July 14th, 2008
The full cost of ADHD includes ignorance
There’s a new WHO study out, claiming ADHD means I’m 10% less productive than other workers.
It’s a survey based on counting days missed from work or where a worker didn’t feel productive.
It’s absolute nonsense, a conclusion based on ignorance, the assumption that time spent at a desk equates to productivity.
(The picture is of Robin Williams, from my own ground-breaking blog post about the condition, The Robin Williams in My Head.)
Second the study classes ADHD as a disability. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. While it has disabling characteristics, it also gives me bursts of creativity other people don’t have, and leaps of intuitive logic which make me highly productive.
Fortunately some researchers are listening and getting to the bottom of it.
You know that Williams reported cocaine made him quiet, calm, and unfunny? Well, a new Vanderbilt study indicates why — having ADHD is like being on speed all the time. That may be why Ritalin works, by chemically replacing this effect, reversing it.
How do I know about the ignorance? For one thing the WHO study claims males are far more likely than females to have ADHD.
Well, if you’re looking at the active type, marked by impatience, anger, and other outbursts, that’s right. In females it displays differently, often as passivity, which means it often goes undiagnosed. They’re watching the show. They’re not here.
It’s the stigma of ADHD as a disability, rather than a difference, which keeps people from getting the help they need with its side effects. The WHO study indicated 12.6% of those with ADHD in the U.S. were getting treatment, 2.7% in the Netherlands, none anywhere else.
The result of failure to treat ADHD’s side effects is that it can lead to depression and self-medication, or drug abuse. Sure enough, many of those studied were being treated for these other problems.
The bottom line is that until we stop treating ADHD as a disability, seeing it as the mixed blessing it in fact is, and stop stigmatizing those with ADHD, instead celebrating our accomplishments, it will continue to cost all of us.
Ignorance regarding ADHD is a huge part of its cost. Studies like this latest bit of WHO nonsense only add to that cost.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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