Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a tough condition. But it can also be a major critique of our clock-bound bureaucracy
A fascinating essay from Open Democracy, on how Attention Deficit Disorder (which the writer Laura Basu’s husband suffers) can be framed as a kind of critique of our time-scheduled, overly-bureaucratised society and economy.
Basu opens by citing the books of the Hungarian-Canadian medical doctor and writer Gabor Maté:
Maté has written about ADD (he has it), chronic illness, and addiction and compulsive behavior (he exhibits it).
Maté dissents from the mainstream consensus on what causes ADD, which is that it’s mostly genetic. He says that while there is a genetic element, what determines whether or not you develop it is the extent to which you receive the right nurturing in infancy. Five-sixths of human brain circuitry is wired after birth.
Those with ADD have different wiring in the prefrontal cortex, which controls self-regulation and attention. For optimal brain development to occur, infants need food, shelter, and secure attachment with their primary caregivers.
You can’t blame the parents, though. Not receiving the right nurturing doesn’t necessarily mean abuse or neglect, though it can. Parents being stressed out and not being able to attune to their infant can do the job.
Maté was born to Jewish parents in Budapest two months before the Nazis occupied the city. But it doesn’t have to be that extreme. Show me one parent who isn’t stressed to the eyeballs struggling with work, finances and trying to raise kids without enough help and on no sleep.
These are individual neurophysiological features but they arise within social contexts. Our capitalist societies create stressed-out families, carceral schools and toxic workplaces. No wonder our brains are going haywire on an unprecedented scale. ADD is a capitalist condition.
Basu goes on to show that ADD can be understood “not only as our era’s totemic condition but also as its Trojan Horse”, in four distinct ways:
ADD against the clock
We see the tyranny of capitalist time most starkly in Amazon warehouses where workers’ every movement is monitored by algorithms and the least productive regularly fired. We see it in poultry farms where workers are forced into wearing diapers because they don’t have time for bathroom breaks.
Due to differences in wiring and chemistry in the brain’s frontal lobe, the person with ADD does not experience this kind of linear time. Gabor Maté says that, for ADDers, there are two states of time: the here-and-now and the ever after…
… You can see why this kind of human is inimical to an economic system grounded in the regimentation of time. Good luck trying to get a person with ADD to get to school or work on time, do set tasks for certain durations and then go home and do whatever they need to do to be able to do the exact same thing tomorrow.
ADD slips bureaucracy
…If there’s one thing the ADD brain can’t handle, it’s bureaucracy. Due partly to reduced dopamine levels, those with ADD find it virtually impossible to devote any amount of time to activities for which they have no internal motivation. If you want to get an ADD kid to do their maths homework, you need to structure it like a video game that delivers a hit of dopamine every time they score a point.
Let’s face it, along with straight-up bureaucracy – which takes up an inordinate amount of our time and for which are paid nothing – much of the paid work we do can also pretty much be classified as bureaucracy. It has no intrinsic meaning, it adds no value to society and we do it purely to get money to stay alive.
Again, those with ADD are unable to motivate themselves to do things that have no intrinsic meaning. We can ask ourselves why any of us can – when you think about it, who is it really that has the disorder?
ADD is an anarchist
…The ADD brain is not made for pointless drudgery. It’s made for creative, free-form thinking, where connections fire off in all directions. The same wiring that generates internal chaos and distractibility also means that ADDers are better at ‘divergent thinking’, ‘conceptual expansion’ and ‘overcoming knowledge constraints’.
True, capitalism often ends up befitting from the ADD non-engagement with bureaucracy, as those bailiffs will attest. The individual with ADD will most often be the one getting harmed. Or, let’s be honest, the ADD person’s long-suffering partner will end up doing their bureaucracy for them, especially if that partner happens to be of the female persuasion.
But still, the ADD brain’s point-blank refusal of capitalism’s hijacking of time through both wage labour and bureaucracy, and its insistence on creativity, pleasure and self-expression, should be seen as a source of raw, joyous, anarchic rebellion.
Love is a doing word
For Gabor Maté, while medication may be helpful in many cases, it should never be the first or only port of call for treating ADD. ADD is not a disease. It’s a neurodevelopmental difference, caused by families that are too stressed-out by the pressures of life to give their kids the attention they need.
People with ADD have been brutalised by society. The same goes for addicts and for people with chronic diseases. The good news is that people can heal at all stages in life. What they need to be able to do so are spaces where they are accepted and given room to pursue their passions, connect to their feelings and nurture their self esteem. In other words, what they need is what everyone needs.
I’ve always said that love is not just a feeling, but a verb, an action. Apparently I’m not the only one to think this. The American psychiatrist Scott Peck defines love as action, as the “willingness to extend oneself in order to nurture another person’s spiritual and psychological growth, or one’s own”. Maté ends his book with the words: “If we can actively love, there will be no attention deficit and no disorder.”
We owe it to each other to create those spaces of active love and healing. Along the way, we can all learn from the ADD brain’s refusal of labour time and capitalist bureaucracy. We can all adopt its defiantly creative, lateral thinking. We can all embrace the disorder that will set us free.