The Invisible ADHD of a Gifted Mind
For the highly intelligent, neurodivergence can hide in plain sight.
Mental health awareness has come a long way. Gone are the days when the word “psychology” evoked a pretentious, pipe-smoking erudite furrowing his brow at the free association of a couch-bound neurotic. While many still consider the field pseudoscience, most can at least acknowledge its practicality. Therapy is helpful. Depression is real. Anxiety is more common than the common cold, and trauma can strike any of us in a thousand monstrous forms. Particularly with younger generations, it is no longer taboo to express these realities out loud.
And yet, our collective understanding of ADHD lags painfully behind.
The past two decades have yielded breakthroughs. A problem once limited to young boys who couldn’t sit still, its scope has expanded from these restless students to people of all genders, ages and walks of life. We now recognize ADHD as a developmental, far-reaching and potentially lifelong disorder of executive functioning — a disorder that one does not simply “grow out of.” With brain imaging technology, structural differences have emerged in the ADHD cortices to hint at etiology. Our understanding has progressed lightyears.
