ADHD

This isn’t merely nostalgia for childhood, warmer summers, or better music. After much reflection, it’s really about the lack of distractions.

Author, Douglas Coupland spoke about his book Girlfriend in a Coma, describing his Gen X childhood. When he was a kid, he wondered what it would be like to be in a coma for a year. That way, when he woke up, he wouldn’t have to wait for that next album release, the next season of his favourite TV show, or film, or book, or whatever. He could access it all at once in one day. Being also Gen X, this makes sense to me.

But today, every day is like waking up from a coma. The sheer volume of information that is available to us every morning is staggering. And most of that information is presented to us in a manner designed to steal focus. Clickbait, that eye-catching headline, yet another imaginary Menckenian hobgoblin that politicians or activists want us to be afraid of, social media posts, new music, new recipes, instructions, directions, obligations, invitations, warnings, and so on, and so on.

Bleeps, notifications, alerts – designed, with much research, to demand as much attention as a crying baby. A sound that cannot be ignored. Aural tyranny.

In 1974, it was chimes – and they were not common. Phones rang, yes. But it was the organic sound of literally a bell. (Yes, I know, a trimphone… but few had one). Perhaps your oven timer or microwave also had a bell. And there were doorbells, and people called round much more than they ever do now. It is hard to ignore a bell. A physical bell, though, is an invitation, a reminder, a recommendation, far more than it is a demand.

And bells are fixed in place, you can avoid them.

A train journey meant your brain wasn’t being jerked about by someone’s phone notifications. You weren’t dodging phone zombies in the street. Written notifications came by letter twice a day. There were 3 channels on the TV, but BBC2 was rarely something anyone wanted to watch – so really, 2 and a bit channels.

No, I’m not a luddite. I am a fan of progress, whilst I loved the graphic design process of drawing board, letraset, type gauges, ordering typesetting, compasses, and pantone markers… laying out a page took a day, not an hour in Illustrator or inDesign. And I would not be communicating to you without that progress too. In 1974, I’d have to self publish a fanzine, or similar, to do this, and that would be expensive as well as take 20 times longer.

But for a rest, just now and then, it would be nice to go home.

ADHD: it’s an acronym that I type frequently. It’s an acronym that I write with a pen or pencil frequently. If you have ADHD, you probably do too.

You may have noticed that it is a particularly unpleasant combination of letters; both to type, and to write. Perhaps it’s the other letter intervening between repeated “D”. ADD for example, is far easier to type, or write.

A dedicated ADHD key would make my life so much easier.

Of course, I am aware that there is likely to be a number of ways that I can assign a keyboard shortcut to that letter combination. Likely, also, it would take less time to do this than it would to write this post – just routine housekeeping. But ADHD means I’ll never do that. Ever. My brain simply will not go there.

The issue, however, is not the acronym. It is what that acronym stands for. I will not repeat the many and oh so very obvious reasons why the label Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is nonsense. Everyone with ADHD already knows all about that. 

Medical folks have some history with misnomers – take the common cold, for example. A disease that makes you hot, and isn’t confined to cold seasons. 

Naming things, any thing, is very challenging. So, one can have some sympathy for someone who gets a name a bit wrong. However, ADHD is so obviously, wildly wrong. So wrong, in fact, that its name alone actually promotes misunderstandings and prejudice about the condition. It’s akin to Orca being called Killer Whale.

One can only hope that one of the topics up for discussion at next March’s 10th World Congress on ADHD in Prague, is the very name of the condition itself.

Yes, changing the name and the acronym will result in everyone having to run “find and replace” in an enormous number of documents.

But, this may well be a routine housekeeping task that people with ADHD will be very willing to do. 

That may be a price worth paying.