No ADHD?

Via Vox Day:

A doctor with more than 50 years of medical practice asserts that ADHD is an umbrella of symptoms, not a disease in itself. And he also declares that the treatment can be considerably worse than many of the underlying causes.

They're on the right track here. It seems clear that something is wrong around the prevalence of ADD and ADHD. Arguments have been made that the diagnosis is medicalizing boy behavior in an increasingly femininized world. Day's source has an example in which the misbehavior was due to a nutritional deficit.

Day himself has this theory:

One boy with a supposed case of it was magically cured and never had any trouble controlling his behavior around me after I picked him up by the throat and told him that if he ever kicked me again, I'd rip his balls off and feed them to him.

All of these focus on acting-out behavior--kids who don't follow directions and are disruptive. That's certainly a sign of ADD but it doesn't mean that the child has ADD.

I'm a typical Internet ADD patient--self-diagnosed, so I don't offer myself as an expert or Certified Victim, but here's my perspective:

I think we'd all be better off thinking of ADD as an alternative cognitive strategy. That is, the minds of people with ADD work slightly differently than those without it. It's similar to how some people learn visually while others learn kinesthetically, etc.

Adam Dachis wrote a piece for Lifehacker in which he shares what he thinks are ADD-friendly tips for being a good listener. In fact, he's explaining ADD coping mechanisms.

When you can't pay attention like everyone else, you wind up getting bits and pieces of sentences. Fortunately, most people follow similar speech patterns and say a lot of the same things. The more you get to know someone, the more you can easily fill in the blanks and guess what they've said.

Most of the time I hear the beginning of a sentence, but things start to break up from there. For example: 

So did you want to ____ Mexican _____ _______ _______, or ___ ___ _____ __ ________ ___ __________ new for once? 

I blanked out most of that sentence, but kept in the parts that are easy to hear even if you can't pay attention for five seconds. Generally speaking, I'll hear the first part of the sentence, anything coming after a pause (e.g. or/and), and a few words at the end. There isn't much information, but I bet you can tell from tiny pieces what's happening in this example.

Dachis tells us to use context clues and our knowledge of the other person to figure out what is said. The thing is, most of us have been doing that our whole lives.

ADD isn't necessarily having a short attention span; in fact, "hyperfocus" is one of the symptoms. ADD is more a low tolerance for old information. Too many space-filler phrases in a conversation and one starts looking at the person's nostril hair or thinking about something that's actually interesting. ADD is about uncontrollable attention, not lack of it.

That's why I always say that ADD means that sometimes you have to take the long way. For example, I've tried to read the Monarch Mind Control book I'm outlining many times before. Each time, I've gotten bogged down in the long block paragraphs detailing brain chemicals and secret airstrip locations. But by breaking it down into chapters, skimming it then reading it to make notes then going over it again to write about it, I've been able to get a handle on the information. The issue hasn't been that I'm uninterested in the subject but that the format is at odds with my cognitive strategies. The block text in particular is a real obstacle; the sight of it puts my brain into first gear.

The reason why I have no compunction about announcing my self-diagnosis is that being certified by a doctor is irrelevant to me. Not because I'm so sure I'm right but because my life and productivity improved once I started thinking that I had it. I adopted ADD-centered approaches to what I wanted to accomplish, knowing that I had a tendency to get bored and find something else more immediately exciting. I learned how to manage distraction and how to break down tasks, among other things. It allowed me to think, "Oh, this is my problem and it will always be a problem. I'd better figure out a workaround." Thinking of myself as someone with ADD--and thus someone who has to make adjustments for the way my mind works--has improved my life greatly.

The lesser reason why I don't mind saying "self-diagnosed," like the proverbial basement-dweller is that I did attempt to see a doctor about it.

I called a local psychiatrist who specialized in ADD. I had no insurance and wanted to get an idea of how much I'd be spending to get the Official Stamp. The doctor asked me, "What makes you think you have ADD?"

I answered, "Well, I've had eight jobs in the past two years and it took me nine years to get my bachelor's degree."

"Yeah, maybe you'd better come in."

And, of course, I didn't go. I just never got around to it.

How to See Real Magic

This is as much as what Tumblrites call a "signal boost" as it is a commentary. I'm really enjoying Henry Dampier's Quick Reactions blog. He's approaching neoreactionary thought in a similar manner as myself, with an eye towards the moral and the non-rational.

From his post, Magic: More Real Than You Think:

If magic is a way of perceiving the world, then it may be more ‘real’ than the enlightenment-rationalist method of pretending as if the many things that we don’t understand accord to natural laws that we only pretend to be familiar with.

I didn't realize it at the time but Chesterton's Orthodoxy had a profound effect on me. On the first reading, I recognized the feeling of searching the world for a philosophy that made sense to me and then arriving upon the Christianity I was raised with. The rest made sense only on the surface.

The second reading jimmied some cracks in my mind. Chesterton presents the point that faith allows us to see the world as being as magical as it is. It took some time for it to sink in.

I was already down that path. I realized that the best way to approach the world is to picture oneself smaller and smaller within it--that is, that the world was getting increasingly bigger around me.

It started as a response to the artistic-types with whom I had surrounded myself. Most of them came from comfortable backgrounds and the rest had recklessly charged into the world, unconcerned with consequences--they had experiences that I envied. But as I heard them talk, I realized that their experiences were badges that they wore, not events that shaped and changed them.

I can explain it this way:  I imagine myself and the individuals I envied sitting in a Roman piazza, sipping espresso. My eyes would be wide, trying to take everything in, trying to imagine it hundreds of years before, trying to incorporate all the historical figures who'd been there, trying to understand the architecture, the people, the atmosphere and my reaction to it. I'd be a tiny child on an enormous playground. The people I met--who had been able to make these kinds of trips--sat there thinking, basically, "Hey, check me out. It's me, in Rome."

(Lest you think that I'm just guessing at my reaction, I was lucky enough to travel to India for a couple of months at the end of the last century. This is an accurate description of how I felt, with the addition that everything was a mystery to me, having no grounding in Indian history.)

But the entire world is this way, even the path from your door to your car. I wrote a bit in this direction in my piece about polyamory. Traditional marriage is one of those magical phenomena in the world. Even the concept--it's a human discovery rather than a human invention. It seems to exist in our collective psyches without anyone making it up; after all, nearly every culture has some variation on the union.

Our world is filled with these. The novel, for example--was it invented? Or is it an outgrowth of our natures, a knotting of language, imagination, our need for narrative and our ability to manage complexity? Wasn't it inevitable, not the creation of one individual but a diamond that only needed to be unearthed?

When one looks at the world with an understanding that it is more strange and wonderful and complicated than you can know, that it all exists outside of you, when one understands that there are dynamics at play of which one only sees shadows--well, it's a lot happier place to be.

That's why the post-Enlightenment, pseudo-rationalist progressive worldview is repugnant. It's not a matter of maintaining ignorance, like one burning astronomy books because one wants to believe that stars are the candles of angels, but a matter of knowing that our struggle to understand is like emptying the ocean with a teacup. The progressive tells us that the ocean is only an inch deep and a mammoth teacup will be here any day.

Take, again, Diana Adams' relationship philosophy. Her perspective was that humans have some finite number of needs/desires that need to be checked off to become happy or satisfied. Her particular set of needs could not be satisfied in a relationship with one partner, so she expanded.

Adams and her Yale-educated brain were bigger than the human phenomenon of relationships--she could map and diagram all the gears and controls and engineer a relationship(s) that fulfilled her needs.

That's not what relationships are and that's not how the world works. So much is unknowable--and if we do learn something, you can bet that there's another mystery right behind it.

Western Civilization has struggled with male-female relationships its entire existence--Adams and her comrades believe that the problem is that there weren't clear rules. Not only that, they believe that clear rules are possible and that they will cover every eventuality. I say that's madness.

Tradition, not speculative logic, is the method of handling the mysteries of the world. We can map the path through the forest, but only once we've gotten through it.

Improving the Rabble Through Education

When I first moved back to my home town, I took a comfortable little apartment downtown. It satisfied what I loved about city living--I could walk to work, the grocery store and the bank--and added a little extra:  I finally had a balcony.

A balcony, more or less. In actuality, it was the roof where the first floor extended beyond the second. It allowed me to tickle the child inside by entering and exiting by way of my bedroom window and gave me a private place to smoke.

It had a perfect view into the courtyard of my town's most downscale bar. Charming, in its way. Always dark inside, it rented rooms to itinerants and was closed only when state law mandated it.

From my vantage point, above and unseen, I saw just what you'd expect to see. Drug deals, public sex, breakdowns and plenty of people sleeping it off.

One late morning I stepped outside for my breakfast smoke. The door to the courtyard flew open and a group of three came out. They were led by a middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt and what I know as sleep pants but are standard apparel here.

They were talking loudly but I couldn't make out what they were saying. The woman turned away from the door and dropped the back of her pants to just below her ass.

From her position and the way the two others gathered behind her, my first thought that she was getting some sort of shot. Diabetes or something. Out of instinct, I turned away, thinking that they had gone out back for privacy.

I heard a hissing, popping sound. I turned back, just in time to see a bottle rocket shoot out of the woman's ass crack.

They whooped it up and returned inside. Well, that's something, I thought.

A week or so later, I told the story to a young man that I knew, who found it plenty amusing. In time, the conversation turned to his upcoming entry to college. He was over twenty-one and this was his first go at higher education.

I gave him my standard advice. "Don't go until you know exactly what you want to accomplish there. You want to make sure that you get through as fast as you can and come out with a job."

I added my usual spiel about how college was overvalued. That got him to lay down the standard liberal line, "I think everyone should go to college."

"What about that woman who shot the bottle rocket out of her ass? What would she have gotten out of college?"

So, you can imagine my surprise when EducationRealist highlighted the first paragraph of Caitlin Flanagan's fraternity smear in The Atlantic:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his a** and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

ER's students had the appropriate response:

“Why would she write about an idiot?” asked Dino, ever the challenger.

“How did someone so stupid get to college?” Bruce wanted to know.

Well, Bruce, that's what college is all about. At least, these days.