Transcript of 7 Common Myths About ADHD That Stigmatize People

There's a lot of misconceptions and myths about ADHD, and unfortunately, these false beliefs perpetuate the stigma around the disorder. I'm going to debunk seven of the common ones. I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist and I make mental health education videos. These myths are in no specific order. The first one is believing that we all have ADHD at some level, we all have it. This idea is a variant on the base belief that ADHD, which stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder isn't a real illness. Instead, it's a focus problem that falls on a spectrum that affects everyone. Well, true. We can all struggle at times to pay attention if we have a lot going on, or need to sustain attention for an extended period. The ADHD is so much more than trouble focusing. In fact, there are a lot of reasons that you can have trouble focusing and concentrating. Some of these reasons are not getting enough sleep, being run down for any reason, sick, working long hours or being burned out. Also, anxiety interferes with focus and concentration. Illnesses like COVID can give you brain fog that makes it hard to focus and organize your thoughts. So all of those are things that can interfere with your focus. I said ADHD is more than a focus problem. People with ADHD also have trouble with motivation. Time management is huge. Organization, multitasking, and in some people there's emotional dysregulation. I talk about that in my video on symptoms that you can see in adults with ADHD. These symptoms taken together cause a lot of problems for people such that the person with ADHD who doesn't get it addressed can flounder and underperform such that they never reach their full potential. Everyone isn't experiencing those consequences. So yes, there are lots of things that can distract us and make it hard to get things done, but no, everyone doesn't have the brain disorder of ADHD that most often leads to a lot of negative consequences for the people affected by it. Number two, ADHD medication is a crutch. It's hard for me to talk about this one without getting upset. Medication isn't for everyone with ADHD. It is a double edged sword because it comes with side effects that are intolerable for some people, but when it works, medication corrects or improves a disability and levels the playing field for the person with ADHD. The idea that medication gives people with ADHD superpowers goes back to the belief that it's not an illness, but a decision you make not to do the things expected of you like you can turn it on and off at will. It is true that people with ADHD can hyperfocus on the things that they're interested in, but they can't control the things that they're interested in. You can wave a million dollars in someone's face and say, "You get this if you can just read these 10 books and summarize them this week." The money doesn't give them the power to push through and complete the task. If the content of the material doesn't resonate in a way that keeps their attention, they won't be able to complete the task. It just won't happen, even though they desperately wanted to. So this hyperfocus interest thing is not just something that they pick and choose based on selfish interests. Also, the hyperfocus can be a bad thing because they can get locked into something and lose track of time, and therefore neglect other important obligations or be late to things, making people angry, or not completing assignments because they got lost in something while they were hyperfocused. I mentioned not taking medication because of side effects. This hyperfocused thing can happen in a negative way as a consequence of taking stimulants. You may have five things that you need to complete. You take your Adderall, and six hours later, you've done one thing. That one thing is fleshed out in a lot of detail that's probably overkill, but you've let some people down by not doing the other things. Number three, myth. If you cared enough, you'd remember things. This is related to the concept of paying attention to the things that interest you, and the assumption that you choose what interests you. People with ADHD can be extremely forgetful. Memory requires a certain amount of focus and attention to a subject to encode the information and then retrieve it later. If you don't attend to something long enough, it will not be encoded and you won't remember it. A good example of this is for getting someone's name right after they said it. For example, let's say I walk up to you and introduce myself. You may see me and the first thought that comes to your mind is her hair looks awfully thick. Can she get a comb through it? You may even imagine me struggling with it. If that's what's going on in your mind while I'm saying my name, you're not going to encode the information even though you heard it because your mind was occupied with other thoughts. This is how it can be all the time with someone with ADHD; information goes in one ear and out the other and only some of it gets retained. The things that get retained are not cherry picked based on what you care about. Sometimes it's just random, but this can be a difficult thing for people close to you to accept even though they understand it intellectually, and that's where you as the person with ADHD has to create a system that reminds you of the things that are important to other people for the sake of your relationships, job, or school. Number four, accommodations give people with ADHD an unfair advantage. Most school accommodations are things like getting extra time to take tests or complete assignments, and there are other things like sitting near the front of the class or taking tests in a separate room. People who believe this myth are usually referring to the extra time. Hey, I got a concert I want to go to the night before an assignment is due. I want to get some extra time too. The extra time needed for the person with ADHD is because of the things that I mentioned before, like getting sucked into a hyperfocus hole, or having trouble organizing your time, or even reading and processing information slower. It can take you longer just to read and reread the questions on a test. The person without ADHD doesn't have these problems. If you need more time for a test because you're not prepared and don't know the information, that's a completely different issue from needing more time because you process the information slower. Number five, people with ADHD aren't very smart. Things like needing more time for tests and assignments can make people pass this judgment, but if you have ADHD, you can even think this about yourself, especially if you're failing classes or struggling to finish work tasks that your coworkers don't have a problem finishing. In this setting, it's easy to think what's wrong with me? I'm just not good at anything. But the information processing impairment that comes with ADHD is a completely separate entity from intellectual capacity. Think of it as a performance issue. You have a certain set of capabilities, but you stumble with the execution of things. I'll use myself as an example. You hear about people being able to read a book in a day. I could never read a book in a day. I can only stay focused so long before I forget what I read and have to go back and reread. So I have to read very slowly if I don't want to backtrack. Because of my slow reading, my fifth grade teacher told me or told my parents that I don't belong in advanced classes. Fortunately, my parents ignored that feedback and encouraged me to focus on the things that I was good at like math and science. But if you don't have someone in your corner, this kind of rhetoric can seep into your soul and shape what you think about yourself, especially when it comes from an authoritative source or people whose opinions matter to you. Number six, people with ADHD lack discipline and are lazy. It can look like laziness or lack of discipline from the outside, but on the inside, it's lack of adequate motivation. The motivation I'm talking about is a brain-derived motivation and not externally motivated. And what do I mean by that? I've heard it said you're not motivated? You can't remember? Well, maybe if I pull out my belt, you'll get motivated. No. Punishment, shaming, and threats don't motivate. The threat of losing your job may motivate the person or get the person moving who lets their self interest get in the way of getting their work done. But the person with ADHD has a brain that does not produce enough dopamine and the nerve circuits that control motivation and reward. I talk about that in detail in my video on motivation. I'll have that video linked at the end of this one and in the description. As for laziness, what seems like an easy task for the person without ADHD can seem monumental to the person with ADHD. The low motivation from low dopamine can make you feel completely inert like you can't move. Inertia is defined as a property of matter where things at rest remain at rest or remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force. With ADHD, you can't always access the force that changes your current state. You know you need to do this thing, but you're stuck in this mind space and just can't get out of it. And similarly, with the hyperfocus, you can be moving at 50 miles an hour on some task and you can't get out of the fast lane. You just have to keep going until something comes along that forces you out of it or you just run out of steam. So the inactivity here is involuntary. Last myth, number seven is ADHD medication makes people with ADHD more likely to become addicts or drug seeking. This belief stems back to the idea that medication is unnecessary because ADHD isn't a real disorder that requires medication to correct it. It is true that stimulants are habit-forming, but the addiction comes from the people who are taking them for performance enhancement and not to correct a neurodevelopmental brain disorder. Stimulants produce immediate results within minutes to an hour. And like other medications that produce these quick responses like benzodiazepines, your body can become tolerant to the effects. So over time, the dose that you took becomes less effective and you need a higher dose to get the same effect. I usually encourage my patients to take breaks from the medication like on the weekends or vacation if they can because giving your body a break from it slows the tolerance process. But tolerance can happen with anyone and isn't proof that you're becoming addicted. Addiction happens when someone misuses the medication, like taking it around the clock to be on top of their game day and night. And this might be someone who's working two jobs and needs to be awake for 20 hours a day, but our bodies aren't meant to be awake for 20 hours a day. The current Adderall and Ritalin shortages perpetuate this myth. Adderall and Ritalin are scheduled to control substances in the same category of abuse potential as the opioids. Now, many of them are back ordered and some pharmacies if you call them won't tell you over the phone if they have it in stock. You then may have to drive around shopping from pharmacy to pharmacy to find one who has it. And all this secrecy about where you can get it and where you can't get it changes the tone and the vibe around taking stimulants and puts you into a drug seeking mode, which is something associated with addiction. Technically, you are drug seeking, but you're seeking the medication that's out of stock that you were prescribed to treat a condition. Take a look at these other videos that I have on ADHD, understanding the brain chemistry behind it and how it can look differently in adults, and share this video with someone you think believes some of these myths so that we can decrease the stigma around having the disorder and getting help for it. Thanks for watching. See you next time.