A Yuletide Apocalypse

UPDATE I’d given up trying to find this article, which is a great piece about what I’m talking/thinking about by Susan Smalley at The Huffington Post. Check it out: Living And Loving ADHD. This paragraph distills in a less schizophrenic way, what I was trying to say…

Although ADHD is still classified a disorder because of the challenges individual’s face with it, I’m more convinced everyday that it is a way of thinking and processing the world that is so beneficial to humanity, we must turn our attention to it. In many ways, our attention has been focused only on the disorder side of the condition, at the expense of the strengths, and science is just beginning to discover what those strengths might be. There is a popular book out right now, The Black Swan, about how all major changes come from ‘outliers’ in the world of ideas, the strange and misunderstood ideas that don’t fit into conceptual frameworks of the day but prove to shift humanity to new heights.

Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike - New York Times:

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies”

Booyah. That article is crappy, but I kept the link since it’s what initially inspired this entry. A better article that talks much more specifically about this connection can be found here. Some quotes (I love the opening:

Robert daydreamed so much that he was put out of school. Frank went into such trancelike dreams that one had to shout at him to bring him back. Equally problematic were Sam’s restlessness and verbal diatribes. Virginia, too, demonstrated a tendency to talk on and on. Thomas experienced school problems, in part because of his high energy. Nick’s tendency to act without thinking caused him to have several scrapes with death and near-tragedies, such as plunging to the earth from the roof of a barn, clutching an umbrella. In these examples we can see how the concentration, high energy, and unique ways of thinking and behaving that were exemplified by Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla resulted in school problems, dark diagnoses, or worse. These are examples of creative individuals whose behavior could also be interpreted as the inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Schools and families can best prevent misinterpretation of a child’s behaviors by becoming aware of those indicative of high creativity and attempting to sort out the disabling from enabling ones.

The article then goes on to “look at the particular problems that can beset creative children in today’s schools when their behaviors are mistaken for one of the most frequently diagnosed psychoeducational conditions, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).” Which is not really what I’m getting at. I’m more interested in those individuals who exhibit BOTH the creativity AND the AD/HD, not the misdiagnoses.

Increasingly, I have come acrosstalk of its connection to creativity and unique thinking (on a related note: the idea of differing types of intelligence, vs. the uniform standard promoted today.) The connection between atypical brains, historically, with creativity is also quite strong, as mentioned in the paragraph above. For a fascinating exploration of this issue, read The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain“ by Alice Weaver Flaherty.

People lament the drugging of America’s youth and the stifling of all those bubbling young minds…, that’s another post for another time, but I mention it only to raise this question:
How does medication relate to the positive characteristics of AD/HD-type personalities? (and more generally, the creative effects of other mental illnesses, such as manic depression and bi-polar disorder)

I’d argue from my personal experience that medication can actually promote creativity, since it allows ‘independent thinkers’ to channel their otherwise anarchic mass of ideas into something that can actually be communicated to normal people, and used to impact the world. What good are all those innovative ideas if the person developing them a.) Can’t develop any of them past a few fragments that have meaning only for the innovator, b.) Can’t articulate the ideas so as to communicate them to others, and c.) Can’t stay on the task of coming up with ideas long enough to come up with some ideas!!

So I guess my conclusion from all this is that drugs have their place, though they obviously should not be taken unquestioningly, or without constant reevaluation (only as a last resort). Beyond that, there is a clear place, perhaps even a more valued place for people with this type of thinking, especially in areas that value such spontaneous, outside the box thinking. BUT, such people require innovative management (not in the bureaucratic sense, but in the ”micro“ sense. Like having a boss who understands such a person’s strengths and weaknesses, and how best to let these people exercise their comparative advantage.

p.s. I considered waiting to post this until I edited it into a nicely organized, flowing piece of writing… But I think it’ll be more fun just to post it as-is, in all its attention-deficit glory. TO BE CONTINUED…

also see this post that I wrote wayyy back in 2005