Trevor Noah and the Privilege of ADHD — How Designer Diagnoses Cause Harm to the Rest of Us
I love Trevor Noah. He is funny and kind and comes across as humble and self-aware. Unfortunately, as with many people who rise to fame following a challenging past, he is prone to vulnerability and gullibility.
Like the rest of us, Trevor desperately wants to belong, to fit in, to be seen and heard and understood. Belonging is a universal need. When that need is not met on a regular basis, we are all prone to spiraling into “insanity” — but not all insanity is created equal — as the corrupt DSM-5 so clearly illustrates.
“Clusters of symptoms” can be easily identified by looking at the four categories of trauma responses and realizing that we all respond to trauma in the same basic ways — a combination of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Post-traumatic stress is universal. Post-traumatic-stress-DISORDER (PTSD) occurs when we are unable to fully process our trauma. Complex-PTSD occurs when many tiny unaddressed traumas accumulate over years and years, often unrecognized as trauma — “death by a 1000 paper cuts”.
The differences between the symptomatology of ADHD and ODD — Oppositional Defiant Disorder — are negligible and open to bias. Can you guess which type of children are offered an ADHD diagnosis and which ones have an ODD diagnosis forced on them?
Is it any wonder people wear their ADHD diagnoses like badges of honor? It’s a perfect excuse to separate themselves from those “others” — the defective, oppositional people who defy (aka — try to protect themselves from) authority.
The ADHD misdiagnosis becomes even more damaging when parents mistakenly believe they have passed their own ADHD on to their children and medicate them for a condition that doesn’t exist. This behavior is reminiscent of the bizarre Munchausen By Proxy cases I witnessed as a pediatric nurse — but when promulgated by the experts in charge, what choice do the parents have?
This is psychiatric betrayal at its worse — experts who stick to a narrative even when the scientic evidence is not there. The professionals who are supposed to be helping us, become our unknowing abusers. Their well-meaning but invalidating words create cognitive dissonance and severe shame in both the professional and their victims, perpetuating the vicious shame spiral and causing ripples of complex-trauma.
“Othering” (labeling) is the equivalent of dehumanization. Aren’t we better than that? Shouldn’t our psychiatric system be better than that?
Labels separate us into categories and create stigma. Compassion means recognizing our shared humanity and treating all vulnerable human beings as the trauma survivors we are. It’s now up to society to break the stigma. The experts have failed us.
Modern psychiatry has proven that the “experts” are incapable of compassion. Thier hubris and lack of empathy are evident in the way they dole out diagnoses without a solid understanding of why their patients are struggling. Their refusal to pay attention to the real experts speaks volumes. Informed consent becomes meaningless when the “information” is so faulty.
Experts have even taken to diagnosing people who are no longer alive — talk about hubris! I wonder what John Lennon and Albert Einstien would feel about their ADHD diagnoses. Would Vincent Van Gogh reject his post-mortem schizophrenia diagnoses as Edvard Munch rejected his diagnosis while alive?
Let us not forget all the amazing humans lost to suicide. Might they still be alive if we’d recognized and treated their complex-PTSD before it was too late?
The sooner we accept that mental health diagnoses are actually trauma responses to Complex-PTSD, the sooner we can start treating all people as human beings and not as diagnoses that divide us into groups.
The only real difference between someone diagnosed with ADHD and someone diagnosed with ODD is that they’ve developed different trauma-responses.
ADHD = flight and fawn
ODD = flight and fight
And you can do this for every single diagnosis in the DSM:
Depression = freeze
Anxiety, OCD, etc. = flight
Bipolar = freeze/fawn (depression) to flight/fight (mania)
NPD = fight/fawn
Borderline, schizophrenia, etc = all of the above
Addiction = mainly flight (escape from the pain), but also self-medication (we are drawn to the substances that alleviate our trauma-responses: food & alcohol for freeze, caffeine & nicotine & cocaine for flight, opioids & ecstasy for fawn)
The one-size-fits-all treatment for complex-PTSD is simple — it’s called compassion, not false compassion as peddled by the experts, but fierce compassion that arises from understanding the power of our own narcissism.
Fierce self-compassion [healthy narcissism] doesn’t simply mean changing ourselves. It also means changing the systems that cause us harm. — Kristin Neff
The experts have failed to help us. It’s now up to us to help ourselves. Those of us burdened with stigmatized diagnoses need celebrities to dig deep on their own compassion and recognize the harm you are causing the rest of us. Let’s work together to change the systems that are causing us harm.
Please stop othering us so we can #breakthestigma for all.
