hard to dismiss. When you look at 150,000 people over years and see such consistent patterns, you’re not looking at a fluke. You’re looking at a signal that challenges the conventional wisdom about what ADHD treatment really means.

This isn’t just about school grades or workplace productivity. It’s about life and death.

For parents of children with ADHD, these findings may offer some reassurance. Choosing whether or not to medicate is one of the hardest decisions a parent can face. The fear is always that you’re drugging your child into compliance, that you’re robbing them of their spark. But if the medication — or other interventions, including ADHD-friendly schools and occupations — helps keep them alive, safe, and able to thrive, then the calculation looks different.

And if we reframe ADHD not as a deficit but as an evolutionary inheritance that needs support in certain contexts, then medication becomes not a denial of identity but a tool for survival. Hunters can remain hunters while still making it through the school day, the workday, and the long road home.

In the end, this study underscores the central point I’ve been making for years. ADHD is not a disorder. It is a difference. It is the expression of ancient wiring in a modern world that was not designed to accommodate it.

Sometimes that mismatch produces brilliance. Sometimes it produces tragedy. And what we do about it is a test of our compassion and our wisdom.

Medication is one tool, but so is redesigning our schools, our workplaces, and our communities to recognize that not every valuable human mind operates on the farmer’s timetable.

Hunters have always been part of the human tribe. Our survival has often depended on them. The least we can do in return is make sure they have what they need to survive in ours.

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For generations, society has treated ADHD as a defect, a disorder to be managed, a brain that needs fixing. Schools punish it. Workplaces stigmatize it. Pharma tries to medicate it into compliance. But what if the traits we associate with ADHD—hyper-responsiveness, scattered attention, novelty-seeking, impulsivity—are no longer liabilities in the emerging world? What if, in the age of AI, the future actually belongs to the distracted?

It’s a counterintuitive proposition, but stay with me. Artificial intelligence is rapidly automating everything structured, linear, and rule-based. That’s the territory of the “Farmer brain”: the organized, steady, persistent mindset prized since the dawn of agriculture. From spreadsheet wrangling to customer service scripts, from standardized testing to logistics planning, tasks built around consistency and predictability are being swallowed whole by machines. AI doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t get bored. It never forgets.

That’s not great news for farmer-brained people who thrive within traditional systems. But it opens the door for something else: something more adaptive, more agile, more human. As AI colonizes predictability, it leaves behind uncertainty, intuition, chaos, and creativity. It opens opportunities in what I call “Hunter territory.”

Hunters—our ADHD ancestors, and arguably our ADHD selves—have always thrived in unpredictable, high-stakes environments. They track, scan, pivot. Their attention isn’t “deficient,” it’s divergent: spread wide, not narrow. They don’t do well with repetitive tasks, but give them novelty, urgency, or danger and they light up like a Christmas tree.

In short, the kinds of brains we’ve pathologized for the last century may be the exact kind needed in the coming one.

This isn’t just romantic speculation. Creativity researcher Dr. Holly White has documented that people with ADHD often outperform neurotypical peers on tests of divergent thinking and originality. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that people with ADHD traits tend to explore problems more broadly and persistently—an ideal mindset for solving complex, ill-structured problems that AI can’t touch. Another team recently suggested that ADHD may represent a “specialist phenotype”—a subset of humans wired for exploration and risk-taking in unstable environments.

And here’s where it gets timely: the economy is shifting faster than our institutions can adapt.

Already we see mass layoffs in white-collar sectors once considered safe. According to a report from McKinsey, generative AI could automate up to 70% of business tasks in some industries. IBM recently paused hiring for any jobs that AI could replace. Education, accounting, law, journalism—the very professions that once rewarded compliance and attention to detail—are now in AI’s crosshairs.

So where does that leave the Hunters among us? Perhaps paradoxically, it leaves an opening for people whose brains don’t play by the old rules. ADHD people are fast. They’re creative. They’re intuitive. They don’t need to be told to think outside the box because they never lived in one to begin with. They’re also more likely to be entrepreneurs, inventors, first responders, and disruptors. All of that gets more valuable as AI eats the middle.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that ADHD is suddenly an easy ride. It’s not.

In a society still built for farmers, hunter brains continue to struggle, especially in school and corporate structures. But the cracks in those structures are widening. The very things we’ve punished in kids with ADHD—their restlessness, curiosity, resistance to authority—may be precisely what’s needed to navigate the next era. Especially as automation forces a deeper question: what is it that makes us irreplaceable?

One answer is attention. AI is great at prediction, but it doesn’t know how to notice. It can’t attend to the subtle or the sublime. It can’t chase a pattern without being told what to look for. Humans—especially hunter-type humans—are uniquely gifted at that. We notice what doesn’t fit. We react in real-time. We surprise.

Another answer is meaning. AI can mimic style and spit out content, but it has no intuition for truth or urgency. ADHD people are driven by those things, sometimes maddeningly so. we can’t fake interest, but when we care, we really care. And that fire, that obsessive drive toward purpose, is not just human. It’s essential.

There’s an irony in all this. For years, we’ve pushed ADHD kids into conformity, medicated them into submission, and told them they had to work harder just to be “normal.” But as AI renders normal obsolete, maybe it’s time we stopped trying to fix these brains and started learning from them. Maybe the real “deficit” is in our imagination.

I’m not arguing that we abandon structure or that ADHD should be left untreated. What I’m saying is that we need a cultural reframing. We need to stop seeing neurodivergence as a failure to conform and start seeing it as a form of strategic difference. Not every ADHD trait is a gift, but neither is it a flaw. It’s a variation: an ancient one, forged for a world of risk and opportunity.

And that world? It’s coming back.

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We are standing at the threshold of a world profoundly transformed by artificial intelligence. Tasks once seen as inherently human—predictable, repetitive, rule-based labor—are being devoured by algorithms and automation. This is not just the fourth industrial revolution; it’s the Great Conformity Disruption. And in this brave new world, the very traits that define Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may be not only relevant—but essential.

For centuries, society has punished the Hunter’s brain. ADHD, with its restless curiosity, impulsivity, and penchant for novelty, has been stigmatized, medicated, and misunderstood. We built schools, factories, and cubicles for the farmer’s brain: compliant, routine-driven, patient. We rewarded long-term planning, repetition, and the ability to sit still.

But what happens when machines become better farmers than we are? When algorithms never tire, never get distracted, and can do every predictable job faster, cheaper, and with greater consistency?

We turn, finally, to the hunters.

The Brain Wired for Novelty

Evolution shaped ADHD traits for survival on the savannah. A hunter needed to constantly scan for threats and opportunities, shift focus rapidly, react in real-time, and take calculated risks. Sitting still might have gotten them eaten. Daydreaming might have helped them spot a new food source. What we now pathologize as “inattention” was once an evolutionary advantage.

Now consider this: what kind of brain thrives in chaos? In uncertainty? In a world disrupted by exponential technological change? The same one that thrived in the unpredictability of the wild. Hunters weren’t broken farmers; they were optimized for a different game. The same is true today.

The Death of Routine

The jobs AI and automation are taking first are the most routine: bookkeeping, transportation, inventory control, manufacturing, customer service. These are Farmer tasks. Predictable. Rule-bound. Efficient.

But the jobs that remain—and the ones that will matter most—require intuition, creativity, rapid response, and out-of-the-box thinking. Problem solving. Design. Entrepreneurship. Crisis management. These are all domains where ADHD brains often shine. Why? Because they resist the comfort of sameness. They crave the next thing, the edge of the map. That’s where the game is.

In fact, multiple studies now confirm that people with ADHD traits are disproportionately represented among successful entrepreneurs. One 2018 study out of the University of Bath found that ADHD traits like impulsivity and hyperfocus, far from being liabilities, correlated strongly with business creation and innovative problem-solving. In other words, the same brain that gets written up for zoning out in a boardroom might be the one to reinvent the boardroom altogether.

Risk and Resilience

Let’s talk about risk. AI isn’t just replacing workers; it’s destabilizing entire industries. Navigating that kind of terrain takes a willingness to try, fail, and adapt. ADHD folks have been doing that their whole lives. Most have endured years of being told they were lazy, disorganized, or problematic—and still kept going. That’s grit. That’s adaptability. That’s what you want in a storm.

These are the people who ask, “Why are we doing it this way?” The people who quit perfectly good jobs to pursue crazy dreams. Who pivot without warning when something better comes along. That looks like dysfunction from a farmer’s point of view. But in a disrupted, uncertain, AI-dominated world, it looks like survival.

Creativity: The Last Frontier

AI can imitate style. It can remix existing ideas. But it cannot invent the next big thing from nothing. It cannot experience the spark of sudden insight, the bizarre connection made in a restless brain scanning for novelty. That kind of leap—from one idea to a wholly new domain—is where ADHD brains come alive.

Look at creative fields: acting, music, writing, design. ADHD is overrepresented in these professions for a reason. The hunter doesn’t need a map; they follow instinct, curiosity, scent. They see patterns others miss because their attention is diffuse, jumping, scanning.

In fact, a 2020 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology argued that ADHD traits are strongly correlated with divergent thinking—the ability to generate novel solutions and creative insights. That’s not a deficit. That’s a superpower.

Reframing the Narrative

If we don’t start reframing ADHD now, we risk losing a generation of innovators. We continue to funnel kids into systems built for yesterday’s economy, medicating them into submission, measuring them against irrelevant metrics. And we wonder why they disengage.

We don’t need more compliance. We need minds that rebel against conformity. That refuse to sit still. That demand better, newer, stranger, faster. That’s the Hunter’s brain. That’s the brain that invents the next world.

So What Do We Do?

We stop asking, “How do we make these kids fit the system?” and start asking, “How do we change the system to let them thrive?”

We build schools that reward curiosity, not memorization. Workplaces that tolerate lateral thinking. We let people move while they think. Let them speak out of turn. Let them chase rabbits. Because sometimes those rabbits lead to breakthroughs.

The age of conformity is ending. And in its place, we need the very minds we’ve spent decades trying to silence.

Let the Hunters hunt.

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We’re told the climate crisis is a technical problem. A policy problem. An economic problem. But at its core, it’s a problem of human behavior. And changing behavior requires a certain kind of mind: one that isn’t comfortable with the status quo, that isn’t lulled by routine, that can act decisively in the face of danger.

Sound familiar? That’s the Hunter brain!

Our collective inability to act fast enough on climate change is, in part, a symptom of a world dominated by farmer brains—patient, cautious, slow to change. In a stable society, that’s useful. But when the fire is already in the building, patience is not a virtue.

Urgency and Restlessness as Evolutionary Advantages

ADHD brains are wired for urgency. We Hunters feel time differently. We’re drawn to high-stakes, high-reward situations. When the pressure is on, many of us perform better than ever. That’s no accident: Hunters who could stay calm under threat and act on instinct were more likely to survive.

And the climate emergency is exactly that: an existential threat that requires bold, fast, and often nonconforming action. Yet we still approach it like a budget process.

What we need are people who don’t care what everyone else is doing. People who speak out of turn, go off-script, and do what needs to be done. We need people who can emotionally feel the urgency others suppress. That’s where the neurodivergent shine.

Seeing Patterns Others Miss

The ADHD Hunter’s brain doesn’t focus the way a neurotypical brain does. It scans. It jumps. It finds connections where others see only noise. This can be a liability in a classroom, but it’s an asset in crisis.

Climate solutions aren’t going to come from doing the same thing slightly greener. They’ll come from disruptive ideas: regenerative agriculture, circular economies, decentralized energy. Hunter ADHD minds are often the first to imagine those futures, because we’re not invested in the way things have always been.

A Different Kind of Activist

There’s a stereotype of ADHD people as unreliable. But give a hunter a mission that matters, and they’ll run through walls. We’re not motivated by abstract rewards; we’re motivated by urgency, justice, and adrenaline.

You see it in the climate movement already. The loudest, most insistent voices are often neurodivergent. Greta Thunberg, who is autistic, talks openly about how her neurotype helps her stay focused on what really matters. And while autism and ADHD are different, they share a resistance to social conformity and an intolerance of hypocrisy.

These are not bugs in the system. They are features. The neurodivergent are less likely to be seduced by greenwashing, empty promises, or slow-walked change. We don’t have time for that—literally.

Restoring the Role of the Disruptor

Throughout history, change has come not from consensus, but from disruption. It took rule-breakers to end apartheid, to legalize same-sex marriage, to break Jim Crow. These movements weren’t led by polite committees; they were led by people who refused to wait. Hunters.

Today’s fight for a livable planet needs that same energy. Yes, we need scientists and policy wonks. But we also need the kids who won’t shut up in class. The activists who block traffic. The entrepreneurs who invent crazy solutions. The rule-breakers.

Too often, these kids are told to sit down and be quiet. Their brains are pathologized instead of honored. And yet they may be the best hope we’ve got.

Creating a World They Can Inherit

If we want ADHD and other neurodivergent people to help solve the climate crisis, we have to stop breaking their spirits. Stop designing schools and workplaces that punish difference. Start listening to what they see.

And we need to understand: the climate crisis isn’t just a scientific problem. It’s a crisis of imagination, of courage, of speed. In short, it’s the kind of problem a hunter brain was built for.

Let the farmers keep the ledgers. Let the hunters lead the charge.

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Practicing daily gratitude is a habit I picked up from my spiritual mentor, Gottfried Müller; when Louise and I took a long hike through the trails of Forest Park here in Portland yesterday, for example, we stopped a few times to look around at the forest and just notice what an amazing world we live in and then to say “thank you” to all the life around us.

Every day, when we take our daily walk, we do this. Sometimes it’s our amazement at the clouds or the geese or the river or just the fact that we’re alive. I think of what my parents or my deceased brother would give for just a few minutes of what I’m experiencing and it fills me with awe and appreciation.

And I’m so grateful to you for reading and sharing my writings. You’ve helped built a real and meaningful community both here on Substack and on the radio/TV. Thank you!

I always suspected that this daily practice of gratitude helped keep me sane in these insane times, but now I’ve discovered there’s actual science behind the mental health impacts of it.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, science is revealing that our annual tradition of giving thanks might be more powerful than we ever imagined. Research shows that expressing gratitude doesn’t just make us feel good momentarily — it actually reshapes our brains in ways that enhance our well-being long after the holiday dishes are cleared away.

When you take a moment to count your blessings, your brain releases dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that create feelings of pleasure and contentment. It’s like turning on a happiness switch in your mind.

But what’s really fascinating is that this isn’t just a temporary boost — these moments of thankfulness create a positive feedback loop, training your brain to look for more reasons to be grateful.

Brain imaging studies have captured this process in action. When people express gratitude, they activate the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center for decision-making and emotional regulation.

This triggers a cascade of beneficial effects, including sharper attention and increased motivation. Think of it like building a muscle — the more you exercise gratitude, the stronger these neural pathways become, making it progressively easier to access positive emotions.

Perhaps even more remarkable is gratitude’s effect on stress. When you focus on appreciation, your brain actually dials down the production of cortisol, your body's primary stress hormone. This helps explain why grateful people often seem more resilient in the face of life's challenges — their brains are literally wired to handle stress better.

But the benefits don’t stop there.

Research conducted at Indiana University found that practicing gratitude can actually change the structure of your brain, particularly in areas linked to empathy and emotional processing.

It’s as if giving thanks regularly renovates your brain’s emotional architecture, creating lasting improvements in how you process experiences and relate to others.

These changes ripple out into nearly every aspect of life. People who practice gratitude regularly report sleeping better, probably because they’re replacing anxious thoughts with appreciative ones before bedtime.

They tend to have stronger relationships, likely because gratitude activates brain regions involved in social bonding and empathy. Many even report improvements in their ability to solve problems and think creatively, suggesting that a thankful mind is also a more flexible one.

Want to harness these benefits for yourself?

Science suggests several effective approaches. Keeping a gratitude journal helps reinforce positive neural pathways, training your brain to focus on the good in your life. Expressing appreciation to others not only strengthens your relationships but also activates reward centers in your brain.

Even simply pausing throughout the day — my favorite practice — to notice and appreciate positive moments can help reshape your neural circuitry.

The most encouraging aspect of this research is that gratitude’s effects appear to be cumulative and long-lasting. Studies have found that people who regularly practice gratitude experience positive changes in brain function that persist months after they begin the practice. It’s like compound interest for your emotional well-being — small investments in gratitude today can yield increasing returns over time.

As your brain becomes more adept at recognizing and appreciating positive experiences, you may find yourself naturally adopting a more optimistic outlook on life. This isn’t about ignoring life’s challenges or pretending everything is perfect. Rather, it’s about training your brain to maintain a sense of appreciation even while acknowledging difficulties.

So this Thanksgiving, as you share what you’re grateful for around the holiday table, remember that you’re doing more than participating in a cherished tradition.

You’re engaging in a scientifically validated practice that can transform your brain and enhance your well-being. Each expression of thanks is like a small deposit in your neurological bank account, building toward a richer, more appreciative way of experiencing life.

In a world that often seems designed to highlight what’s wrong, cultivating gratitude might be one of the most powerful tools we have for training our brains to notice what’s right. And that’s something truly worth being thankful for.

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While ADHD is a very real thing and a very real problem for many children, it can often also be an excuse used by school systems that, themselves, are struggling with issues of under-funding and being caught in a political whipsaw. It’s also more of an impediment to middle-class success than it was in our parents’ or grandparents’ generations when it was rarely diagnosed (and when it was it was diagnosed as “hyperactivity,” “learning disability, or some other general category).

For example, seventy years ago the percentage of children graduating from high school was much lower than it is today.

A high school diploma wasn’t considered “necessary” for many occupations, particularly those involving manual labor, farm, or factory work. It wasn’t uncommon for people to enter the work force full-time at the age of 14 or 15, as did Thomas Edison. It was most likely the ADHD individuals who dropped out of school and ended up working or joining the military at young ages.

Yet in those days — indeed, even as recently as forty years ago — these people weren’t considered odd or dysfunctional. They merely had chosen one particular career path, that of driving a taxi, for example, or working in a factory, or on a farm. (And this is very much still the case in Europe, where going into a trade school and doing an apprenticeship to be a baker, mechanic, or chef is considered highly respectable.)

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, where several of my friends’ parents worked at the local Oldsmobile plant (my dad worked in a tool-and-die shop). Many had never finished high school; some were immigrants who spoke broken English. A willingness to work hard and membership in the union were their tickets to success, not education.

But today more children are staying in school longer. There’s more pressure for them to stay in school, and fewer opportunities for those who drop out. Many factories won’t even consider a job applicant without a high school diploma, for example, and even people applying for minimum-wage service-industry jobs find their resumes being scrutinized and themselves ranked by their high-school grades.

This emphasis on staying in school, and on succeeding in school, creates more of an opportunity for children’s ADHD to be noticed, diagnosed, and treated. It also can lead to an often justified near-hysteria among parents about their children’s educational achievement.

Consider the grandest paradox: if ADHD is genetically transmitted, why is it that the highest rates of diagnosis and treatment for it are usually in upper-middle-class white neighborhoods? Could it be that this is a condition that’s only transmitted among upper-income people of European ancestry? Most geneticists would laugh at such a notion.

The obvious reason for the higher diagnosis and treatment rate among more well-off families is that such parents are more aware of the importance of education and therefore more sensitive to their children’s school performance. In addition, children in upper-middle-class neighborhoods have better access to health-care professionals who can diagnose ADHD and prescribe medications.

The Medication of Children

But even setting aside considerations of income or class, there are still powerful reasons for a school to want to label and/or medicate a child.

When I was executive director of a residential treatment facility for abused children in New Hampshire, I remember one boy who was brought into our program from the state mental hospital. He’d spent the past several years in the hospital, drugged with the powerful antipsychotic Thorazine into a dull stupor.

After withdrawing him from the drug and running a few month’s worth of tests on him, our psychiatrist determined that he was neither psychotic nor even particularly neurotic, other than from the psychic pain he’d experienced from being locked up in a mental hospital for two years. He’d been dumped there as an emergency placement for a day to get him away from an abusive home because there were no beds that day in more appropriate places. Subsequently his case paperwork was lost or his social worker quit her job or something happened (we never did find out what) and he simply was kept there for a few years. This boy was locked in a little room, often tied to his bed, and, finally, continually drugged.

I asked his new social worker, who’d rescued him from the mental hospital and moved him to our program, why he’d been on Thorazine all that time. Her reply was both cynical and accurate:

“With all the financial cutbacks in social services, the hospital was in a crisis. They were overworked and understaffed. So drugging him to passivity was probably the easiest, cheapest, and least troublesome way to handle him.”

When I travel around the country speaking on ADHD, frequently teachers are in the audience. Many have come up afterward to talk with me, and I’ve done seminars and trainings specifically for teachers and school administrators.

In all of these contacts, one distressingly familiar theme keeps reappearing. Our schools and teachers are overloaded and under-funded; they’re not supported in their efforts by parents; and the most common scapegoats, those who have the finger of blame pointed at them when children fail, are the teachers.

Compounding this, hard-core rightwingers have decided to vilify teachers for political gain and the GOP has committed itself to destroying our public schools. Four Republican-controlled states have begun the process already, with statewide voucher programs with universal eligibility.

This is, of course, totally unfair. While there are some teachers who are just putting in their time, the vast majority are committed, caring professionals who are trying to do their best in a world of diminishing resources and increasing demands.

Part of the “solution” to this problem, for many put-upon teachers and underfunded schools, has been the diagnosis of ADHD. By identifying and treating children with ADHD several things happen which from the school’s point of view are desirable.

First, the blame for the child’s failure to perform at the level of his or her potential is shifted from the system to the child. It’s not that the teacher is overloaded, or under-funded, or the school is under attack financially — it’s that the child has a deficit in his ability to pay attention. Of course he’s not learning: he has a neurological disorder.

Second, by medicating or otherwise treating the child to reduce his or her ADHD-like behaviors (particularly those which are hyperactive as well), the level of disruption in the already strained-to-capacity classroom is diminished. This also benefits the teacher and the school. (It has the added benefit of improving the probability that students will be able to learn, but that’s a point to discuss in a later article.)

While far less Dickensian than the experience of our child referred from the state mental hospital, the root cause is the same, as is the potential for abuse. The simple fact is that American schools and teachers are hitting levels of overload.

Add to this the worried voices among the middle- and upper-middle-class shouting about the inadequacy of the schools, and politicians calling for privatization of schools, vouchers, and all the rest. It’s both convenient and useful to label, blame, and medicate students rather than genuinely supporting or even reforming the system.

That’s not to say that ADHD isn’t real, isn’t a serious problem for many children, or is just an excuse. But it does highlight how important it is for all of us to work with our schools to give them better tools and better funding rather than purely or simply blaming our children for their apparent inability to learn in a struggling system.

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Here’s an odd coincidence: In Russell A. Barkley’s classic book Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment, he points out several studies documenting that children with ADHD (particularly those who also show signs of Conduct Disorder) are significantly more likely to smoke cigarettes.

In a recent article in USA Today, it was reported that tobacco giant RJR had found that rival brand Marlboro was successful in attracting new and young smokers because Marlboro advertising appealed to young men who were “rebels, risk takers, and those who liked sports and rock music.” Wanting to go after this same market, RJR developed the Joe Camel ad campaign, rocketing that brand to the top of the sales charts with fierce brand loyalty among young adults, teenagers, and preteens. It’s now estimated that 3000 children begin smoking every day in America, and that 1000 of them will eventually die of smoking-related diseases.

Could it be that advertising and screen usage “cause” ADHD? Or just that some savvy advertisers, websites, and social media have identified ADHD children and adults as an exploitable market? (Remember the “impulse buy” items that line the check-out areas of grocery stores?)

At first glance, the former seems absurd while the latter makes sense. And, in fact, impulsive people have long been considered the salesperson’s dream, with seminars and sales trainings that have, for decades, stressed the importance of getting the customer to “buy now,” whether the product is insurance or a new car.

But could it be possible that modern advertising practices do play a role in the explosion of ADHD and ADHD-like behaviors we see in the Western world?

Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers have pointed out that people are almost never static; it’s not the nature of life to rest in one place or one state. Physics teaches this same concept in the notion of entropy—it’s the nature of all things to decay into chaos unless continual energy is added to the system to prevent decay and collapse. Another example can be seen by observing the nature of an ADHD teenager’s bedroom when, for a week, his parent doesn’t encourage him to clean it up.

The simple fact is that we’re almost always either moving toward something or away from something. We’re never stationary, static, held in one place, no matter how much that may seem to be the case.

Many people don’t realize this (or that they can exert control over this, but that’s another discussion, which you’ll find in my book Adult ADHD: How to Succeed as a Hunter in a Farmer's World). Even fewer realize that their moving-toward or moving-away-from behavior is nearly always the result of a specific strategy to help them get what they want in life.

The Pain-Pleasure Continuum

The world of humans, we’re told by psychologists such as Leif Roland, is made up of people who are either “moving toward pleasure, or moving away from pain.” While everybody is theoretically capable of using either strategy, most people use one or the other as their primary way to stay motivated.

Those who use the “moving away from pain” strategy to keep themselves motivated visualize the terrible things that will happen to them if they fail to perform or reach their goals. When they begin to slack off at work, they think of the pain of being unemployed or yelled at by the boss, and that image pushes them from behind in a forward direction.

Similarly, when they’re presented with the possibility of poor social or personal choices (using drugs, having unprotected sex, skipping school, dropping out, driving too fast), they visualize the potential negative consequences of these behaviors. This pain-avoidance strategy causes them to decide to not engage in that behavior.

At the other end of the spectrum, people who use a “moving toward pleasure” strategy hold different mental images, feelings, or discussions with themselves to keep motivated. When they feel the urge to slack off at work, they visualize the raise they may get if they do an excellent job, or how good the praise from the boss will feel, or the warm glow of the recognition of their peers.

They may even imagine the envy of others and hold to this picture: it’s something to move toward. When times are tough for these folks, they look for the next thing, the new future, the golden opportunity, using that light as a magnet to draw them forward.

Both of these strategies are useful, and both have their appropriate times and places. If we understand the primary motivational strategy a person uses, then we can use that to keep them motivated. A “from pain” person will respond better to the threat of a failing grade, whereas a “toward pleasure” person will be more motivated by rewards.

Where this starts to break down, however, and where it may have to do with helping answer the question, “Why Do We Have ADHD?” is when a person becomes stuck in one particular strategy and therefore loses access to the other.

A person stuck in the “from/avoid pain” strategy, for example, may become so obsessed with the idea of avoiding pain that they become completely averse to taking any sorts of risks. They avoid social situations because they fear making a fau paux, or avoid business confrontations for fear of bringing the wrath of the boss. They hesitate to make decisions (or agonize over them for morbidly long periods of time) because they’re worried about the consequences of making the wrong decision.

On the other hand, a person stuck in the “move toward pleasure” strategy without access to an Avoid Pain strategy to balance them out may make wildly inappropriate decisions. They choose to take drugs because of the potential for a good feeling, for example, and fail to consider the consequences of the potential pain until they’re already broke or in jail.

If we consider ADHD to be composed primarily of the three behaviors of distractability, impulsivity, and risk-taking, it would seem that folks with ADHD are more solidly in the “Move Toward Pleasure” camp than in the “Avoid Pain” arena.

They’re distractible because they’re looking for the Next Pleasure. Much as a hungry person walking down the street will notice all the restaurants and bakeries, the pleasure-seeker is distracted by all the potential pleasure around him at the time. He may pursue these impulsively—without considering the potential pain they may cause—and thus make decisions which lead to the death of businesses, jobs, and relationships.

So, in this context, it’s possible to redefine ADHD as being a characteristic of those people who occupy the extreme end of the pleasure-seeking spectrum, and hang out very rarely in the Pain- avoiding areas.

But if this is the case, where does this come from? Why would we have this type of ADHD?

One possible explanation could be that modern children, particularly in the middle-and upper-middle class, where most ADHD is diagnosed, are suffering from a surfeit of comfort. They rarely experience pain (hunger, deprivation, etc.) as did their grandparents who lived through the Great Depression.

They haven’t developed a strong sense of the need to avoid pain. Life has been easy; everything has essentially been handed to them on a silver platter. Another, even more insidious explanation is that our children are being conditioned to seek pleasure at the expense of learning how to avoid pain.

Five decades ago Vance Packard exposed the emerging marriage of psychology and advertising in his landmark book The Hidden Persuaders. While some of Packard’s claims bordered on the paranoiac (the naked women he saw in the ice cubes in the liquor company’s ads may have been more of his own personal Rorschach test than an intentional reality), nonetheless Packard did make an important and vivid contribution. Advertising in the 1950s and 1960s very much became a science, and that science was rooted in the notion of positive associative conditioning.

First, focus groups in an advertising company are held to determine what the strongest positive psychological images are that a person may respond to in relation to the product. Are women most attracted to a perfume’s association with pastoral fields of wildflowers? Or are they most drawn to the muscled hunk who may hold them in his arms when he gets a whiff of their fragrance?

Thus an ad is created which continuously alternates between the most powerful known pleasurable image and the product.

The ideal result occurs when consumers walk into a store, notice a product on the shelf, and feel good when they see it. It’s entirely irrational — or at least beyond the regions of rationality — and is experienced by most people at a level so visceral it’s unconscious. They can’t explain why they love a particular brand, but they just do.

Advertising, Screens, and TV

Because the use of Approach Pleasure psychology is such a powerful strategy in advertising, the Avoid Pain strategy is rarely used. Instead of saying, “Use our deodorant so your armpits won’t smell like the town dump,” advertisers show images of attractive people of the opposite sex swooning when they get a whiff of the newly-aromatized pits.

For the average child or adult watching an average amount of television, each day brings—literally—thousands of these Seek Pleasure messages. Is it any wonder, then, that this generation’s predominant motivational strategy is to seek pleasure? They’ve been taught that since before they could speak, watching cartoons and the Seek Pleasure commercials for everything from toys to breakfast cereals.

Another aspect of an individual’s life strategies has to do with the notion of problem-solving. How do they react to stress? How do they evaluate and solve problems? With what depth can they see and analyze future situations and future problems, the consequences of their choices and their actions? Will they play checkers or chess—look for the quick fix or the five-moves-ahead strategy?

Again, here we see television as a powerful formative model.

On TV, virtually all of life’s problems are solved in thirty to sixty minutes. On the rare occasion when that’s not possible, the viewer can rest secure in the knowledge that the solution will come a week later, in the sequel. (Look at how frustrated and outraged many viewers become at sequels!)

If the first and most important message of television is always to seek pleasure and not bother with avoiding pain, then the second message is that all life’s problems can be resolved quickly and easily. This, of course, reinforces the idea of the relative unimportance of avoiding pain: after all, why avoid something that will quickly be resolved in any case?

This additional theory of why we have so much ADHD posits that the current explosion of ADHD is traceable to the introduction of television. Modern psychologically-driven advertising methods penetrate the daily lives of people from birth through childhood and adolescence, and even into adulthood.

Without the reality-check of something like the Great Depression or a World War, modern children are left assuming that life is about seeking pleasure at all times, and that avoiding pain is only a nuisance. Seek Pleasure becomes such a predominant part of their internal motivational landscape that they lose most of their ability to view a situation in terms of the pain it may cause. They don’t realize that there are possible choices to minimize that pain.

This theory also offers an answer to the nagging question about the parents of today’s ADHD children, young adults and Baby Boomers. If ADHD is genetic, and most ADHD children have at least one similarly-afflicted parent, why was the parent able to finish school and keep a job, whereas the child is having trouble completing the seventh grade?

If we take this theory as one of the causative factors for why we have ADHD, it would make sense that those children with the greatest tendency (genetically) toward ADHD would be the most affected by the conditioning of TV and advertising. It doesn’t mean ADHD isn’t genetic, nor does it mean that it’s entirely caused by TV and screens. But the combination is both powerful and often tragic.

Boomer parents, who weren’t bombarded with the Seek Pleasure images to which their children and grandchildren were subjected, were able to develop at least functional Avoid Pain strategies to balance out their Seek Pleasure natural proclivities.

There are two aspects to solving this problem: education and avoidance.

Education is the first and most important. I remember well the first time I was able to point out to one of my children lies in a TV advertising campaign, and how shocked she was to discover that everything said on TV wasn’t the truth.

Some people apparently haven’t yet had this experience, and uncritically accept virtually everything advertisers shove at them, from foods to political candidates. It is possible, however, to teach our children how to critically examine an advertiser’s claims, to find the self-serving distortions or misrepresentations of truth, and to accept or discard calls to action based on this knowledge.

With regard to avoidance, experts like Marie Winn and Vance Packard suggest that children should simply be kept away from large amounts of TV and screen viewing, so their exposure to and conditioning from advertising is at a minimum. This will provide them with the self-assurance and independence of thought necessary to break through the impulse to seek pleasure uncritically whenever possible.

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Not since the Great Depression have we had so many children dropping out of or failing in school or so many people homeless (the situation has somewhat improved in the last two years). Now we also have the highest percentage and the highest raw numbers of incarcerated citizens in the world. And finally, never have so many people exhibited or been diagnosed with mental disorders.

ADHD (diagnosed or undiagnosed) may be one of the more common causes of school failure. There also may be a causal correlation between the high percentage of people in prison who could be or are diagnosed with ADHD and the problems of impulse or substance abuse which landed them in jail. Might all this then have to do with the state of modern life?

To those familiar with the topic, it may seem silly to position some ADHD as merely a product of our stressful times. After all, we have specific criteria for ADHD, and have even tentatively shown differences in brain function between ADHD and non-ADHD individuals.

Yet long-term stress can produce measurable and definable changes in the body and brain, and those changes may become permanent over time. First documented in rat studies in the early decades of the l century, more recent research into stress has given us startling insights into how stress affects the body and mental functioning.

Endocrinologist Dr. Hans Selye of the Institute on Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Montreal was the first person to describe and define the condition known as “human stress.” He points out that the stress syndrome is not a mental or emotional condition, but an actual physiological response of the body. It’s not the same thing as depression, frustration, anxiety, or worry, although in the popular press these are often miscast as stress.

Instead, stress produces specific and measurable changes in the autonomic and sympathetic nervous system, including the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline, glucose from the liver, dilation of the bronchi and pupils, changes in clotting processes, increases in the number of leukocytes, and changes in cholesterol levels. When stress is severe and sustained, there are also changes in cortisone levels which can lead to physical and mental function changes, including modification of the attention span. In fact, a medical textbook used in most medical schools, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, speculates that as many as 50% to 80% of all physical diseases seen in doctor’s offices are either psychosomatic or stress-related in their origin.

If stress is capable of producing lasting and destructive physical and mental changes, where is the stress coming from that would be so severe and pervasive? Might it account for some percentage of the explosion in what is diagnosed as ADHD?

Collapse of the Middle Class

A major national survey conducted a few years ago found that anxiety was the most pervasive emotion people described in America, according to the Associated Press. The article by Washington reporter Mike Feinsilber pointed out that three out of four Americans surveyed said they were dissatisfied with the direction of life in America, a record.

Feinsilber quoted Jerome Segal, a philosopher at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, noting that what were once considered basic necessities of life in America—decent housing, transportation, schooling, and health care—are increasingly out of the reach of the middle class since the Reagan Revolution gutted unions and took a meat axe to workers’ wages and benefits.

For example, Segal pointed out that a smaller percentage of people today have decent housing than did Americans 50 years ago. This is largely because many parts of America have deteriorated since 1980 to the point where they’re virtual war zones, yet still are primary locations for business and commerce. So residents must either flee to the suburbs and then endure long, stressful daily commutes to work, or else pay a premium for in-town housing that often carries with it an added and stressful risk of crime.

Similarly, this move to the suburbs means that the family car has become a necessity to commute to work, and because so many families now have two people working, two cars are required. The financial burden and the added commute time increases family stress as one or both parents are gone from home for long periods.

Schools have turned into war zones in the cities, and many suburbs aren’t faring much better. Between groups trying to ban books and jail teachers and librarians and school shootings, going to school has become an extraordinarily stressful event for both children and their parents. Daycare, once a luxury of the upper classes, has become a working-class necessity, and can easily cost between $6,000 and $36,000 per year. And with the dearth of well-paying jobs and the collapse of a highly-paid blue-collar work force, college is increasingly seen not as an option or a luxury but as a basic necessity for future survival at a standard of living above that of a trailer park.

The AP article concludes with Segal’s observation:

“We find a society in which long-standing, legitimate need is widely unmet, and which in some instances is more thoroughly unmet than in previous, less affluent generations.”

One of the nation’s more insightful folk philosophers, Tim Underwood, noted (upon reading the above):

“Economically speaking, things have been going downhill from the ‘heydays’ of the late 1950s and early-to mid-1960s when dad supported the family and mom could stay home. Economically we’ll never have it that easy again. They didn’t work nearly as long or as hard, to support their standard of living.

“But that generation of Americans had it easy at the expense of the third world, even more so than is true today. In part this was because the resources that American corporations were stripping from the Earth domestically and abroad, such as wood and oil and especially minerals, were still relatively plentiful. As consumers we all share the blame for the damage inflicted by this ongoing devouring mechanism. This process also tends to feed wealth into the western world’s consumer societies, and especially into the richest one to two percent of the population.

“Now, as the world’s natural resources are becoming exhausted, this stripping is going on in new and different ways. Middle class Americans are currently being divested of their security, their jobs, their disposable income, the quality of their family life and their free time—as corporations ‘downsize’ and become more ‘efficient.’

“The endemic American free-floating anxiety and malaise is in small part new-millennium angst, and in large part a consequence of our loss of security. America of the 1950s suffered from fear of the Atom Bomb and fear of Russia (our national shadow). Now Americans dread the future because unlike our parents we can no longer envision a brighter tomorrow. What we can see are overpopulation and environmental degradation. Things are getting worse. If you know things are going to be worse next year and worse in ten years and worse for your kids and you feel helpless to turn this around, wouldn’t that make you anxious? Despite fear of the Bomb and paranoia, in the 1950s Americans lived with a very rosy picture of the future: ‘Better Living Through Chemistry.’ Things had been getting better and were apparently going to continue to get better. People will sacrifice and put up with a lot, if they have that certainty.”

So we have this theory, this possibility, that some of what we call ADHD is actually the product of children and adults living lives saturated with anxiety-producing stress, with that stress producing physical, mental, and emotional changes in us. But is there any objective evidence of this?

Yes, says the Gallup organization, America’s most famous and most credible polling company. In a survey they found that while 13% of adult Americans had reported trouble sleeping in 1991, nearly half of all Americans reported trouble sleeping just four years later in 1995, just as Reaganomics was really starting to bite. This more-than- quadrupling of the number of people experiencing sleep problems was caused, according to the National Sleep Foundation, by the “increasingly frantic pace of life in the ’90s, along with work pressures.”

And this isn’t just an isolated or irrelevant phenomena: one third of the respondents had fallen asleep while driving and ten percent reported that this had led to an automobile accident.

The Gallup poll, with only an error margin of plus or minus three percentage points, found that Americans not only are experiencing more stress in their daily lives, but also that stress is measurable in an epidemic of sleep disorders.

Lack of sleep is another condition shown to have an effect on a person’s attention span.

So the concept that at least some of what we call ADHD is caused by our modern society “going to hell in a hand-basket,” as one ADHD adult described it to me at a recent conference, may be more than just an odd possibility.

Possible solutions to this problem would include getting more sleep, finding less stressful jobs or places to live, and trying in general to reduce stress levels in life. Learning meditation, for example, has been shown to be effective in improving emotional well-being. Similarly, many people find that moving to the country or finding a new job serve to transform their lives in a positive way.

As Americans become more and more nervous about their economic future, it’s becoming fashionable to live a simpler life — using recycled materials, shopping in thrift stores, eating less extravagantly, and driving a more humble automobile. These lifestyle changes appear to be very healthy overall, and people experiencing stress in their lives may want to consider some of them.

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Perhaps another reason why we see so much behavior that looks like, or is misdiagnosed as ADHD is because more and more of us are growing up in a neurologically toxic environment.

In most of the world, lead is still added to gasoline. Only in the past few decades has it been removed from the fuel of the industrialized nations. Lead-contaminated paint can be found in many homes, particularly older ones, more likely to be occupied by low-income people. Children in the inner cities consistently test even today as having high levels of lead in their bloodstream.

This is significant because there’s a direct correlation between lead levels in the bloodstream and the ability to perform well on intelligence tests and in school. While severe lead poisoning can cause profound retardation or other obvious neurological damage, we’ve learned in the past twenty years that even small amounts of lead will have a subtle but measurable effect on the ability to develop and function mentally.

Similarly, at the International Conference on Toxicology held in Hot Springs, Arkansas, researchers reported on 17-year follow-up studies of 2000 residents of central Taiwan. They were exposed to high levels of polychlorinated biphenyl’s (PCBs), a chemical so widely used for the past seven decades for electrical transformers and other applications that it can be found in the blood of nearly every human on earth.

These Taiwanese, from the Yu Cheung area, were exposed to levels of PCB that were, on average, about fifty times that of the average world citizen. Their children, born after the chemical spill in the area, were found to have levels around six times higher than normal. These children exhibited “small but significant delays in attaining normal developmental milestones” in childhood, and the boys performed poorly on reasoning tests. They also found, oddly, that these PCB-exposed children were six times as likely as normal Taiwanese children to suffer from recurrent ear infections, an odd anomaly often noted among ADHD-diagnosed children in the United States.

The neurological effects of toxins may not be limited to exotic and deadly chemicals in our environment. In R. Ridley and H.F Baker’s 1983 paper, “Is there a relationship between social isolation, cognitive inflexibility and behavioral stereotypy? An analysis of the effects of amphetamine in the marmoset,” and in K.A Miczek’s “Ethopharmacology: Primate Models of Neuropsychiatric Disorders,” a case is made that stimulant drugs taken during pregnancy may profoundly affect the developing fetus. Other researchers have wondered out loud whether this may even extend to caffeine, although it’s difficult and politically unwise to try to get research money for studying the effects of that drug.

Thirty years ago no one warned pregnant mothers that alcohol and nicotine could damage their unborn child: now such warnings are commonplace. Fifty years ago DDT was routinely dusted on virtually every food we ate, and sold as a garden powder. Now it’s banned worldwide, but still shows up in the fat of Antarctic seals. Lead was put into gasoline and paint for nearly a century before it was learned that just these two environment sources of lead were reducing IQ scores among city-dwelling children by as much as 10 points.

We must be careful not to fall into the trap of assuming that our current state of knowledge about the toxicity of our environment is the end-state of all knowledge. Yesterday’s health-food fad is often today’s practical reality or EPA law.

It may seem a bit eccentric to shop in the organic produce section, or to insist that our children eat their vegetables. When our houses are not full of junk foods and sugary breakfast cereals, however, it may provide our children with that small edge they’ll need to grow up with a strong nervous system in an increasingly complex and demanding world.

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While the idea that ADHD is “caused” by diet is pretty well debunked, having an optimally-functioning brain is vitally important for people challenged with this condition. And that’s where there is a clear association between good nutrition and high functioning brain power.

Serotonin is one of the primary neurotransmitters that facilitates and regulates our ability to think, to pay attention, and to engage in higher mental functions. It also plays a strong role in our emotional state: when levels are out of balance people will fall into depression, mania, and a host of emotional symptoms between the two. It’s also the main neurotransmitter that’s boosted with stimulant medications.

Given the importance of this neurotransmitter in maintaining normal functioning of the brain and emotional systems, we would be remiss if we didn’t look at those ecological factors proven to affect serotonin levels or the ability of the brain to use serotonin.

Vitamin E: In a study published in 1992 in The Journal of Neurochemistry, researcher Dr. A Castano found that as little as two weeks on a vitamin-E deficient diet was enough to damage the serotonin-processing neurons in the brains of rats. This was corroborated in a study published in Brain Research in 1993.

Vitamin C: The body uses vitamin C in the process of manufacturing serotonin. While the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin C is 60 milligrams per day, this may be far less than optimal. One 10-year study reported in Beyond Prozac by Michael J. Norden, M.D., found that men who consumed 400 milligrams or more daily had 70 percent less mortality than men who consumed 50 milligrams.

Minerals: Lithium is the treatment of choice for people suffer¬ing from bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness). It’s also a naturally-occurring mineral found in varying levels in much soil. Scientists knew from their studies with sufferers of bipolar disorder that lithium tablets would increase serotonin levels, but were astounded when they looked at psychiatric and criminal statistics from those parts of the country where the soil lithium levels are so high as to be measurable in drinking water (principally in Texas). They discovered significantly lower levels of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, and a host of other psychiatric illnesses. A number of studies have all but proven that this is attributable only to the trace levels of lithium in the local food and water.

Similarly, chromium, zinc, manganese, copper, and iron are all minerals necessary for the manufacture and maintenance of proper brain levels of serotonin.

Vitamin B6: This vitamin is the most directly tied into the serotonin system, as it’s required to convert dietary L-tryptophan into serotonin. Studies have found that high levels of it are therapeutic in a number of serotonin-related disorders, including depression and seizures.

The significance of all these nutrients in the context of ADHD is that they’re all necessary in appropriate amounts for normal brain function. The way most people get them is through the foods they eat, yet much of our food has lost virtually all of its nutrients.

We take wheat, for example, strip out the germ (the budding plant at the center which has the highest levels of nutrients and vitamin E), the bran, and then chemically bleach the resulting starchy substance left. This destroys virtually all the nutrients except the starch, producing the nice, white flour that seems to be so loved by so many ADHD kids. Similarly, sugar cane juice has all its minerals and vitamins removed (the removed goo of its nutrients is molasses), and is then chemically bleached to remove whatever might have escaped the primary extraction process.

Cooking destroys many nutrients, and others are leached out of foods into cooking water which usually is thrown away.

The bottom line is that many experts in nutrition—and not just those from the “health food fringe”—believe that Americans are among the worst-nourished people in the industrial world because of our heavy reliance on processed foods.

Vitamins and minerals have been aggressively stripped from our soil and foods, and then trace amounts of a small spectrum of “essential” nutrients are added back (sometimes by requirement of law, so bad was the damage done to people in the early years of this century by eating processed food). This however, is no solution. People must eat a diet rich in raw or lightly cooked fruits, vegetables, and whole grains if they are to expect their bodies— and their brains— to function properly.

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One theory of why there’s such an explosion of ADHD has more to do with the proliferation of the diagnosis among adults than it does among children.

Children often report they don’t like the way Ritalin or other stimulant medications make them feel, or are resentful about having to take anything at all. Particularly after the first few months when the newness of the experience has worn off, it’s just another thing to have to remember. Children also simply appreciate that it often helps them do better in school.

But among adults, although these same responses are common, another response occurs with alarming frequency.

Literally hundreds of adults have come up to me at ADHD conferences, book signings, ADHD support group meetings, or other public events and begun what back in the ’60s we used to call a “speed rap.”

The person talks so fast that they barely can keep up with their own words. They smile widely, have great urgency and intensity, and often bounce up and down while talking. They have absolute certainty that they’re saying the most important words ever uttered in the history of humankind, and that their insights are mind-boggling and world-changing. They believe the person they’re talking to is hanging on their every phrase.

In my experience, being on the receiving end of these speed raps, sometimes it’s amusing; more often than not, though, it’s annoying to the other people who want a book signed or have a question to ask. The last time I spoke to a convention for adults with ADHD, I encountered at least two or three speed-rappers an hour throughout the day. One fellow even paused in mid-sentence of a mind-numbing discourse about the state of American politics (he’d stopped me in the hall to share his insights about “Bill Clinton’s ADHD”) to throw down his throat a half-dozen yellow 5 mg. tablets of Ritalin.

“How much of that stuff do you take?” I asked.

“Not much,” he said. “Only about a hundred-fifty milligrams a day.” While this may seem like an eye-popping amount of stimulant to take (normally, adults and children begin at 5 to 20 mg./day), there has been quite a bit of discussion lately about the value of such high doses of methylphenidate (Ritalin), Dexedrine, or methamphetamine. No doubt some folks require such high doses, or have built up a tolerance that makes them less dangerous. If nothing else, the spectrum of humanity varies widely in its neurochemistry.

But there’s also a problem here: some of these people have gone from unhappy and dysfunctional to bubbling and dysfunctional. While from the inside it may seem like an improvement to them, follow-up discussions with many reveal that they experience black depressions when they “crash” from their high levels of drugs. Therefore, some are also on antidepressants such as SSRIs or benzo drugs. And most distressing, very, very few are receiving any sort of psychotherapy or learning new life skills to help them become more functional with or without medication.

Several psychiatrists commonly on the ADHD speaking circuit have shared with me similar observations. A small but measurable subgroup of adults really enjoy the buzz they get from stimulants and, whether they’re ADHD or not, they’re using an ADHD diagnosis to maintain access to these substances.

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time a drug drove the diagnosis of mental conditions (rather than the other way around, as one would normally expect). Sigmund Freud found cocaine so psychologically liberating that for several years he prescribed it to nearly all his patients, as well as taking it himself. Until the darker side of the drug revealed itself to him, Freud believed it facilitated the cure of conditions ranging from depression to sexual dysfunction.

When I was a college student in the 1960s, we all knew of several area physicians who’d willingly prescribe stimulant “diet pills” (typically methamphetamine or dextroamphetamine) for anybody as much as ten pounds over the norm. We used them as study aids: they were, after all, the same stimulant drugs now used to treat ADHD. The availability of stimulant drugs drove an epidemic of overweight diagnoses. And this wasn’t just limited to college students in Michigan. Housewives and young women across America discovered diet pills in the ’60s, leading to an entire American subculture of middle-class drug-users chronicled in books and movies of that era such as Valley of the Dolls.

It’s impolitic to say that people take drugs simply because they enjoy them, but it’s a widespread fact of life. Look at the millions of Americans who take nicotine in the form of tobacco, a drug which when taken as directed often leads to death. Alcohol is another recreational drug of our culture. The way that over-the- counter and prescription drugs are pushed on TV (we’re the only country in the developed world that allows prescription drugs to be advertised to the public), it’s easy to understand how the average raised-on-television American might think there’s a pill to solve virtually every problem.

With the stimulant drugs used for ADHD, there’s a substantial grain of truth to the notion that they solve a problem. Benzedrine was first promoted in the 1930’s by the infamous Dr. Bradley as the “miracle mathematics pill,” and thousands of college students took it to improve their test scores. Dr. Bradley himself advocated its use in public elementary schools.

Dexedrine and Benzedrine were routinely given by the U.S. military to pilots from the late 1930s until the practice was mentioned on CNN during the 1990s Gulf War and then discontinued because of the adverse publicity. These drugs do measurably enhance performance, at least over the short term.

So here is another possible reason why so many people are visiting the doctor (and now hooking up with telemedice doctors who advertise on TV) to inquire about having ADHD. Stimulant drugs produce an enjoyable sensation and make some people more proficient — at least over the short term — at their work or studies.

A study on drinkers of coffee found that nurses who consumed more than two cups of coffee daily were less likely to commit suicide than those who consumed fewer than two cups. Although this study was flawed in several significant ways (it didn’t look at personality factors which may be common to non-coffee-drinkers and suicidal people, for example, or between coffee-drinkers and non-suicidal people), it may indicate that there’s some benefit in taking stimulant drugs on a regular basis. So the societal and medical solution to this situation may be twofold:

First, consider that the drug may be driving the diagnosis, and look for other ways people can find satisfaction in life without using Ritalin, amphetamine, or other stimulants. These would include the standard psychotherapeutic strategies of examining life situations, relationships, interpersonal strategies, work, etc., and looking for better alternatives or ways to change. Many of these are outlined in other articles here on HunterInAFarmersWorld.com.

And second, perhaps we should reconsider the role that Ritalin and other stimulants play in our society, and the level of restriction attendant to them. While the first strategy implies using less of these drugs, we may also find that there should be more use of them, particularly the naturally-occurring compounds such as caffeine, Yerba Mate, and Gingko.

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Susan knows she’s ADHD because her home is a mess. “If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist,” she says, so therefore “everything important or that I need to remember is out visible someplace, usually in a pile.” The result is what some people would call chaos, although Susan says she has to have it this way. “When I tried filing things, I’d invariably lose them forever.”

Bill, a high school student, has no problem with filing things. His desk at school and his homework area at home are both spotless, and, in fact, he has what he describes as a “superstition” that he can’t do his schoolwork until the work area he’s in is clean and tidy. He’s highly distractible, however: the slightest noise, the most insignificant motion, even a stray thought will sent him off on a daydreaming thought-train that may take him twenty minutes to recover from.

Jack doesn’t have much of a problem with organization or distractability, although he admits that both represent a constant challenge. His issue is his hyperactivity; he can’t stop moving or talking. “I’m always on the go,” he told me as he was about to leave home for a trip to Europe. “If I’m not traveling, I’m talking. If I’m not talking, I’m working on something. I can’t stand to be bored.”

Donna, a psychiatric nurse, knew she was ADHD because the other doctors and nurses she worked with often asked her if she was on drugs (she wasn’t). “I’d just get spacey, you know? I’d walk from one room to another to get something, and before I even arrived in the second room, I’d already forgotten why I was heading there.”

And the mother of Jared, age five, knew her pediatrician’s diagnosis of ADHD was correct when he pointed out that Jared was always jumping into risky activities. “He’s run out into traffic, jumped off tables, tried to climb up to the roof of the house, and even tried to start the car once when he found my husband’s keys,” his mom said. “He has to be ADHD; he’s an incredible risk-taker.”

Jared, Donna, Jack, Bill, and Susan are all certain they have Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. All tried Ritalin or Dexedrine and reported that it helped or solved their problem. Yet each, if confronted with the other, would probably say, “I’m not like that person.”

ADHD is a tough diagnosis or category to get your arms around. With over a dozen “questions” in the DSM criteria, and some (such as those proposed by Hallowell & Ratey in their book Driven To Distraction) running as long as 20 to 50 questions, a lot of room for individual variations exists.

There’s also no definitive biological marker or physiological test for ADHD, at least as of this writing. No gene has been definitely identified, no blood or saliva test clearly shows that a person has ADHD, and no physical characteristics lead to a positive diagnosis.

So what if ADHD were actually a catch-all category for a half-dozen or more completely different conditions? And, even more heretical, what if many of those conditions don’t really represent identifiable pathologies, but are merely aspects of the human condition?

For example, scientists who study the difference between brain structures and behavior point out that certain behaviors can probably be associated with certain types of brains and brain chemistries. When particular structures are weak, loosely connected, or simply operate at a different-from-normal threshold, those differences will manifest as specific and often-predictable behavior profiles. For example; an ADHD person might exhibit these tendencies:

♦♦♦ Thalamus/Recticular Activating System (which controls our level of overall brain arousal)

— Inability to stay on task

— Easily distracted, often leading to mental errors in logic —A craving for large amounts of stimulation

♦♦♦ Frontal Lobes (which provide our sense of orderliness and our ability to measure, sense, and live in time)

— Lacks impulse control so makes impulsive decisions

— Hyperactive

— Disorganized

— Wild mood swings and high emotional intensity

— May be stubborn, defiant, oppositional

♦♦♦ Parietal Lobe (where speech, language, and certain types of thought are processed)

— Wanders off into daydreaming easily: may even spend most of life in this state

— Internally distractible: distracted by their own thoughts

— Specific Learning Disabilities, especially disorders of visual processing, mathematical processing, and prosody.

♦♦♦ Specific Sensory Areas (visual or auditory cortex, for example, where sight or sound are processed)

— Easily distracted only by the type of sense affected

♦♦♦ Limbic System (the “reptilian brain” in which primi-tive/baseline functions are moderated, such as appetite, fight-or-flight, sexual desire, etc.)

— Appears either under-or over-motivated

— New stimuli in the environment elicit unpredictable responses (or sometimes even no response)

— Sometimes over-responds to seemingly irrelevant or inconsequential things

Any of these variations in the human brain could produce behaviors which may be clinically defined as attention deficit disorder. Yet each is different in its cause, its effect, and even in the appropriate interventions (medication, strategy-training, etc.) that may be effective for it.

The waters are further muddied by research done at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital in Jerusalem. It began when Dr. C. Robert Cloninger of Washington University advanced the theory that four primary and independent personality traits account for much of the vast range of visible human behavior: novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence.

Cloninger went a step further than mere psychology, however, when he proposed that all of these behaviors were neurochemically mediated, and suggested that with novelty-seeking behavior the neurotransmitter involved was probably dopamine.

Dr. Richard P. Ebstein and associates at the Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital picked up the gauntlet of that challenge, and administered a personality questionnaire to 124 individuals in Jerusalem, a mixture of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. The questionnaire was designed to determine each person’s level of novelty-seeking behavior. Simultaneous with that, Ebstein drew blood from the volunteers and looked at the D4DR gene, which is known to regulate the formation of one class of dopamine receptors in the brain.

What they found was that the higher the individual scored on the novelty-seeking-behavior questionnaire, the physically longer and more complex was their D4DR gene. This study was followed up by Dr. Jonathan Benjamin of the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., with 315 people, many of them pairs of male siblings. The results were similar: the longer the D4DR gene, the more novelty-seeking behavior the individuals exhibited.

This is much more fundamental and narrowly-focused than ADHD, but in the wake of this research being published many psychologists and ADHD experts are asking out loud to what extent this clearly-genetic novelty-seeking behavior and an ADHD diagnosis may go hand-in-glove.

Perhaps so much ADHD is being diagnosed now for the same reason a hundred years ago many people were diagnosed with “excess blood” and were bled to relieve virtually feverous, nauseated, or diarrheal conditions: Our diagnostic criteria is blurry.

Keep an open mind to the various conditions or behaviors that may contribute to, or look like, ADHD. Continue to learn and grow, and think twice before dropping life’s problems into one neat little diagnostic category which may actually be far less well-defined than many people think.

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A few years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the front-page, left column, for which I’ve searched in vain ever since (I read it on a plane and left the paper behind). While I can’t quote the article directly, the gist of it was that many corporate personnel people now look for a different personality profile in the people they’re hiring from the criteria used in previous years.

Conventional wisdom for the past century has been that managers should look for the “slow and steady” person to fill every position in corporate America: people who had only one job for a decade or more, and who left that job only because of a natural disaster or other unavoidable reason.

“Job hoppers” — those people who changed employers every year or two — were considered dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. After all, it can take half a year to get someone fully trained and up to speed, and there’s considerable cost associated with that. When they just cut and run after a year or so it leaves a company high and dry, having to spend money to search for another employee, and then start the expensive training cycle all over again.

This article pointed out, however, that view is changing. While people who can’t hold a job for over six months to a year are still considered a poor risk, someone who’s changed jobs every two to four years is now, in many sectors, considered an asset.

According to this article, such people bring with them to the job a breadth of knowledge about differing corporate cultures that is useful. They’ve picked up different strategies and insights at every job, and seen a wider variety of things done right and wrong from which they could learn lessons than the average “slow and steady” person. These insights of theirs can contribute substantially to the corporate culture and the company’s systems or way of doing business.

In this context, that touch of the wanderlust so often associated with ADHD would be a good thing.

Similarly, children and adults who want to surf the Internet, or program and create web pages in such a dynamic environment, must be highly creative and understand the needs of a short-attention-span medium. The entertainment environment in which our young people live is very fast-paced (complete with a TV show called “The Short Attention Span Theater”). It seems that the only part of their lives that still moves at 19th century speed is school.

And even that is changing. With schools increasing reliance on fast-paced media such as computers and video for instruction, being one of those “fast thinking” people may nowadays be as much an asset as a liability.

The first “revolution” was from hunting to farming, 10,000 years ago: the agricultural revolution. The second was about one hundred and fifty years ago — the industrial revolution, fueled primarily by the development of electric power grids in cities and the discovery of internal combustion engines which could exploit a then-cheap source of energy (coal and oil).

Both of these revolutions were well adapted to people with a Farmer mentality. They required linear-thinking skills and the ability to stand in one place for hours a day and put the same bolt on the same nut (or plant the same grain) time after time for years.

But in the past five decades, we’ve witnessed two more revolutions. The first is the service industry revolution. Since the Reagan Revolution gutted unions and moved manufacturing offshore, a huge percentage of our workforce now are employed within the service sector — fast food, entertainment, advertising, marketing, online work, cleaning — compared to just twenty years ago. In this sector, largely driven by salespeople, running at full speed is required. Kids diagnosed as ADHD in school have a blast working in many of these fields, and usually do very well in professions such as sales or marketing.

And the forth revolution—the big one—is the information revolution. More people are employed today in the United States in the business of providing or moving information than are employed in our factories. Fifty years ago, the only people in the information business were librarians, teachers, and writers, but now it’s exploded across the country. One manifestation of this is the proliferation of online services such as social media and YouTube.

In the information age, speed is critically important. Information is accumulating and changing so rapidly that systems such as Telerate, Reuters, and others have adapted to transmit changes in the prices of currencies, for example, worldwide at nearly the speed of light. Fortunes are made and lost in moments, and decisions must be made and acted on with dazzling speed.

Consider how this change in technology and the speed of life is reflected in something as simple and basic as the home. How many contemporary families do you believe would — or even could — sit around the living room for two or three hours a night quietly reading? Or listening to the radio?

While these were the norm one hundred, or even fifty years ago, today’s average family, both parents and children, would run out of the room screaming in boredom after an hour on the first night.

Television producers well know how the attention span of Americans has changed over the past fifty years. The long-winded introductions of Ed Sullivan or skits of Ernie Kovaks have been replaced by shows where the camera never lingers more than seven seconds before the scene is cut to the next shot.

Newspapers reflect this change, too. Compare USA Today (an apt name in this context!) with any newspaper from the early years of the 20th century.

So, suddenly we’re living in an environment uniquely well-adapted to the ADHD individual.

“I love to multitask,” said Bill, a designer for an Atlanta ad agency. “With the computer, I can have three projects going at the same time, and when I get bored with one, I just hop to another.” Work and channel-surfing are taking on an eerie resemblance to each other.

Cultural Anthropologist Cindy Smith is quoted in a recent issue of Information Week as saying that the clues to constructing a successful work environment in the Information Age are found among the hunter-gatherer tribes of the !Kung bushmen who live in Africa’s Kalahari Desert.

“The characteristics of virtual teams are high mobility, very weak notions of property — like having an office — and a high sense of egalitarianism,” she says. “Exactly like the characteristics of a band of hunters and gatherers.”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that this milieu has spawned a generation of short-attention-span individuals. They may, after all, be the ones best adapted to the brave new world we’re entering, where the average individual has available with a laptop computer and modem an amount of information ten thousand times greater than the sum total of the knowledge and history of humanity just eighty years ago.

Thus, we find more and more people moving in the direction of work, careers, and a lifestyle which uses and celebrates ADHD, rather than trying to be a tax accountant, groaning under the daily weight of detail and calculations. And increasingly parents are counseling their ADHD children to do the same, even if their school is still stuck in the nineteenth century.

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In the late summer of 1995, I spent a week with Dr. Jane Shumway on an Apache Indian Reservation. We were doing in-service training for teachers and social workers, and spent most of our time with members of the tribe. We were invited to a number of sacred ceremonies, including a sweat and a puberty rite for a young girl.

This latter was fascinating. For four days, this girl and her family stood out in the desert. With the medicine men and friends and family supporting and encouraging her, she danced a religious dance to bring a blessing on her and to mark the transition from girl to woman.

Judy, one of the Apaches who hosted us, made a comment to me after we’d stood in the hot sun with this girl and her family dancing for six hours. “If she makes it through this, she’ll know for the rest of her life that she’s capable of anything.”

Virtually every indigenous culture in the world has rites-of-passage rituals for its young, a reality that was not lost on Carl Jung, Margaret Mead, and other observers of human nature. It seems that ritual is a critical component to developing emotional and spiritual strength. Family rituals such as meals together, vacations, attending church or synagogue, etc., all serve to build the ties within a family and strengthen the members individually.

But in modern Western society, our historic and constructive rituals are breaking down. In their place, new rituals will necessarily emerge: it’s a requirement of the human organism. And so we hear of gangs which require new members to rob or kill somebody, of fraternities who haze members to the point of death or injury, and roving gangs of suburban, middle-class teenagers who vandalize mailboxes, steal street signs, or compete to see how drunk they can become before they drive. These behaviors, as sick as they may seem, are actually fulfilling a basic human need for ritual and belonging.

But these rituals don’t produce the kind of deep emotional strength that the family and larger-culture rituals of the past did. In many ways they’re just hollow imitations, lacking in meaning and only transitory in their fulfillment of this inner need. This is similar to the way some people mistake sex for love, compulsively seeking it throughout their lives, never achieving satisfaction.

This loss of ritual may also address the deeper conundrum of modern-day ADHD children: If ADHD is genetic, then probably many of these children’s parents are just as ADHD as their kids. That being the case, how did those parents— themselves afflicted with ADHD from birth—become sufficiently successful to end up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood? How did they get through school, college, relationships, and into the workplace?

One answer may be that they had rituals. Church and home were important in the pre-TV and pre-social media days. For the generation of my parents, the most common ritual of adulthood was to go off to war or participate in the war effort at home (WWII in their case). For their parents, there was the work involved in surviving the Great Depression or participating in World War I.

Yet for my generation, going off to the Vietnam war was spectacularly unsatisfying and unnoble, and the protest riots were a poor substitute. Hippies and flower children sprang up as a community, context, and to provide ritual, but it was a largely dysfunctional culture for transition into “normal, American adult life.”

Our children have virtually no larger context for ritual, as families often no longer eat together (at least not without the TV), or worship together. Even the puberty transition ritual of graduating from high school has been minimized by the growing emphasis on a college education.

How can we re-establish ritual for our children so they can grow up with the maturity and emotional stability which will allow them to succeed with or without ADHD, as so many of their parents and grandparents did?

Organizations exist which have historically provided this sort of ritual and context of belonging to children, although they are nowhere near as pervasive or important in American life as they were a generation ago. The Boy and Girl Scouts are probably the most well-known, but there are also others, many of them specific to particular parts of the country or religions.

The Army, that rite of passage for my father, is still available but no longer mandatory. There are efforts in Congress to put into place public-service equivalents, commonplace in European countries such as Germany and Scandinavia where every teenager must serve in the military or in non-profit volunteer work after high school.

And, of course, working to strengthen family and local cultural rituals is an important step. Taking the kids to weekly worship, or to the symphony, or even to vacation together, builds that sense of shared experience and camaraderie that will become a strong foundation for later life.

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Tens of millions of Americans now know how to use computers without having learned these skills in school. In fact, if they had learned how to use computers in school, they would probably be far less functional in their use of computers. Why? Because of the way schools are designed. They’re often not designed to teach: they’re designed to condition.

While we have all heard about the hard school years in Japan, few know that children in Hong Kong’s schools—with a shorter school year—regularly outperform Japanese students in both math and science. Or consider Sweden, one of the countries with the highest literacy rates in the world: Sweden doesn’t send its children to school until they’re six years old, and Swedish high schools graduate children after nine instead of 12 years of schooling.

In May of 1996 Louise and I visited Taiwan and found that their public school system is shockingly different from that of America. We saw lot of what looked to us like “ADHD behavior” among the Taiwanese: they are, after all, descendants of the malcontents who tried and failed to take over China, and then fled to Taiwan where they largely destroyed the indigenous people.

How do they handle ADHD there? Their schools are high-stimulation places where these high-energy kids thrive.

Taiwanese schools are so high-stim that an article in The Independent in London on June 6, 1996, by Fran Abrams, referred to their classrooms as “anarchic.” Children aren’t required to sit quietly: instead, they’re allowed to jump up from their seats to write on the board, to speak up, to shout out answers, all without waiting for permission from their teachers. Book-work constitutes less than a few minutes out of each 40-minute class session: most of the time is instead devoted to discussion and action. “And the Taiwanese pupils are ahead of their British counterparts,” summarizes the article in The Independent.

School in the United States, on the other hand, has become standardized even as the system itself is under attack from rightwingers.

To understand the origins of this system we have to go back to the last years of the 18th century. The state of Prussia (now part of Germany) had as a major industry the export of soldiers. If your country wanted to fight a war, you hired the Prussian experts to come in and show you how, and in many cases even fight it for you. The Prussian army was known and feared all across Europe.

Until 1806.

In that year, at the battle of Jena, Napoleon’s amateur soldiers trounced the Prussian army, producing a profound and humiliating defeat for Prussia. Not only was the Prussian national pride at stake, but also their livelihood: their national business was producing and supplying soldiers and armies.

This defeat led the German philosopher Fichte to deliver what was to become one of the most powerful documents in the history of education: his “Address to the German Nation.” In it, he blamed the defeat at Jena on soldiers who were not sufficiently willing to obey authority and take orders. He then proposed a system of forced education which would produce soldiers and citizens who would be obedient, well-behaved, unquestioning of authority, and who would share similar opinions on issues of “national importance.”

By 1819 the Prussian King had agreed with Fichte. He didn’t want to lose any more wars. He ordered that all citizens must send their children to the new public school institution or face severe punishments. It was the world’s first compulsory public school, and its agenda was not educational per se but the fulfillment of social/industrial/military goals.

This led to an explosion over the next decades in the wealth and success of Prussian industry and the Prussian military. Soldiers accepted orders, workers obeyed their managers, the Prussian government flourished, and the people of Prussia adopted similar viewpoints on all the issues identified as crucial by their King.

Elsewhere in the world, governments who were struggling with issues of nonconformity and rebellion were fascinated by the apparent success of the Prussian experiment.

Here in the United States during the early- and mid-1800s the benefits of this type of schooling were fiercely debated. On one side, wealthy owners of factories, mines, and farms argued strongly for such a system to provide them with more compliant workers. The westward expansion taking place at that time occasionally produced shortages of factory labor, and “independent American thinking” was viewed by these industrialists as a social ill.

On the other side of the argument were the post-Jeffersonians who believed that educational decisions about children should be made by those children’s parents and the community as a whole.

If groups of parents or communities wanted to get together to hire a teacher and start a school, the structure of the classroom, the duration of the school year, and all the other aspects of education in their community should be up to them. The post-Jeffersonians believed that allowing communities this independence would create workable school systems and foster superior education.

The Prussian program had addressed this debate right from the start by creating a two-tiered school system which endures to this day in modern Germany. The Volksschule (people’s school) educated over 90% of the country’s children, in a way that was guaranteed to produce conformity, compliance, and to stifle independent thought. The Real Schulen (actual school) educated the remaining 8 to 10 percent of the students, the children of the ruling and wealthy elite, who were destined to become the leaders of government and industry.

Unfortunately for America, the debate was settled here by the resolution of “the Catholic problem” in the state of Massachusetts. In 1852 a Protestant secret society known as The Order of the Star Spangled Banner dominated Massachusetts politics. (Their password was the phrase: “I know nothing.”) Their political arm, The American Party, controlled the Massachusetts legislature and was concerned about the Catholic immigrants from Ireland who were flooding the state and especially the port of Boston.

That same year the famous “Know Nothing” legislature of Massachusetts (yes, it’s referred to as that in the history books) passed a law designed to take young Catholic children away from their parents and indoctrinate them in the ways of the Protestants who ran state. One of the unspoken goals was to “Americanize” these children, to displace the influence of Irish family culture. Compulsory public schooling had only once before been tried and was soon abandoned in this country—in the Massachusetts colony in 1650 by the witch-burners at Salem. Now it became state law, and soon other states across the country began to adopt the Massachusetts model.

And so began the standardization of American education.

Horace Mann went to Prussia to view the Teutonic school model and thought it wonderful: he came back to America and strongly advocated its widespread distribution as a way to cure our social ills, tame the wild west, and provide “educated” workers for industry.

When the federal government finally got into the act, one of the first US Commissioners of Education, William Torrey Harris, went out of his way in 1889 to assure Collis Huntington, one of the fabulously wealthy railroad magnates of that day, that this new system of national compulsory education was scientifically designed to prevent “over-education” from happening to American children. There would always be a ready supply of drones to help build and maintain the railroads.

In addition to the dumbing down of American citizens, the Prussian model of Volksschule has, in the opinion of some, also led to two world wars. In the classic All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque asserts that World War One was caused “by the tricks of schoolmasters.”

Even more chilling was the view of the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who pointed out that World War Two was the “inevitable product” of this type of schooling and child raising. By that he meant was that the German people had, for several generations, been stripped of their critical thinking skills. They had, in his opinion, become a nation of good and obedient drones, who thought alike and were willing to follow the instructions of those in authority, regardless of how bizarre or immoral those orders might seem. They were ready to follow the rantings of a demagogue.

Hitler himself was a strong advocate of using compulsory public schools to socialize children. National Socialist (Nazi) philosophy was a compulsory part of school curriculum during his reign. It is also significant that in Hitler’s Germany children were forced to attend school daily starting at age five.

So it should be no surprise to us that children are coming out of American schools deprived of critical thinking skills, and missing the ability to analyze complex problems or understand the details of far-reaching political issues.

It shouldn’t amaze us that Americans today—the products of years in an underfunded and under-attack school system—will march in lockstep enthusiasm to single-sentence political slogans dealing with complex issues such as flag-burning, abortion, the decriminalization of drugs and international trade.

What many of us don’t know or have forgotten is that our system was designed from the ground up to operate exactly as it often does today. Once upon a time the most important product of a public school system, for government and commerce, was compliant young women for the household and men for the army and industry. Do we still want this today?

This system has no provisions for talented children who are less than enthusiastic about sitting in the same room all day every day doing the same thing, from kindergarten through old age. Like Robin Williams’ character in Good Morning Vietnam—a heretic and misfit in a conformist system—they stick out and get in the way.

So they are given pejorative labels as troublemaker or hyperactive or ADHD and these days frequently are medicated with drugs like Ritalin to help them comply with the system. Sometimes this works, and these rebels and misfits become “good students,” “good children,” who behave and become “good citizens.”

Solutions to the problems of our schools are highly problematic. In my opinion and experience, what’s called for is a radical re-invention of our school systems. This would make them more functional and accessible for children with ADHD, and also increase the quality and quantity of learning available to non-ADHD children. The details could include:

— Relevant curriculum. Rudolph Steiner (after whose ideas the Waldorf Schools are patterned) had the idea that teaching should not be subject-specific, but multi-subject simultaneously. Have children write about History as part of their English curriculum. Do the Math to determine the accuracy of Einstein’s Time Dilation Equation as part of Physics, and then write up a summary of it in German as part of their language lesson. Integrating subjects together, Steiner thought, would make education more relevant and more like the real world.

In fact, his idea wasn’t anything new. It was the way that much instruction had been done for thousands of years, and it wasn’t until the Prussian school model came along in the early 19th century that the idea that breaking up topics and dealing with each in a vacuum was considered. The reason for this was simple: the Prussian King wanted his students to be compartmentalized thinkers, unable to see the interconnectedness of things, and thus good cannon fodder.

— Student participation in the educational process. My youngest daughter became interested in herbal medicine from reading old books we have around the house. This led her, homeschooling at the age of 14, to study Latin, so she could understand the names of the plants, taxonomy so she could understand their classifications, botany so she could understand how they grew and formed healing compounds, and a whole spectrum of studies in human medicine from anatomy to physiology so she could understand their effects.

“Dad, what’s a diuretic, and, if it’s what I think it is, how do the kidneys effect blood pressure?” was one morning’s question, followed an hour later by, “Dad, what’s the active alkaloid in Uva Ursi?” A year earlier she didn’t know what the word alkaloid” meant: she learned more, in a variety of disciplines, in her first year outside of school than she had in the previous two years of public schools, and it’s all because she wanted to learn these things. Today, she’s a physician’s assistant (PA) specializing in addiction.

Many private schools and some innovative public schools are well-known for working with students to devise their own curriculum. The bottom line is that when kids want to learn something, you can’t stop them. So the emphasis in our schools should shift from trying to force education on children to inspiring them to want it.

— Student empowerment in the classroom. Most public-school classrooms are mini-autocracies. As such, they alienate the students from the teachers and vice-versa. At Horizon School in Atlanta, the public schools of Taiwan, and other private, alternative schools, the students help in defining the rules of classroom behavior, and there’s far more emphasis on learning than on behaving. As a result, learning happens.

— Recognize good teachers and pay them appropriately, while weeding out the dead wood. When we begin to pay teachers the salaries we pay corporate executives, we’ll begin producing students capable of becoming corporate executives.

— Break down the mandatory structures of education to open more alternatives. Homeschooling, alternative schools, local community schools, Charter schools, and one-room schools all are viable alternatives to public education, but they’re often fought by political power structures. Most important, because most parents can’t afford or don’t have the time for private schools or homeschooling, let’s replace the hysteria around banning books and trashing public school teachers with a solid committment to supporting them in innovation and excellence.

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Historically, whenever there has been social or economic chaos, it’s been accompanied by the rise of authoritarian leadership and institutions.

Hitler rose in Germany out of the ashes of that nation’s defeat in World War I and the Great Depression. Mao Tze Tsung came to power in China after decades of weak government and the near-defeat of the Chinese by the Japanese war machine. Stalin responded to the uncertainty of the Russian people after the Russian Civil War and the flu pandemic, and his message struck a responsive chord.

As Iran stumbled back from the cultural upheavals and violent repression of the ’60s under the CIA-installed and supported Shah, a demand for religious fundamentalism brought a theocratic government to power, as has happened in many other countries.

Even here in the United States, we can see how times of uncertainty bring to the fore the shrill voices of those who would offer simple—and extreme—solutions to complex social, political, and economic problems.

So, too, the proliferation of the ADHD diagnosis may reflect this trend on two levels: the search for simple answers to the complexities of human nature, and the desire of increasingly authoritarian institutions to modify “out of the norm” behavior.

Dr. Timothy Engelmann, who directs the Adult ADHD clinic at Philhaven Behavioral Healthcare Services in Pennsylvania, recently emailed these observations to me:

“Part of the problem consists on a social-cultural level. Our society, as you point out in your Hunter’s book, is becoming more rigidly rooted in the structuring of experience. Problems arise from rigid structuring. People vary in their ability to conform to this way of life, especially the ADHD person, who in repeated failures to respond to such structuring becomes labeled as ‘disordered.’

“More disturbing, however, is that such structuring can be used as forms of social influence, which I believe limits the very nature of who we are as people.”

Here we have in ADHD a very complex set of behaviors and perceptions, encompassing a wide range of human experience. ADHD is felt and expressed in dramatically different fashions from individual to individual.

Yet, like the call for flat taxes or balanced budgets or family values or organic food (all simplistic “solutions” to complex issues), the ADHD diagnosis is viewed by many individuals and professionals as a sort of all-encompassing, cast-in-concrete certainty.

“People with ADHD are more likely to...” is a phrase I’ve heard come from the mouths of dozens of professionals in the ADHD industry, usually from a lectern. The sentence is finished with a wide variety of things, from “be in trouble with the law” to “have more car accidents” to “be promiscuous” to “fail in school.” Rarely is it: “Be more creative,” “be more interesting,” “have more friends,” “experience life in an uniquely rich way,” or any other positive.

By having a nice, predictable box we can put people into, we seem to have resolved something. Labeling, in our society, often seems the same as fixing: but it’s not, of course.

Dr. Englemann points out:

“As social control becomes more pressing, the ADHD way of life actually becomes not only an asset, but an antidote to such limiting of experience.”

But still, as society becomes more rigid, the search for nice little explain-all categories will continue and intensify. From the political arena, where a person can be dismissed with the wave of a hand and an, “Oh, he’s a liberal,” or “She’s a conservative,” to the social “I’m a Gen-X-er,” to the technical “It’s an M1 machine,” one-word labels seem to be the order of the day.

Similarly, as institutions come under attack from those who respond to the complex problems of society with simple answers, those institutions will become more rigid themselves, and therefore more prone to quick labeling and instant dismissal of individuals.

When “permissive” schools, for example, are attacked by politicians as the cause of a host of social ills, the schools react by becoming less “permissive.” They’ll reactively categorize, label, and cram into consistent little slots as many children as they can. The end result will be (and is) an epidemic of diagnoses of ADHD, oppositional-defiant disorder, etc.

As our institutions and culture become increasingly pressured and fractured, many will respond by trying to find simple, one-word, quick-fix, easy-label answers. ADHD is none of those, of course, but in the wrong hands it often has become exactly what such zealots would want.

Beware the overfocused Farmers who want to set the rules and define the game!

Psychotherapist William J. Ronan of Minneapolis shared with me his “Farmer’s Traits as a Disorder” paper:

The salient aspects of Farmers:

1. Unable to think tangentially. Tunnel vision. Miss subtle tangential environmental clues. Sees things as they have been told. Vigilant as in “vigilante.”

2. Unable to remove nose from the grind stone, ending up with a smaller nose while having missed much of life’s potential tangential inputs and experiences. Person is left singing, “Is That All There Is?”

3. Militaristic, rigid, inflexible. Possess no innate moral code. All morality is taught by and determined by external force. Does what s/he is told.

4. Loves monotony. Is able to take pride in marching in fours to the strains of a band.

5. Process oriented: results are secondary. Believes in doing tasks the proper way, even if the “proper way” does not produce optimal results.

6. Can he easily led by illusionary goals. Believes in what they are told, regarding religious, political doctrine, repressed memories (false memory syndrome), etc., even when there is no objective support for the position. Calls gullibility and delusions “faith.” Thinks of learning as memorization, and reasoning as “the devil’s workshop.”

7. Conformist, obedient to authority (see experiments performed by Stanley Milgram in 1963 when students were ordered to give shocks to other students). This is the group that Hitler aimed his political persuasion at in order to win his elections. Perfect choice for mob psychology.

8. Able to attend to small details while the larger picture is left unattended. May take pride in “getting the gas to Auschwitz on time, ” while either unwilling or unable to understand the larger implications. As a young male can easily be led to go halfway around the world and to kill people he doesn’t know, for reasons he doesn’t understand, philosophies he has never read, and economic theories of which nobody is certain. He will do this with extreme certainty because he was told to do so by “a person in authority. ”

9. Self-centered, within the context of group acceptance. Unable to take social risks. Will not say no to a social movement if it is perceived that this is what everybody else thinks. The Farmer is a person easily manipulated by society, and therefore valued by those elements in control of society.

10. Will easily adopt group ideology and abandon his/her own. Easily taken in by witch burning, McCarthyism, “Dittoheadism, ” and other similar social, political, and religious movements.

I wouldn’t go so far as to demonize Farmers, but the contrasts he provides — or the diagnostic criteria, were society to consider “overfocusing syndrome” to be a pathology — is fascinating food for thought.

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Last week, a caller into my radio/TV show mentioned a teaching technique pioneered in the 1970s by Professor Elliot Aronson called the Jigsaw Classroom.

Aronson developed it when the Austin, Texas schools were first racially integrated during that era as a way of reducing competitive pressures and bringing kids together who came from diverse backgrounds that had, in many cases, historically been in conflict with each other.

With this technique, students in the classroom are broken up into five or six groups of a half-dozen or so students each and a large topic (like “World War II”) is broken into five or six sub-topics (“Rise of Hitler,” “Treaty of Versailles,” “Invasion of Poland,” “Pearl Harbor,” “D-Day”).

Each one of those sub-topics is assigned to each one of the kids in the group, and their job is to collaborate with students from other groups who have the same sub-topic assignment to develop a report to bring back to the group. At the end of the exercise, each student presents his or her sub-topic to the group, so the entire group is filled in on the larger topic.

This is a rather clumsy description of the Jigsaw system — I encourage you to check out the Jigsaw Classroom website for a deeper explanation — but the bottom line is to encourage, or even require through the structure of the system, collaboration between the kids to break down the walls of distrust and miscommunication.

But, for Hunter kids, it would also raise the classroom from a boring, dreary, dreadful place into one filled with stimulation, movement, and talk!

Back in 1996 when I was traveling around the world speaking on ADHD, following TIME magazine publishing a major review of my Hunter in a Farmer’s World hypothesis, I came across an article in The Independent on June 6, 1996 by Fran Abrams that described Taiwan’s public schools as “anarchic.” I already knew their teachers are among the most high-paid and highly-regarded in the world: being a teacher in Taiwan is a super-high-status job and getting into teaching schools is very competitive.

A parents’ group in Taiwan had contacted me when that article came out, as well as one in Singapore, so Louise and I booked a flight to visit both countries to speak to these groups.

Our experience in Singapore was rough: I told the parents they should engage in the political process to demand better educational outcomes, and the police ransacked my hotel room in apparent retaliation. Political activism is largely forbidden in that country, as I wrote about in my book The Hidden History of Big Brother.

But Taiwan was a whole different thing. We were invited to visit a classroom, fourth or fifth grade equivalent, as I recall, and watched a truly brilliant teacher teach a class in a way that any Hunter child would love.

First, the teacher stood in front of the class and laid out the day’s lesson on the chalkboard. It was a math equation, as I recall. Then she asked the students to raise their hands if they fully understood it. Out of the 30 or so kids in the class, six or seven raised their hands.

The teacher then had those kids who understood the lesson stand up, and the rest of the class broke into little circular groups around each of the standing kids, so each standing child had their own little circle of students. The standing kids then taught their peers, and as the sitting (in the circles) kids figured out the lesson, they’d stand up and participate in the instruction. (The teacher floated around the class to help out.)

By the end of the hour every kid in the class knew the lesson and, most important from my point of view, nobody was bored.

Back when Horace Mann was designing our modern school systems, in the 1890s, the model he used was the factory. Each kid was an item on the assembly line, and each had to absorb a “standardized” lesson at the same time in the same way. With such a system, it just makes sense that Hunter kids would get lost and left behind, as most ADHD Hunters can testify from their school experience.

With innovative teaching methods like Jigsaw and what I saw in Taiwan, everybody — Hunter or Farmer — can thrive and the classroom becomes an exciting learning environment. Pass it on!