If you are a late diagnosed ADHD-er I bet you have heard at least one of these comments?
” ADHD doesn’t exist”
“Everyone does that!”
“You can’t use ADHD as an excuse for everything!”
As much as these statements are hurtful, I guess we can’t blame people for thinking that way because our ADHD symptoms and traits cannot be justified by just seeing it as what we do. Instead we need to understand neurobiological basis of why we do it.
If I tell a person that I have ADHD because I’m always late and I always forget birthdays (which, by the way, I am not known for doing out of anxiety. But that’s a story for another day), the natural response will obviously be, everyone does it! In fact, I know many neurotypicals who are more tardy or procrastinate more than me.
Take the example of judging the punishment for crimes. Motive plays a big part in determining if we perceive the perpetrator as a bad person or a good person who was forced to do something bad for a good reason. We judge a murderer as a monster and a person who murdered another person in self defense as a hero.
The same goes for ADHD symptoms, or any other mental health condition for that matter, you need to dig deep and see the reason behind the symptom. In the case of ADHD, it’s how your neurological difference drives a particular trait.
I got the idea for this post after watching this video on YouTube. It was shared to me by a dear friend and fellow ADHDer. Our immediate comment to this video was, “Wait? aren’t those ADHD symptoms?”
So this post is mainly to highlight two things. Why so many people “relate” to ADHD posts and why some people refuse to believe that ADHD is a real impairing disorder but rather consider it a variation of human behavior.
The reason behind it is that people often have superficial understanding basic human psychology and assume things based on limited personal experiences and assumptions. Little do people know people have studied personality extensively and we know more than you think we know about human behavior.
In psychology, personality has been extensively studied in attempts to understand and how to better ourselves. There are many ways people classify human personality traits. I’m sure everyone has probably done some form of personality tests like the MBTI, Enneagram or many other tests online.
The one I will talk about on this series is The Five Factor model or the Big 5 Personality Traits that is widely studied and has been around since the 1880s. This is going to be a long one so ill break it up and hopefully can make a point on distinguishing ADHD from bad personality.
These Are the Contents of My Head 