I wrote most of this out as a YouTube comment, but it's so long YouTube won't take it. Here's the video I'm responding to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sw87u86i2E&t=3174s
I was diagnosed with ADHD quite young. I'm not exactly sure when, but somewhere between 3 and 5 years old. The doctor recommended medication. My parents considered this very seriously, and they ultimately decided against it. My ADHD made school quite difficult for me. Up through 6th grade, I struggled. I had a hard time paying attention. I did do very well in some subjects, but I couldn't concentrate on others at all, and I got in trouble a lot for being restless. In 6th grade the problems became to big to ignore. I was in the Talented and Gifted program, thriving in it, but I was also failing 6th grade. I'm sure my parents got some pressure to medicate me again at this point, but if so they never mentioned it. Instead, they decided to homeschool me. My mom bought a ~3 inch thick workbook that was supposed to cover all of 6th grade, and she assigned me 10 pages a day, which she calculated would get me done by the end of the school year (which we were halfway through, so it was basically a double course load). Not only did pull it off, most days my school work was done by noon. (Most people don't realize that ADHD doesn't just mean you are very easily distracted. Most people with ADHD can also hyperfocus given the right motivation. I've always really enjoyed learning. The problem with public school is that it was way too slow for me, so I would get bored. Giving me a double workload and letting me work at my own pace produced an environment perfect for triggering me to hyperfocus.)
Anyhow, I'm middle aged now. I still have the symptoms of ADHD. But now it's different. I consider ADHD a super power. I'm not a victim, because I've learned to use the benefits and largely avoid the negatives of having ADHD. I got through college, both a Bachelor's degree and I just graduated with a Master's last month, with a consistent GPA well over 3.8. I even regularly went far beyond the requirements on many assignments. College lets me learn at the pace I want to. I don't have a teacher discouraging me when I get ahead of the other students, out of fear that I'll be disruptive (which I certainly would have been and sometimes was in public school). College professors (at least, the ones I had) love students who are excited about learning. I was always the student that would take up the professor's sometimes flippant challenges, offering significant grade boosts for doing things that should be very difficult or impossible for inexperienced students (though I never needed the grade boosts...). Even better, I came into college with almost 20 years of experience in my major, so I had to go well beyond the assignments, because I knew if I didn't, I would get bored, then get distracted, and then start failing my classes. So I would intentionally do my assignments in unorthodox ways that would allow me to learn something new, while still technically satisfying the requirements. I sometimes would ask professors for permission to do assignments differently, satisfying more difficult requirements instead of the normal ones. If a professor made a flippant remark like, "If anyone manages to include [this expert level element that you won't learn about for three more semesters] in their project, I'll give them an automatic A in the entire course", I was the one who would do it. I even had a physics professor who had a grading policy of giving the course grade of either the composite score or the grade for the final, whichever was higher. So every time I got a graded test back, I would rigorously study everything I missed on the test. That professor used to tell his students that no one had ever gotten a better grade on the final. When my brother took his course after I finished it, he told me the professor now tells his students only one has ever done it. My composite grade was a B. A scored better than 100% on the final. (I did miss one question, but I made it up with a much more difficult bonus question that was worth more than the one I missed.) I worked hard for that, but I did it because I knew I had to hyperfocus to get a good grade at all.
Another really valuable power that comes from ADHD is being very observant. I notice the tiniest things. Most people with ADHD do this, but then they are immediately distracted by them. If you can learn to refocus immediately though, after very quickly assessing whatever it is you've noticed and making sure it doesn't need immediate attention, this goes from liability to super power. And with practice, it becomes automatic. My brain will notice everything. It will quickly analyze each thing it notices, and if it is more important than what I'm currently doing, it will "notify" me instead of returning my focus to my current task. Otherwise, it will store it away for later. This is extremely valuable in many situations. In the simplest case, it just means that I can remember things that happened around me when I wasn't paying any attention at all, often days or weeks later. The ADHD made my brain consider it important enough to maintain a memory of far longer than most people would. More deeply though, it means that I can remember what people said around me when I wasn't paying attention, for example, in a class, when I'm getting distracted by something else. It means that I can often search for a lost object entirely in my own head and find it, even if it wasn't important enough to consciously notice at the time that I saw it. (Like, something that belongs to someone else, that I may never have even seen before and didn't seem out of play or otherwise unique or interesting when I saw it.) Fully leveraging this may require some memory training as well. When I was young, my mom did a lot of memory training with me, which probably helped to amplify this super power by increasing retention time significantly. But this is exactly the kind of thing that educators could do (and that doctors could recommend) to develop and leverage the powers of ADHD.
I'm so happy that my parents didn't listen to the doctors. I know others who grew up with ADHD, drugged, and they still struggle with it. They still have a very hard time focusing on things. Because I wasn't drugged, I was forced to deal with it and to learn to control it, and that's why ADHD has become a super power for me. I can deliberately hyperfocus when I want to now, and that allows me to be 10 to 100 times more productive than most people working in my field. Allowing myself to be distracted when I don't need to focus also provides me with great value, both in terms of mental health, and in terms of learning. I can spend my free time learning large amounts about a massive range of different subjects on YouTube, Wikipedia, and all sorts of other places on the internet. As a result I have a solid education in hundreds of different subjects. Because my parents didn't take away my ability to be distracted by every little thing, I can be interested in practically everything, and because I can hyperfocus on demand, I can go from being interested in something to learning a huge amount about that thing very quickly. And that means I know a huge amount about a huge amount of things. Every person I talk with who has some project, I can offer some insight or help on their project. If you have some hobby or interest, I can probably hold a coherent conversation about that hobby or interest. For any given person, odds are I have some interest in common with them. And that's extremely powerful and valuable!
ADHD is a super power. You aren't a victim because you have ADHD. Like any fictional super power though, if you don't learn to control it, it will do more harm than good. Some people with ADHD do need drugs. My daughter has a friend whose ADHD is so severe that he literally can't function without drugs. He's so incredibly excitable that he'll end up running around screaming at the slightest stimulus. (And even on drugs, his ADHD is similar to what mine was before I learned to control it.) But most people with ADHD are at least as function as I was in elementary school. Instead of fearing ADHD and drugging kids who have it, we should be teaching them to control it, because we need more people who have and can control this super power!
It may also be worth noting that I have Asperger's (I've decided I'm not going to buy into the "spectrum" lingo/classification). I'm not diagnosed (most qualified people won't diagnose the same person with both ADHD and anything related to autism, due to significant overlap), but I've gotten unofficial two professional opinions. One was from a close family friend who spent a lot of time around me. (She specialized in child psychology and provided in-home therapy and psych evaluations for children.) She didn't tell me she thought I had an autism disorder, but after I was an adult and had moved away, she told my mom, and when I told my mom I suspected, my mom told me that this friend had said the same thing. Then, around 5 years ago, I was in a situation where someone wanted an official autism diagnosis. It is generally extremely expensive for an adult to get an autism assessment from someone qualified to give a diagnosis, and the entity that wanted the assessment wasn't willing to pay for it, so they settled for a regular psychiatric evaluation with a "is consistent with" or "isn't consistent with" diagnosis, and the psychiatrist who evaluated me basically "diagnosed" me as "consistent with" having very high functioning autism. Again though, while this does come with some social issues, autism, when high functioning, also comes with significant benefits. The combination of ADHD and autism might have made it easier for me to control the powers ADHD gives me. But on top of this, the autism also helps me by making me care less about what other people think and more about objective reality, logic, and such. I work in a technical field, where this is incredibly valuable. Additionally, I have some friends who also have Asperger's or more severe autism, and we can have very frank and blunt conversations, and none of us are offended. This allows for very concise and terse discussion, wasting nothing on pleasantries, hedging, or beating around the bush. It's so efficient and results in discussions and debates that progress very rapidly, producing value at a very rapid rate. I've learned to be decent at conversation with normal people (though I still tend to talk too much and sometimes ramble), but when I don't have to, the exchange of information and development of ideas is so much faster. Autism, when reasonably functional and controlled, is also a super power!
So here we are, trying treat ADHD and autism, when we should be trying to develop them in those who have them, and help them learn to control them for their benefit. I don't identify as ADHD or autistic. That seems stupid to me. In fact, I generally don't strongly identify with any personal trait I have that I came with naturally. I am a human male, but these aren't major parts of my identity, because I didn't decide to be these things. The things that make me unique and interested, in my opinion, aren't the things I came with. They aren't the things that are beyond my control. Having pride in attributes I can't control is stupid, because I didn't do them. I'm very intelligent, but that doesn't give me any special kind of worthiness or superiority. What I choose to do with what I have been given is what actually defines me. I'm an engineer/maker, because I chose to learn the required knowledge and skills and then to use them. I'm an artist, because I chose to learn and practice various arts. I'm a scientist, because I chose to seek out and learn science and experiment with it. I'm not as "smart" as I am because I have a high IQ but because I use what I have learn about everything I possibly can and practice those things that I have the resources to be able to practice. This might sound a bit big headed, but I don't actually feel superior to anyone else who uses what they've been given to improve themselves to a similar degree. How many athletes are there who may not have a high IQ, a very good memory, and the benefits of ADHD and Asperger's, but who instead have very high quality muscles, tendons, and bones, who have put as much effort as I've put into my super powers into their own special super powers? And further, I recognize that even people who have no obvious specialty might have invisible super powers. I've often wondered if there might be a kind of savant (in the actual psychiatric sense of the word) whose specialization is social skills. We define savantism as a trade between social skills and some specialization, but what if it isn't? What if it is just a trade between all other skills and that one specialization, and social skills just happen to be the most noticeable one, because they are so important in our culture? If that's the case, then there could be actual social savants, who are beyond genius level at social interaction but lacking in everything else, and we might just see them as lazy slackers because very good social skills are just written off as "charisma" while bad social skills are treated as a huge problem.
Anyhow, I think we've barely brushed the surface of what ADHD and autism really are, and massive scale overdiagnosis and overtreatment are just muddying the water, making it more difficult to learn more. I suspect the best treatment for most people with ADHD and autism would be a special educational strategy that helps them learn to control and focus these superpowers instead of just trying to suppress them. The X Men narrative is prophetic. Any abnormality is automatically treated as bad and we try to suppress it, even when we know that there is good in it. If instead of focusing on the perceived bad and trying to suppress it, we focused on the good and tried to develop it and control it, we could have a world changing number of people with mental super powers on our hands. I have several children with ADHD and/or Asperger's myself. (Most actually diagnosed.) We don't medicate them, because it isn't severe enough to need medication. I figure society is lucky that my wife and I got these kids with these "disorders" instead of someone else, because I know how to develop them for great good, and I can (and have to some degree) teach my wife how to do this as well. Unfortunately, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of kids with ADHD and/or autism that are being treated as dangerous mutants whose powers need to be suppressed to protect themselves and others. We can and should do better, and maybe if we do, having tens or hundreds of thousands of additional people capable of hyperfocusing, broad learning, communicating efficiently without taking offense at every little thing, and generally solving hard problems, the world would become a much better place.
In fact, what if the problem with modern society is that we have suppressed the people who normally keep society from going off the rails by saying "That's an absolutely idiotic idea", with no fear of what people will think of them, every time someone comes up with some new idea of "justice" that is ultimately self destructive and bad for society? What if autistic people and ADHD people are a necessary check and balance against illogical, destructive groupthink, and our deliberate suppression of their unique capabilities is partially responsible for where our society has gotten itself.
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