Since I’m back on campus, I’m cleaning out my auxiliary inboxen. One of the mailing lists I’m sucsribed to has accumulated about 700 messages over the past month; it’s not as bad as it sounds, though, since there’s a weird bug in the mail server handling the list that’s creating many, many duplicates of randomly chosen messages.
Anyhow, one post I’ve seen three or four times now concerns Adult Attention Defecit Disorder
. (It’s a little off-topic, since the mailing list in question is about the works of a certain author, but let that be.) This is a mental disorder with symptoms like: you have trouble focusing. You tend to start multiple projects at the same time, but have trouble finishing them. You have trouble sitting still in meetings, you fidget. You tend to be late to work, due to a generally poor sense of time.
Well, here’s the thing: I know many, many people with variations on some or all of these symptoms. In fact, from a Myers-Briggs point of view, most if not all of these symptoms are character traits associated with P (for Perceiving) type personalities… which make up something like half the population.
I’m not claiming that there’s no such thing as (A)ADD; I’m not a psychologist nor a mental health professional, and don’t really have the data to make an informed decision. I am questioning whether the complex of symptoms that are being described as characteristic of AADD automatically qualify as a disorder. I wonder whether this is really only a disorder
in the sense that people who evince these symptoms don’t fit into the boxes that society provides for us. So why is it the problem of the individuals and not a problem with the greater society?