When Labels Cut Deeper than the Difference: The Story of Bill

The shocking impact of labels and how they’ve changed—or haven’t.

It’s true that labels are often useful, and there are very good reasons why we use them, both as individuals and as a society. At other times they can be insidious and destructive. It’s im­portant that we first have an overview, a broad look at what labels are, how they come to be applied, and the impact they can have.

For example, I have a friend, who prefers to remain anony­mous so I’ll call him Bill, who has a hereditary brain differ­ence from normal people. He first learned about this when he was a very young child.

Bill’s about a decade older than me, in his eighties now, and lives in retirement with his brain abnormality. There is no drug for his condition, and although numerous types of drugs, brain surgery and electroshock treatments have been tried on others over the years to correct his type of abnormal­ity, none has ever worked.

Many thousands of people were left dead or mental vegetables as a result of such experiments over the past thirty centuries. If you were to perform a PET, SPECT, or MRI scan on Bill’s brain, you would find that it is organized and wired differently than my brain or that of the vast major­ity of humanity. Odds are his brain is different from yours.

This difference is not only obvious on a medical scan, it’s also obvious to anybody who spends ten minutes with Bill and observes his behavior.

Bill’s brain abnormality was apparent to his teachers when he was a child. Recognizing his brain abnormality as some­thing which would cause Bill problems in later life, his teach­ers did their best to try to get him to rewire his brain, or at least to perform as if he didn’t have this brain difference.

“They really had my best interests at heart,” he told me. “They knew that the whole world is set up for people like you and not people like me, and even though it seemed to me at the time that they were brutalizing me and singling me out and ridiculing me for my difference, I know now that they were just trying to help me fit in and be a bit more normal. It was very painful as a child, however, to be identified as being so different just be­cause I was left-handed.”

Bill is lucky that he was born in the twentieth century.

Five hundred years ago, if he’d allowed people to learn of his difference, the leaders of the Catholic Church or any of sev­eral countries they controlled the governments of could have declared him an apostate, heretic, demon, agent of Satan, devil, or witch, and he could have been put to death. At the very least, he may have been subjected to torture or exorcism, and ostracized from both the church and the professions.

People of that era and before who shared Bill’s brain abnormality often went to great lengths to hide from everybody but their par­ents the fact of their difference, and there are records of par­ents and physicians in medieval Europe who put young chil­dren to death when it was determined that they were left-handed.

As it was, the worst thing that happened to Bill was that in the first few years of school his teachers tied his left arm to his body so he couldn’t use it. In later years, when he’d reach for things with his left hand, the nuns who were the teachers in the school he attended would painfully slap his hand with a yardstick or ruler, or shout across the room at him, startling and humiliating him enough to quickly switch to his right hand.

“Being left handed is no longer a crime or a sign of de­monic possession,” Bill told me a few years ago. “It’s not even any longer assumed that it means you’re gay. Now it’s just a major inconvenience. I suppose I should be grateful for that.”

Grateful, indeed.

Where the Wounding Occurs

Most people who grew up with ADHD and count themselves among the walking wounded will tell you that their wounds came not from the ADHD itself (unlike the tormented paranoid schizophrenic or the chronic depressive), but instead, like the left-handed person, from the response of the world around them to their ADHD.

Only other people with ADD understand them and the way they think and live their lives. Their disorganiza­tion or messiness or distractability is seen by their boss or spouse or teachers as enemy behaviors, symptoms of moral or mental weakness or sloth. Their craving for new experience and excitement is seen as an inability to make a commitment, a fail­ure of will, an emotional weakness, or an unreliability in a world dependent upon the predictable and reliable to work properly.

The wounding of most children with ADHD happens, then, not from within, but from without. It’s the world around them which inflicts its judgements and criticisms, just as it once did to left-handed people, and when those judgements include words like “bad, lazy, stupid, crazy, dysfunctional, defective, or disordered” then the wounding can cut very, very deep.

In this regard, even the labeling of a person with the term “Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder” is a form of wounding. It’s an instant stigma.

Few could imagine it being a pleasant experience to stand up among friends and peers to say, “I am the per­son here with a deficit,” or, “I’m the disordered one among this group.”

Even if there hasn’t been a formal diagnosis, the child with what we now call ADHD probably knows he or she is different from “normal” people: it’s been a darkly kept secret in the lives of many ADHD adults.

As is true of many people who are visible in this field, I’ve had many friends and relatives call up after reading my or others’ books to say, “I always thought I was the only one like this in the world; I always hid it as much as I could.” And many choose to continue to hide it.

My goal with this Hunter in a Farmer’s World website is to help those folks to realize they’re not necessarily “disordered” but, rather, merely different. And that there can be considerable benefits to that difference.

Pass it along…