personal writings about ADD/ADHD

August 4, 2013 5:20 PM

I'm looking for high-quality, moving, compelling, interesting writing about having ADD; i.e. personal essays, creative nonfiction, that sort of thing.

I'm not looking for something like a journalistic article about why so many kids have ADD, or changing attitudes in the field of psychiatry, or whatever. I don't care about degree of exposure as much as quality-- if your friend wrote something particularly terrific on her audience-of-zero zine in 1998, great, that's totally included in what I'm looking for. Alternately, if Junot Díaz wrote a moving piece that was featured in the New Yorker and reblogged to all hell, that's great too.

Thanks!

Sorry to momentarily make the Green into ADDfilter; I had this question in my head for a while and the other question reminded me.

posted by threeants to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

Well, I would start with the AskMe post of a few years ago. There's some good stuff in there.
posted by MexicanYenta at 7:51 PM on August 4, 2013

Here's a comment I wrote about my experiences in response to someone posting an article somewhere that argued that ADD/ADHD was a "fictitious disease". I'm not sure how high-quality, moving, compelling or interesting you'll find it but here goes:

Given the amount of breathless hyperbole per scientific reference in that article (essentially infinity - lots of opinions, no data or references) I'd trust it about as far as I can throw it. But this is the internet and people are quick to ignore rigorous controlled studies and embrace anecdotes, so here are mine:

My boss once put a copy of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in his shelf full of protein biochemistry books and, according to him, on the day he put it up there I was talking to him, my eyes went kind of out of focus and I broke into a grin and commented on it. No one else noticed it. In ten years.

I once left a plate of cookies on the credenza behind a co-workers desk while she was typing a memo or report or something. If it had been me, there is no way I could have not turned around to see what was up when I heard a 6'4" 300 lb ogre waltz into my office and unwrap a plate of cookies, or smelled the cookies themselves, or noticed said ogre's reflection in the window or monitor or when he eclipsed one of the ceiling lights. She came by my desk an hour later to ask if I knew who left the cookies. Similarly, I have found myself being annoyed as hell by odd sounds (whistling air handling systems, et al) pointed it out and had people say, "Oh, I hadn't noticed."

The punchline, of course, is that in the state of nature they would all be dependent upon me to say, "Hey, you might want to wait for that saber toothed cat to clear off before you go down to the water hole. In modern civilization where you worth is dependent on how quickly and well you can grind out relatively boring documents despite the various conversations, paper shuffling, and desk drumming going on in the cubicles around you and the badly tuned F-16 sound that your building's air handling system produces, I'm the one with the problem. Concerta certainly made it easier for me to not want to stand on my desk and scream, "WILL YOU PEOPLE SHUT THE HELL UP!!!! I'M TRYING TO THINK HERE!"

Fictitious my ass.

posted by Kid Charlemagne at 12:30 AM on August 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half has a few good posts about having ADD. Here are a couple of the ones I found:

Hi, I'm energetic today!

I am not a drug addict so stop thinking that...

Stephen King probably invented cancer

The entire blog is well worth checking out if you've somehow missed the 10,000 times it's been FPPed on the blue.
posted by forza at 4:41 AM on August 5, 2013