With this text I am referring to an article by the author Moritz Hackl, who wrote – primarily – about prominent people with ADHD. The article can be read at: faz.net/adhs. As the mother of a child with this disease, I don’t want to leave the article unchallenged.
Although the author doesn’t write about children, but about adults, his comments show that he doesn’t know much about ADHD; In my opinion, they therefore do not apply to children or adults. He argues that the ADHD diagnosis is used by some celebrities as an excuse not to “work on themselves” or to fend off criticism by saying that’s just how they are. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide any quotes or evidence that you could use to form your own picture.
What’s worse, however, is that he insinuates that ADHD has something to do with fears of the future, climate change, terrorist attacks, incorrect upbringing, an insecure self-image or simply a personal unwillingness to deal with oneself in depth.
People with undiagnosed ADHD experience being questioned
In doing so, the author places the responsibility for this illness on the sufferers themselves – and repeats what people with unrecognized ADHD constantly experience anyway: they are questioned, admonished, criticized and rejected. Because they are tiring. They stop talking, are mentally and physically erratic, impatient, impulsive and tense, talk endlessly and constantly about something else (if you want to describe it through the eyes of an uninvolved, unloving outsider; the many wonderful sides of “ADHD” Personality” I can happily list elsewhere).
“Just pull yourself together, concentrate, don’t interrupt, and why can’t you remember that” – these are sentences that children with undiagnosed ADHD hear from an early age. Our son, intelligence quotient 129, said when he was diagnosed at the age of 13: “And I thought I was stupid.” At that time, he had already had a year of psychotherapy behind him without the basic problem having changed. Only the diagnosis and subsequent medication brought a change. Since then he has been able to concentrate better and is somewhat happy going to school again, but other symptoms remain, the restlessness and physical tension.
This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
But where would be the need to “illuminate the shady spots within yourself” and “deal with the uncontrollable, irrational and frightening within yourself” that author Hackl recommends to ADHD patients? A psychoanalyst in the article advises asking yourself how you became the person you are. I can’t settle the argument about how much of ADHD is neurological and how much is socially induced, but my answer from personal experience is: by being born that way. Our son was described as restless and easily distracted at daycare and elementary school, and this was evident in all the reports, without anyone ever having the idea that it could be due to an illness – which, by the way, it was – probably because of his good grades speaks against the thesis of the “trendy diagnosis of ADHD”; rather, it is itself a fashion theory.
An ADHD diagnosis means a change for everyone
An ADHD diagnosis means less for the person affected than for those around them that they have to adjust and adapt their behavior. You can’t just feed a child with ADHD random information while they’re busy doing something else. They then simply rush through the child without getting stuck somewhere in this brain with filtering difficulties. Such a child needs more breaks and exercise. You have to admonish and educate him, but you have to do it very kindly and you shouldn’t necessarily expect that it will work better next time. You have to build your self-confidence instead of constantly tearing it down through criticism. These children are offered concentration and self-management courses on how to organize and structure themselves. Parents receive advice if everything goes well. We as a family have been in family therapy for almost a year. That changed a lot, but the ADHD didn’t go away. Because it can’t do that at all.
For adults who receive an ADHD diagnosis late in life, it’s basically the same thing, only their suffering doesn’t last years, but decades. There may be some who are so relieved about the diagnosis that they actually no longer want to justify their behavior. The reports I read about it, including in this newspaper, show a great need to explain why they behave the way they do and what difficulties this has gotten them into in their lives. This is pain, not stubbornness.
Moritz Hackl Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 25 Sebastian Eder Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 51 Katharina Roos Published/Updated: ,
One more word about the medications: They only work if you actually have ADHD. Other types of difficulty concentrating, for example due to intensive cell phone use, are not affected by this. If you forget them in the morning, you will notice it in the afternoon at the latest, then no more vocabulary will enter your little head. Before his soccer training in the evening, our son sometimes takes a small extra dose, and on weekends he sometimes skips the medication so that he can eat with appetite again. I admire him for that.