Stories from ADHD camp | 5
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Here's a not-at-all fun fact. The average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in the last 25 years or so. We are all increasingly struggling to focus. The writer Johan Hari attempts to reckon with this phenomenon in his 2022 book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. I read it in 2023 after a guy I was seeing recommended it. He was in the middle of wrestling with his own ADHD symptoms. Anyway, the author of the book moved to a seaside town as an experiment. He cooked for himself. He walked everywhere. He read a daily newspaper and read books. He left his smartphone at home and called his family from a landline. Essentially, he lived in his immediate surroundings. Within weeks, he felt like his old self.
He could think clearly and write for sustained periods of time. He enjoyed conversations with strangers. Outside of the pace of modern life, his symptoms ebbed. After three months, he left this little paradise and set out to find reasons why it's so hard to achieve this feeling in regular life. He found that many forces beyond our control are sort of short-circuiting our brains. Things like pollution in the air, chemicals in our food, tech companies creating addictive products. In essence, the conditions of modern life are not good for our brains, neurotypical and neurodivergent brains alike. And many of the habits of modern life aren't good either. To be clear, Stolen Focus is not about ADHD.
But the book hones in on what Ned calls our ADDogenic culture and why more people might be developing what he called environmentally induced ADHD. That is to say, the way we live these days is manifesting ADHD-like symptoms, even for people who do not have ADHD. Does accepting this fact open the door for greater numbers of misdiagnosis? Yes. But for those who truly have ADHD, it reveals how severely modern life might be intensifying ADHD symptoms. About two weeks after I shared dinner with the Hallowells and talked myself into an unexpected invitation, I showed up at their camp. The ADHD family camp was being held at a boarding school in northern Michigan. As I pulled onto the school grounds, I realized the decision to go there was pretty impulsive. And now that I was there, I didn't have much of a plan. I had hoped, at the very least, to spend the week connecting with women with ADHD. Maybe a few who were recently diagnosed. But beyond that, I didn't really know what to expect.
I got there towards the end of check-in and walked up at the same time as a family. Hello.
How are you guys?
The mom apologized for being late.
That's okay. This is ADD land. We don't expect everybody on time.
We don't expect everybody on time. The Hallowells Camp is, for the most part, outside of the pace of modern life, outside of our ADD-ogenic culture. It's Ned's Vermont, or the author's seaside town from Stolen Focus. It's a week in the woods in a beautiful place, where kids can run around and parents can connect with each other. In other words, it's a pretty ideal setting for people with ADHD and their families. But even here, as I talked to these women, women from all over the world who had decided this was a safe enough space to speak candidly about their experiences, the stories of their struggles felt real and immediate. No matter their background or experience, they were all voicing a desire for more awareness and better treatment. Through my conversations at the camp, I started to see how much more needs to be done if there's to be any hope of reaching all the women who stand to benefit from knowing a name for the way their brain works. In this episode, I'm going to share four of those conversations.
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. The first morning of camp, the kids went off on some sort of outdoor adventure, and the parents met for a group session with Sue Halliwell. They gathered in a large conference room and pushed the tables into a big U. Sue stood at the front and asked the parents to introduce themselves. The first woman said her wife was recently diagnosed with ADHD. A few more moms said they were diagnosed in the last few years. Some discovered their ADHD after their kids were diagnosed or through TikTok videos.
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Chapters
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