ADHD & the Collapse of the Middle Class

Long-term stress can produce measurable and definable changes in the body and brain, and those changes may become permanent over time.

Image by Artur Skoniecki from Pixabay

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
— Pope, Dunciad

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.