ADHD finds itself at the center of mental health discourse, and some see it not as a disorder but as a strength. Danielle investigates the origins of this theory and questions who benefits from the rebranding of ADHD.More on this story: What does “thriving” with ADHD actually look like?The myth of the ADHD “superpower”For a transcript and more resources, visit the episode page on Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give
Chapter 1: Who is Danielle Elliott and what is her ADHD journey?
That's me, giving the maid of honor toast at my sister's wedding. And my mom, laughing as she records on her phone. It's May 2022, about four months after I was diagnosed with ADHD. I'd love to say the diagnosis helped me get my life in order, but that would be a lie. Instead, it sent me down the rabbit hole of ADHD social media, learning all the ways the disorder has likely impacted my life.
It all got overwhelming at a time when I was already overwhelmed. I didn't have an apartment, a partner, or a job. There was nothing grounding me in New York. So I left. I went to South America, told myself I could do whatever I wanted until the wedding, and after that, I'd fly back to New York and figure things out.
Three weeks before the wedding, I flew into Dallas and spent the weekend with my sister. I bought a dress off a department store sale rack. Then I flew to Nicaragua to learn to surf. I know it sounds erratic, maybe like a 37-year-old refusing to grow up, but my choices made sense to me, kind of. I mean, if you need dopamine, learn to surf. Then came the wedding.
I had to leave the welcome party early to pick up the dress from the tailors. I almost forgot, then got lost and missed most of the dinner. A little voice in my head kept telling me I'm an idiot, that I can never get anything right, and I never will because I have ADHD. The wedding would be my first time seeing extended family in more than two years because of the pandemic.
I dreaded the questions about what I'm doing with my life. I figured I'd get ahead of it by standing up in front of a room full of people and starting the toast with the self-deprecating joke I'd written. I asked my cousins to laugh on cue, just in case the joke didn't land. I scribbled notes and rewrites up until the moment the DJ called me to the front of the room.
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Chapter 2: How did Danielle's perception of ADHD change at her sister's wedding?
And as he handed me the microphone and I looked at everyone staring back at me, something unexpected happened. For the first time since being diagnosed, I felt grateful for the way my brain works.
I thought, if ADHD is the reason I don't have this kind of classic life, it's probably also the reason I still love last-minute travel and like challenging the ways we're supposed to do things, and why I have a career in three fields, not one. Insatiable curiosity makes my life possible. All of this raced through my head, and then I started my speech.
two years older, I've always absolutely loved giving pristine advice, so I thought I would start there. There's just one problem. We are in a room full of people who have figured out the secrets to long and happy marriages, and I'm certainly not one of them. So, if anyone has advice, please find the bread and bread later. I'd also love to hear it.
I don't think I could have handled that laughter an hour earlier. I was in such a dark place. And then I wasn't. The speech became a turning point. I stopped resenting my ADHD and started appreciating it. I think it's made my life a lot more interesting. I'd love to claim this is an original thought, but it turns out a lot of people were starting to feel the same way.
Over the next year or so, the idea of ADHD as a strength seemed to take over the public conversation about this disorder. By 2023, it almost seemed cool, or at least trendy, to have ADHD. I watched this happen on social media and heard it in conversations with friends. Friends who'd never mentioned mental health issues were starting to call to tell me they had ADHD.
And in those calls, they used a specific word, superpower. It's like ADHD was somehow rebranded in less than two years. I was confused. I still think of the stigma, and I've wondered two things. First, how'd this happen? I'd read that 84% of ADHD content on TikTok is misleading. Is all of this positivity and talk of superpowers driven by that 84%? My second question is about the impact.
Is the rebranding of ADHD one of the reasons so many women are being diagnosed? If so, what's the connection? And what does it mean to rebrand a mental health condition? Who does that benefit? As I started trying to answer these questions, I realized social media influencers didn't create this new way of thinking about ADHD.
That, as far as I can tell, started at least 30 years ago and has been largely driven by a man determined to get the world to see ADHD through his eyes. For better or worse, I think he can now say, mission accomplished. This is Climbing the Walls, a podcast where I try to figure out why so many women are being diagnosed with ADHD. I'm Danielle Elliott.
Hello. Hello, how are you?
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Chapter 3: What is the origin of the ADHD 'superpower' concept?
Nice to meet you.
Dr. Ned Hallowell opened the door with a giant smile on his face.
Nice to meet you, too. Thank you. I love your doormat.
You notice that. Most people don't notice it. Oh, yeah.
The doormat says, home to Ned, Sue, the names of their kids, and the names of their pets. It ends with a question mark, as though they're not sure if they'll have more kids or get more pets. Ned ushered me into the living room. Inside, the walls are covered with photos, massive frames with 20 or 30 photos each, maybe more. The kids all look grown, so I guess that question mark is about pets.
He walked into another room and stood in front of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
You know, I've written 23 books. By the way, the reason I write so many books, it's not that I'm ambitious to write books. If I don't have a book going, I get depressed.
Writing is one of the ways he manages his ADHD. He stopped in the kitchen, and we sat down at a big table. I asked how ADHD became his specialty.
When I was in medical school, I'd never heard of it. And then I went through my residency in adult psychiatry. Didn't hear of it. It wasn't until I started my fellowship in child psychiatry in 1981.
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Chapter 4: Who is Dr. Ned Hallowell and how did he influence ADHD understanding?
The three main symptoms of ADD distractibility, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Turn each one of those on its head and you get an incredible positive. The flip side of distractibility is curiosity. And that's what drives us. We're driven by curiosity. What's that? What's that? What's that? So if you hear a noise out there, the dull person wouldn't care, but the ADD person, what's that?
What's that? And that's how, you know, discoveries get made. The second one is my favorite, impulsivity. That's what gets us all into trouble. Well... What is creativity but impulsivity going right? You know, you don't plan to have a creative idea. They pop impulsively, disinhibition. And then the third one, hyperactivity, you get to be my age, I'm 74.
It's called energy, you know, and I'm real glad I've got this little power pack on my back.
Ned and John were the first to put all of this into a book. Published in 1994, it's called Driven to Distraction.
John Rady and I thought we'd be lucky if it sold 10,000 copies. The next thing you know, that book, I mean, not to toot my own horn, but that book changed everything.
Driven to Distraction helped Sari Solden recognize her ADHD. It helped Emily Mitchell understand herself. It sold more than 2 million copies. And it's still selling strong. It changes everything for people who read it, which for a long time meant it changed everything within ADHD circles or for people who were already diagnosed with ADHD and looking for more information.
I'm not convinced it changed the public perception of ADHD, at least not at first. And it definitely did not change the minds of the ADHD gatekeepers. One prominent expert, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center named Dr. Russ Barkley, did not hide his dismay.
At first, people ridiculed it. Russ Barkley said to me, will you please stop writing positive things about this because we won't get any research money because they don't want to fund strengths.
I reached out to Dr. Barkley. He told me he remembers this slightly differently. He said that, quote, championing ADHD as a gift risks losing the hard-won protections and entitlements that exist with the diagnosis because it is a disorder. Over the next two decades, research started to support the idea that there are benefits to having ADHD.
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Chapter 5: What are the positive traits associated with ADHD according to Dr. Hallowell?
He said ADHD exists because humans evolved in groups, and groups need risk-takers in order to learn anything new. Someone had to light the first fire. Someone had to be the first to swim. Someone had to try eating different foods. And when they did, it didn't always go well. People lit themselves on fire. People drowned or got eaten by sharks. People ate poisonous berries.
But someone else cooked food, someone else caught a fish, and someone else discovered that we can eat strawberries. Whether they lived or died, the risk-takers taught everyone something. Not all scientists agreed with the research on potential evolutionary benefits. At a 1999 CHAD conference, Dr. Barclay gave the keynote address.
He told attendees he strongly believed that there is no evidence to support the idea of evolutionary advantages and that talking about them trivializes the disorder. He said that you cannot claim to benefit from ADHD and then want to call it a disorder. Ned agrees. Sort of.
It's not a deficit disorder. I mean, I have an abundance of attention. The challenge is to control it. So to call it a deficit disorder makes it sound like a form of dementia, which it's not at all. And I think of it as a way of being in the world, not a disorder, but a way of being in the world, like being an extrovert. It's a way of being.
And when you begin to realize that, then it's so liberating because then you see yourself
For years, this liberation came to those who happened to read Ned and John's books, or Sari Solden's, or a slew of others written by people who treat adult ADHD. The strengths did not enter the medical conversation. But the evidence of potential advantages only grew.
In 2008, a pair of anthropology students traveled to northern Kenya to spend time with one of the few groups that still lives in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Many in the group carry a genetic mutation that is strongly associated with ADHD. The researchers determined that, when living nomadically, those with the genetic mutation exhibit better health than those who live a settled life.
And when living in a more settled life in a village, those with the genetic mutation show greater malnourishment. Conversely, people without the mutation are more healthy in a settled lifestyle and more malnourished when living nomadically.
Summarizing their findings, the authors of the study wrote, There is good reason to believe that in our evolutionary past, ADHD was often not much of a problem and was perhaps even an asset. Several studies have since supported their findings. Still, the medical model continues to describe ADHD as a deficit, and it continued to carry a stigma. Ned sees this as a great tragedy.
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Chapter 6: How has the public perception of ADHD evolved over time?
Chapter 7: What role did the book 'Driven to Distraction' play in ADHD awareness?
There's no diagnosis in all of medicine that can jack up your life better than this diagnosis or can hurt your life more than a diagnosis not made. The prison population is full of people with undiagnosed AIDS, the halls of the unemployed, the addicted. ADD is a very common treatable cause of addiction. So all these at-risk populations, a lot of them, a big segment have ADD.
If we treated the ADD, they cut down on the recidivism rate, cut down on the addiction, save relationships. And they're talented folks. They really are. Things can only get better once you have the diagnosis. So I come along and say, no. You know, my line is, I don't treat disabilities. I help people unwrap their gifts. And that's the truth.
But that shift in emphasis makes all the difference in the world. Oh, okay, I'll work with you to unwrap my gift. I just don't want to work on becoming less crazy or less defective or, you know.
Ned spent more than 40 years attempting to rebrand ADHD. The idea never seemed to reach the general public. Then, sometime during the pandemic, ADHD transformed from a stigmatized disorder into something people casually refer to as a superpower. I've tried to dissect this transformation. ADHD content on social media definitely helped destigmatize the disorder.
So did a general cultural shift towards accepting and understanding mental health differences. But when I look at ADHD content that was posted to social media in 2020, I don't see much, if anything, about superpowers. I talked to a popular ADHD coach. She can't remember people talking about superpowers until about 2021. She suggested it might have been linked to media coverage of a new book.
A new book written by, you guessed it, Ned and John. It's called ADHD 2.0. I read ADHD 2.0 shortly after my sister's wedding. My copy is full of notes, entire pages underlined, especially the part about a recent scientific advance in the understanding of negative self-talk. the type of self-talk that I was feeling before seeing extended family at the wedding.
The authors described this type of rumination as creativity applied to the past. Of course creative people also ruminate, pairs of opposites and all that. Thinking about this helped me tame my inner critic in ways that I never thought possible. So the book's great. At least it was for me. But I'm not sure it shifted public perception. The positive reframing of ADHD still needed a boost.
And then it got one. A big one. One of Ned's patients wrote a memoir, Paris Hilton. On the cover, she called ADHD her superpower. On the first page, she quoted Ned. Around the same time, she and a few other celebrities appeared in a documentary called The Disruptors. In the film, they talked about ADHD as the thing driving their success.
Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles talked about her ADHD in media tours. Comedian Nicole Byer talked about it on her popular podcast. Filmmaker Greta Gerwig mentioned it as she was doing press for her blockbuster hit, Barbie. As celebrities opened up about their ADHD, and did so without shame, the shift in public perception was rapid and obvious.
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Chapter 8: How did celebrity influence and media shape the ADHD superpower narrative?
Ned's wife, Sue Hollowell, was home from work.
Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you.
She shook out her umbrella and wiped her feet on the mat, then walked to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine.
I am back. Is rosé okay? Rosé is great, thank you. Friday night.
I was about to stop the recorder when Ned turned and said, She knows more about couples than anyone in the world. Sue is a therapist. When Ned's first book came out, couples started contacting her about ADHD. She moved around the kitchen as she explained this, then stopped to pour me a glass of wine.
How's that? That's perfect.
She said that back then, she had no idea how to offer couples therapy focused on ADHD.
And so I've learned over the years how to do this. And I really enjoy it.
Yeah. Ned, what did you order? I got two, we got two fishes and one chicken.
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