ADHD: Truly a deficit?

After Familias Leonas TDAH‘s last meeting in Mar del Plata and the repercusion of my blog post about my diagnosis, I’ve been talking to quite a few families about it; specially mothers and grandmothers of ADHD kids, but also other people who don’t have the disorder and wanted to know and understand a little bit more about it.

And there was a particular topic that I would like to address, and it has to do with the concept of DEFICIT within the ADHD label; stemming primarily from the name: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

And this is where we run into the first difficulty in explaining the disorder: the deficit part. What do I mean? Because it is quite easy to misunderstand what it means (or implies) to say “attention deficit“.

I am one of those ADHD adults who experience/suffer from/are privileged with hyperfocus. In my experience with other ADHD adults, either it doesn’t happen to all of us, or not everyone realizes it does. On the other hand, hyperfocus somewhat defeats the purpose of explaining ADHD as an “attention deficit“.

Because (and I’m gonna quote a comment I received thousands of times):

How could a person with an attention deficit focus so much?

I thought you couldn’t focus at all.

I think the problem lies in the concept of “DEFICIT“. I think it would be useful, as an explanatory tool for people to understand a little more about the disorder and how it affects us, if we changed the D for “deficit” to the D for “dysregulation“: attention dysregulation and hyperactivity disorder.

Let’s be clear, I’m not vouching for a name change. This is just an exercise; a tool to explain everyone else what is happening inside our brain, so they can understand it better.

Labeling it “attention deficit” implies that our attention diminishes. It is true, we do find it hard to concentrate; it is hard for us to focus on something. But not because we can’t pay attention, but because we can’t regulate where our attention goes. For must of us, we may not be able to concentrate in class, at work, or whatever, but if we find something that interests us, we get flabbergasted by it and time flies by. Literally.

That is our problem. We cannot regulate what to focus on: because either we cannot focus at all, or we focus SO MUCH, SO INTENSELY on something that everything else simply ceases to exist. People have seen me work, spend 10 hours engrossed in a project, forgetting to eat, answer the phone, get up to stretch my legs, or even listen to another person even if they are right next to me. And then they ask me: “Weren’t you supposed to have attention deficit?”

Well, yeah. I mean, sometimes it’s a deficit and sometimes it’s not. My problem isn’t NOT BEING ABLE to focus; well, yeah, sometimes it is. But sometimes I focus so strongly on something I cannot escape its grasp.

When channeled into something productive, my ADHD is a SUPERPOWER.

When I hyperfocus on something useless…. well, it’s not.

Quick example: last week, my brain hyperfocused on a missplaced eyelash for an entire conversation. Everything else ceased to exist. I found out, much later, the conversation lasted at least half an hour. I have absolutely no recollection of that conversation, but the kicker is I kept talking like nothing. For half an hour. Clearly, my brain was fully on automatic.

In summary, as a didactic tool for outsiders, we could explain the D in ADHD as not necessarily an attention Deficit (meaning a lack of it); but instead as a dysregulation of our ability to focus.