Intro 2 Critical ADHD Studies

plus: what do you think the 'ADHD industrial complex' is?

Okay I actually have, like, news for this newsletter, before we get into it! This month I went on the podcast Material Girls. It was so fun! We talked about dopamine, drugs, brain scans, and communism, all my favorite topics. Find it here.

I’m also in the Spring/Summer 2024 edition of Salvage, with a piece about taking ice baths for productivity reasons, but also early 20th century research on balancing the blood of workers against fatigue, and also John Harvey Kellogg and Wim Hof, and also Andrew Huberman? It’s all in there! And in a real book, too!

Any editors who may be reading this, I have many ideas and would love to write them in other publications, so send me an email!

And, while we’re talking about my recent appearances, also, this:

It’s a book chapter that just came out and I’m quoted in it! Andrew Ivan Brown, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, and David Jackson-Perry lay the groundwork here for Critical ADHD Studies (CADS) by first outlining the two most popular camps of thought which the field seeks to counter:

• the pathology paradigm of ADHD, which focuses on deficits and usually frames ADHD as a disorder of executive functions

• the diagnosis critical paradigm, which draws on medical sociology to frame ADHD as a case of overmedicalizing ‘normal’ behavior

Both the pathology paradigm and the diagnosis critical paradigm are dominated by non-ADHD professionals who are producing knowledge about ADHD from the outside — they tend to ‘focus on ADHD rather than ADHDers,’ overlooking our agency.

The diagnosis-criticals, in particular, tend to view ADHDers as ‘victims of medicalization’ and diagnoses as ‘stigmatizing labels.’¹

“..the diagnosis critical paradigm also largely relies on a deficit approach to ADHD, stressing diagnosis of ADHD as a problem— either for society or for the individual and their surroundings, as within the pathology paradigm.”

There are three strains of thought they identify as part of CADS, some of which conflict in some ways, and sometimes ‘bleed into each other’, but all of which ‘seek to centre ADHDers as agents’:

• the strengths-based approach to ADHD, which focuses on divergent thinking, creativity, innovation, hyperfocus as an asset, etc (as seen in the work of Ed Hallowell and John Ratey in particular, and the superpower narrative in general)

• the cognitive difference approach (‘we are attention different, not attention deficit’)

• ‘phenomenological and community theorizing’ approaches (see my interview with Hanna earlier this year!)

The problem with the strengths-based approach, they write, is that it’s just not critical enough — it’s a nice positive reframe, but it doesn’t pose much of a challenge to dominant discourses on ADHD created by non-ADHDers. So what characterizes the field of Critical ADHD Studies?

• it critiques neuronormativity (selective attention, linear, goal-oriented ways of functioning, clock time, etc)

• it’s made by/with ADHDers

• it’s intersectional, emphasizing ‘the need to move from individualized strength-based approaches (which are often inaccessible to BIPOC and lower socio-economic status ADHDers) to broader, collective challenges’

CADS stresses collective knowledge-making, and a focus on the body ‘as a site of invention rather than intervention.’ So, studying our feelings and experiences, not necessarily so we can tweak them for productivity purposes, but to better understand our needs, grow, and create. They also write that we have to ‘un-know’ some of the things we think we know about ADHD, in order to ‘re-story’ what it is and what it means for us.

“Whatever else we consider ADHD to be, we consider it—similarly to autism— as holding the potential to reveal and question hegemonic behavioural norms and pressures, and the ‘policing’ of those norms, without reducing ADHD to a theoretical tool.”

Yes, bitch! Let’s fucking go!

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Behind the paywall, I’m asking: how do we define ‘The ADHD Industrial Complex’? I don’t know the answer yet, but think through it with me? I did an informal internet review of how it has been described already, applying a bit of Brown at al’s analysis above.

I started with a search for the term ‘ADHD industrial complex’ to see who has used it before and how.