As one who’s always been keen on putting their hand up and admitting to their faults (a perverse form of boasting, I suspect) I was always suspicious of the medicalisation of character flaws which apparently render us helpless in the clammy hands of Fortuna. It was bad enough when friends who’d generally always seemed highly capable jumped on the ADHD bus in later life, suddenly flinching at loud noises when they’d spent a good deal of their lives dancing to ear-splitting techno. But it was another sort of annoying when ex-friends who were merely awful people started blaming all their past ghastliness first on ADHD and then – still not feeling special enough – on autism, a serious condition which affects a tiny amount of people.
But if you want to create ‘conditions’ where previously there were simply personalities, fill your boots; everyone benefits from having a hobby. Where I draw the line is when they attempt to drag me on to the bus with them. No, I am not a ‘narcissist’ who is ‘on the spectrum’ – I’m simply a self-adoring show-off with a tendency to fidget. ‘We’ll relax and take our time!’ I invariably tell my restaurant companion, and if they know me well, they smile sceptically. I’m already catching the waiter’s eye and planning the next watering hole. But I don’t have Attention Deficit Syndrome – I’m just greedy for the next thing.
So it’s a real relief to have psychologists come out and call a halt to this new dance craze. In the Times this week, Charlotte Alt writes: ‘Therapy-speak, which is the casual use of psychological jargon, has made its way into everyday conversation and is thrown around in millions of videos on social media purporting to explain how to spot if someone is “toxic” or if something is “triggering”’. Experts warn that casual use of terms which have specific meanings in clinical contexts risk diluting their significance and ‘over-pathologising’ everyday human emotions’. Or, as the clinical psychologist Marianne Trent put it: ‘One of the trickier aspects of being a human is to feel awful, but it doesn’t mean that every uncomfortable feeling we have is a mental health condition. In the same way, not every difficult person has a personality disorder.’
When I was young, people got drunk because they enjoyed it. When I was a young adult, people caught on that they could wriggle out of responsibility for things they enjoyed but which were taking over their lives (such as drinking) by blaming their mothers. Now, like the writer Caitlin Moran, you’re probably a binge-drinker because, like her, you have ADHD. Am I very bad for wishing that people still got drunk for no reason more complex because they enjoyed it? Life was so simple then. Some people were straight; some were eccentric. But unless you were actually hearing voices, your mental health was not an excuse to be a bore – or a boor.
It’s not just me. The similarly jaded journalist Katie Glass recounts: ‘People turning up late/forgetting plans/not answering texts – and blaming their “neurodiverse brains”.’ One friend’s ex claims to have ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’ which means he gets angry if she asks him to do anything with their children. Another one has a funny line about dating self-diagnosing men in which mental health is the new ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ because they all blame their selfishness on it now: ‘I’m autistic, I can’t help behaving badly!’
Unless you were actually hearing voices, your mental health was not an excuse to be a bore – or a boor
Since the turn of the century, autism diagnoses are up a whopping 640 per cent and ADHD almost 1,600 per cent. According to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), one in four of us are now ‘disabled’ – this is driven not by people who are physically unable to walk, like me, or suffering from life-changing illnesses, such as cancer, but by people who are feeling a bit mis. Forgive me if I’m not overflowing with the oat-milk of human kindness here, but I’d advise anyone feeling that they can’t get out of bed because they failed to score their dream job to confine themselves to a wheelchair for a week, or to walk around with their eyes closed for a day – and see how that messes with your precious, special mind. As someone who is disabled, if I was on a desert island, I’d be done; if someone with ADHD was, they’d pull themselves together and get on with the business of building shelters and catching fish.
Britain already spends more on health and disability benefits (£83 billion) than on defence (£63 billion) according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. With the arrival of John Healey as Chancellor, perhaps we can at last hope to see this ludicrous situation reversed. But what are we defending? A growing population of people – mostly young and who should be at the peak of rude health – who are the modern equivalent of those Victorian maidens lying on fainting couches, too enervated to engage with or enjoy life? ‘Self-diagnosis’ is merely hypochondria dressed up in some sassy pseudo-scientific drag; in fact, it’s not going too far to say that some doctors give out diagnoses to get patients off their backs.
As Michael Simmons wrote here recently: ‘We live in a society in which disabled people must be described as merely “differently abled”, while apparently requiring more state support than ever before. It is a society in which autism is idiotically advertised as a “superpower” – a slogan particularly galling for those families caring for people who cannot speak or live independently. Doctors know this but few speak out. Many privately describe the visible “exhilaration” on the faces of patients they have just diagnosed with in-vogue conditions such as ADHD. They’re gobsmacked when they see the same patients announce the news on social media as though they’ve won the Lottery rather than received confirmation of a lifelong disorder.’
The ‘Worried Well’ have become the ‘Smug Sick’ – sensitive flowers so complicated and precious that we ‘neurotypical’ (the narrow-minded Normies who are only good for paying the taxes that enable the ‘neurodiverse’ to put their feet up) can never begin to understand the exquisite torment of being in their very special shoes. I can’t wear proper shoes any more as my feet are so vulnerable to pressure sores, but I drag my old carcass out of bed at dawn because I can’t imagine not making an effort. I have tenacity and I have talent – but I have just as many vices as virtues, and they’re all mine, the good and the bad. Regrettably, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that severe spinal cord injuries do affect the brain, so at some point I may literally become ‘neurodiverse’ – but I won’t be running around boasting about it as if it’s a new handbag. Because, to me, stubbornly sticking to one’s guns and refusing to identify as anything but an ordinary person with ordinary character flaws is the most original and brave choice one can make in this crazy world.
So I’ll continue to fidget, interrupt and be distracted by bright, shiny things – but let me state here and now that anything which annoys or repels you about me, IS me – not some cod-condition I’m hiding behind. On that basis, feel free to accept me or shun me, free in the knowledge that I won’t have a meltdown as I don’t have ‘Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria’ – ‘a condition characterised by extreme, overwhelming emotional pain triggered by the perception of being rejected, criticised, or having failed.’ In fact, I’ll be moving on to the next watering hole in no time.
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