ADHD: Our Culture is Increasingly Intolerant of “Different” People

One solution to this round-peg/square-hole problem is for people to abandon their efforts to force themselves into society’s neat little niches and instead embrace their differences...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

“The ae half of the world thinks thither daft.”
— Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet

When we moved to rural New Hampshire in 1978, we were assured that we’d soon be accepted by the locals. “It’ll only take twenty or thirty years for them to consider you one of us,” the local chief of police told me. “Until then, though, you’re an outsider. And that’s about as close to ‘the enemy’ as one can be.”

I then lived in Atlanta, and the people with a southern accent looked down on the “carpetbaggers” from the north, while the transplants from other parts of the country tended to react to a southern twang as a sign of stupidity or lack of culture. There’s even a school in Atlanta which does nothing but teach southerners how to speak without their accent.

But this just scratches the surface.

Not only are people different in the ways they speak and the general lifestyles they find comfortable, they’re also different in the way they think, the way their minds are organized. One of the most articulate spokespeople for those with brains that are “unconventionally organized” is Judith Kolberg, an Atlanta professional organizer. She teaches seminars, does consulting, and even publishes tapes and booklets on her systems.

In one of her tapes, she points out that most people think of filing as linear, sequential, and hierarchical. Things are put in folders according to nouns—their categories—and are then sub¬filed according to their sub-categories.

This works fine for people who are linear thinkers, points out Kolberg, but it does nothing at all for Hunters whose minds don’t operate in this linear, hierarchical fashion. So she’s developed a radical new system for filing: use verbs! In one of her systems, file folders might be labeled “Call,” or “Write Back,” or “Copy,” or “Pay.”

She also notes that some people respond best to organizational systems based on feelings, instead of categories or actions. For those people, files may be labeled, “Worry About This,” “Deal with this later,” or “Stay out of jail” (where one client filed his IRS and child-support stuff).

What Kolberg has pinpointed is that not everyone’s brains work alike. “These types of alternative filing systems are particularly useful for my clients who’ve been diagnosed with ADHD,” says, further demonstrating the differences between how people think.

The problem is that society, office, jobs, and schools are all geared toward linear, hierarchical systems— devised years ago by logical, white, middle-class, left-brain men. But when people with differently-organized brains try to use these systems, they inevitably have problems.

Bosses, teachers, and even spouses are often brutally intolerant of non-normal thinking, behaving, and learning styles. When people with different thinking styles are forced to do things in the conventional way, they fail—and that failure is then pointed to with an “ah, ha!” as proof that the person has some sort of a disorder.

The simple fact, though, is that everybody is different in one way or another, both on the outside and the inside. Yet we often have cruel labels for these differences.

Historically, in our male-dominated society, a woman who has a lower sex drive than her husband is called “frigid”; a person who prefers relationships with others of his or her own gender is “homosexual,” and denigrating epithets like f*g or queer are thrown like stones; minorities are the n-word, ch*nks, w*ps, h*mies, sp*cs, and the like; and even kids with ADHD are often singled out in school by their peers and referred to derisively as “ADHDers,” or “hypers.”

The “new right” has managed to make FDR’s old badge of pride, Liberal, into a curse word, while those on the left often refer to conservatives as neocons or Nazis. Political demagogues love to use the word “them” in speeches to whip up the crowd, implying that some people out there are insidiously different from “us.”

Given all this, it’s small wonder that, in the search to find those who are different, children and adults who think or behave in unconventional ways would be labeled “disordered.” After all, they’re not “normal,” are they? Of course, neither were those who disagreed with Hitler or Stalin or Joe McCarthy.

There’s probably a good and healthy underlying cause for all this dysfunction. A few thousand years ago, virtually all humans lived tribally, and people within a tribe were genetically similar. Because they shared a strong common ancestry, they looked and even acted in similar fashion. When another tribe came along, it usually wasn’t to make friends but to steal resources, food, land, women, money, etc.. So people built castles, formed governments and armies, and developed an instinctive wariness of anybody who wasn’t similar to themselves.

So it may be that some of the explosion of ADHD diagnoses we’re seeing is the simple result of the normal and human instinct to look for, be wary of, or even suppress, enslave, and disempower “them.”

Judith Kolberg offers a number of brilliant and useful solutions to this situation with her “radical” organizing systems.

Thomas Edison found he was most creative when waking up from a short nap. Instead of sleeping through the night in a bed he often cat-napped on a couch with a few marbles in his hand, hanging off the edge of the sofa. When he finally dozed off, the marbles would fall from his hand into a pie-pan, creating a clatter that would awaken him into what he considered his most creative and insightful state.

John Kennedy hated desks and did his best and most creative writing in the White House sprawled on the floor with his feet on a couch and a legal pad on his chest.

One solution to this round-peg/square-hole problem is for people to abandon their efforts to force themselves into society’s neat little niches. Feel free to seek your own creative, unconventional, but functional solutions!

Another solution is for all of us, as a society, to become more tolerant of individual differences. Tell the demagogues and diagnosticians who would cast huge segments of humanity as ill and disordered that they should first look at the beams in their own eyes.