Ironic, yet logical, that would be so widely misunderstood, stigmatized, and often blamed in the media for a myriad of social dysfunctions.

In my eighteen years of clinical practice as a psychotherapist with ADHD individuals, couples, families, and groups, every single client reported being scapegoated in their family of origin, or school, or workplace, or all three.

The “urban myths” and blame persist. ADHD is blamed for abuse of medications on college campuses, combative parents dealing with Special Ed services in K-12 school systems, and for being over-diagnosed, as though it were a Walmart version diagnosis invented by lazy parents and/or students, to manipulate the system or by the pharmaceutical industry to sell a false magic bullet.

By analogy, one doesn’t often hear an echo of accusations and blame against those suffering , generalized , or and other -induced disorders.

But ADHD seems to be fair game for disbelief, minimizing, dismissal, and blame combined.

For those of us who toil in the field, it’s a complex juggling act to help people with ADHD find mentors, repair family relationships, teach symptom , and most important, to channel their passion and stay focused on their true path.

We teach them to recognize strengths and talents, find assistance for their deficits, to bear impatience with more grace, use responsibly, and to reach out for support from family and friends.

And many of us devoted to working with this population have ADHD ourselves, as do I.

I discovered this in a proverbial light bulb moment at the age of forty-four, when my parents strategically left the then recently published book by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, Driven to Distraction, on a table near the front door as I was exiting their house to a flight from Logan Airport, Boston. By the time I landed just over an hour later, at Reagan National Airport, Washington, DC, I was fully self-diagnosed and that book changed my life.

It also exploded the myth that ADHD was a condition confined to children and adolescents.

For those of us who do this work, the disinformation-induced allegations are absurd and infuriating.

Why the negativity towards ADHD?

I believe it’s because our “Tribe” both challenges, and is challenged by, some fundamental norms of society. Something as fundamental, universal, and seemingly “objective”, as time itself.

It’s not just the fact that we are almost always late, even when it’s showing up somewhere we really want to be, or even when we make conscious efforts to not be tardy.

It’s more profound than lateness—it’s our actual experience of time and how we react to that experience.

First, we live almost always in the NOW time zone!

This was brilliantly explained by Thom Hartmann, a Vermont based psychologist, who decades ago proposed the metaphor that ADHD folks are the descendants of “hunters”, while conventional society, represents the descendants of “farmers”.

Or as in the famous Aesops Fable, the tortoise and the hare—ADHD folks are sprinters, while the tortoise is the marathon runner, and we all remember the famous adage from that fable, “slow and steady wins the race.”

Not exactly ADHD-friendly .

As hunters, we instinctively hyper-focus when the goal is immediate, compelling, visible, and usually fast-paced. On the other hand, we’re usually not game for the nine-to-five mundane routine or the demands of long-range planning.

Note the high percentage of people with ADHD in professions such as emergency medicine, first responders, athletes, performers, heavy equipment operators, special forces warriors, police detectives, bartenders, chefs, and all kinds of high-risk high-energy crisis-oriented tasks in which hyper-focus is mandatory.

Note the high percentage of ADHDers who work late shifts or stay up very late regardless. To squeeze out that extra bit of life when regular folks are .

Second, we want to do it all! So we’re very deficit ridden at prioritizing, as a multiplicity of options flood our brains simultaneously,

like a Joycean stream of consciousness,

Third, we acutely experience the fact that “objective reality” doesn’t permit or indulge this “all at once and right now” desire; which is at the heart of the emotion called “frustration”, our default negative emotion as we crash against the wall called “reality”.

Fourth, this “frustration” is almost always misperceived as “ ” and the consequent judgment:

“You have too much anger; maybe you need an anger management group.”

But ADHD frustration is not the same as conventional anger even when explosive, because the person realizes that once expressed, the catharsis itself is the cure, at least for the moment.

That’s why I don’t send my clients to “anger management” classes but rather teach them to explore “visceral experience”,

non-violent of course, on a daily basis.

I define visceral experience as that which creates catharsis; something that one feels on a gut level: physical, mental, or .

It transcends the mundane, the bane for ADHD folks. The mundane, which others may experience as security and comfort, is mostly draining and depleting for those with ADHD.

Or considered a waste of time. A twelve-year-old boy, a client of mine years ago, defiantly proclaimed without a trace of irony,

“Sleep is a waste of my time!”

I immediately recalled thinking likewise at his age and older too.

The psychologist, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the founding pillars of , called this visceral state of being, flow, and while it’s a good prescription for general well-being, it’s essential for those with ADHD.

Unfortunately there is a perfect storm of our current cultural and economic trends that make life for ADHD folks increasingly difficult, despite the explosion of and and medication options to allay symptoms.

The advent of 24/7 electronic stimulation, which of course ADHD folks are prone to become addicted to, combined with ever restrictive definitions of behavioral “excess”; the process of defining anything that “threatens” an unreasonably hypersensitive and hyper-fragile person, as being “inappropriate” or legally liable; these make the life of an ADHD person, particularly of the male , at risk of being vigilantly scrutinized and perceived as the “bull in the China shop”, or the potential accident waiting to happen; thus blamed and scapegoated once again.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jonathan Goldin, LICSW, J.D. is a psychotherapist in private practice in Lexington and Amherst, MA.