ADHD & Neurodiversity Is Not a Disorder: India’s Radical Respect for What America Loves to Pathologize
What the West brands as ADHD and hyperactivity, others revere as a sign of spiritual evolution...
“What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all.
How true that is.”
— Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking to the United Negro College Fund
ADHD is about the differences among humans. We and our children have different hair, eyes, body sizes, and different preferences in a thousand areas. Some of us prefer high levels of stimulation, while others like a more quiet world. Some are attracted to novelty and variety, whereas others are most comfortable with the consistent and predictable.
In these and many other ways, we aggregate differences which sometimes collect in such a way that we put a label on them, such as ADHD.
In India there appears to be a very different view of ADHD than what is conventional in the United States. During the monsoon season of 1993, the week of the Hyderabad earthquake, I took a 12-hour train ride halfway across the subcontinent to visit an obscure town near the Bay of Bengal.
In the train compartment with me were two Indian businessmen and a physician, and we had plenty of time to talk as the countryside flew by from sunrise to sunset.
Curious about how they viewed ADHD, I said, “Are you familiar with the personality type where people seem to crave stimulation but have a hard time staying with any one thing? They hop from career to career, and sometimes even from relationship to relationship, and never seem to settle down to one thing?”
“Ah, we know this type well,” one of the men said, the other two nodding in agreement.
“What do you call it?” I asked.
“Very holy,” he said. “These are old souls, near the end of their karmic cycle.” Again the other two nodded agreement, perhaps a bit more vigorously in response to my startled look.
“Old souls?” I said, thinking that a very odd description for what we call a disorder.
“Yes,” the physician said, taking his turn in the conversation. “In our religion, we believe that the purpose of reincarnation is to eventually free oneself from worldly entanglement and desire. In each lifetime we experience certain lessons, until finally we are free of this earth and can merge into the oneness of what you would call God. When a soul is very close to the end of those thousands of incarnations, he must take a few lifetimes and do many, many things, to clean up the little threads left over from his previous lifetimes.”
“This is a man very close to becoming enlightened,” the first businessman added. “We have great respect for such individuals, although their lives may be difficult.”
The other businessman raised a finger and interjected: “But it is the difficulties of such lives that purify the soul.” The others nodded agreement.
“In America we consider this a psychiatric disorder,” I said. All three looked startled, then laughed.
“In America, you consider our most holy men, our yogis and swamis to be crazy people too; we have great respect for such individuals,” said the physician with a touch of sadness in his voice. “We live in different cultures, different worlds.”
Amen. And happy Thanksgiving! :)
This is a response to your prior post on gratitude.
I have been finding it difficult to be thankful, and it goes back to before the election. I went on a news strike for a couple of weeks after that dark day. Now it is time to pull my head out of the sand and move forward. That involves not keeping my damn mouth shut.
If I have something to be grateful for it is commencing my seventieth trip around the sun with my mental facilities intact. Grateful for the ability to string words together in an order that is cogent. I am grateful for an above average vocabulary.
I have just now returned from this morning’s local Turkey Trot. I rode my bicycle and took it on public transit. I was very annoyed, as always, at the token fare charged to ride local light rail. I am grateful that it exists and greatly increases the range of my human powered bike. It exists because of socialism. The token fares do not come close to paying the cost of it. I believe those fares should just be eliminated. They are insignificant to those of us who have the means to pay the measly amount, discriminatory to the poorest among us, and hamper the on time performance of buses. Bus drivers should not have fare enforcement as part of their job description.
I carry dollar coins and sit near the front of busses and have paid fares for homeless people. I am grateful that I am not homeless. I am troubled by many in our society who put the entire blame for homelessness entirely on the homeless themselves. I put it on the growing disparity of wealth in this country, and a cadre of private astronauts who are loathe to drop a dollar to help, the ingrates.
I do not expect gratitude for my minor acts of generosity. It is often given, but I don’t judge if it isn’t
The beneficiaries of that socialism, besides the environmental benefit, are largely the capitalists behind the fast food and retail industries who find it more cost effective than paying workers enough to afford private transportation.
Socialized public transit is a mixed blessing. People should use it, even if they have access to private transportation. It is not very convenient for most people for reasons that will be explained below.
I am grateful for a young woman from Sweden who gallantly tried to bring the environmental challenges that hers and later generations will face. Now retired I am formulating a plan to carry on her work. I am grateful for having the economic benefits bestowed on many of us of the “boomer” generation. That is also a mixed blessing. I am guilty of much of the carbon footprint that has brought us to this point. I am grateful for medical science, without which I would no longer be among the living and able to travel by bicycle.
I should have known better. I did know better. I was constrained by, and something of a willing participant in, an industrial culture that makes living “off the grid” impractical for most people. It is still impractical for most. Here in the western part of the United States most of the larger cities grew up with the automobile, and were built accordingly. Effective public transit is more difficult to implement in such an environment. I am grateful that I can make it work better for me by incorporating a bicycle into it
Consider a tale of two cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Thanks to the Gold Rush of 1849, the 1850’s saw it grow to a metropolis of half a million people constrained to a sea bound peninsula long before the arrival of the automobile. Los Angeles was a fairly small town. There were under a hundred thousand people in the entire four thousand square miles of the county when the movie industry arrived shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, fleeing the grip of Edison who was attempting to monopolize the industry back east. The automobile arrived at about the same time, and the city and county sprawled. The same thing happened in San Diego County, where I live, when it boomed with the start of the second world war.
Public transit serves the public better when the population densities are higher. I am grateful for platforms like Substack where I can present my thoughts. I would be more grateful if I had a larger audience. I am working on that.
In Native American culture there is the "heyoka," a holy crazy person. Anyway, I have a memory from childhood of a woman reading my little palms by the swimming pool at UC Berkeley family camp (not a hippie marijuana den!) and designating me an "old soul" who didn't need to do any more parenting, for one thing. Question is, was the suggestion powerful enough, or was it my existential status, that I never had the slightest interest in reproducing. I'll never know, but now I certainly do not regret that I have no posterity. Especially female. Sad.