Aug 4, 2021
Your Mental Health is Not a Weapon
ADHD doesn’t make you a bad person on its own
There is an incessant amount of stigma surrounding mental illnesses in our society. Many illnesses are considered disabilities, and with good reason.
I was diagnosed with ADHD nearly two years ago as an adult, which is unfortunately the norm for many women who have it. The disorder presents itself very differently in young boys versus young girls, and even more differently in adults. It regularly goes ignored or worse, misdiagnosed and treated as something else entirely.
There are three different forms of ADHD: Inattentive, hyperactive/impulsive, or a combination of the two. A lot of people are diagnosed with ADHD during childhood, but many of us go all of our lives up into adulthood before getting a proper diagnosis or treatment plan.
A big factor in ADHD in adulthood specifically is executive dysfunction. This means that for a lot of people with ADHD, doing regular every-day tasks are hard work. It’s more than just procrastination or laziness, it’s that I genuinely can’t do the dishes or fold the laundry.
Ask me to make a list of all of the house chores that need to be done and I can do that. Now ask me to do them? I’m going to spend three hours trying to figure out which task should be done first and what order everything else should be done in.
ADHD — as well as any other disorder— is going to affect every person differently. One person may be very impulsive in their ADHD and do things without thinking it through, while someone else may get distracted so often and easily that taking an exam is near impossible.
Here’s the thing about all mental disorders though: Having a mental illness doesn’t inherently make you a bad person.
Sure, the illness can make you do things that other people may not do, but it doesn’t force you to do bad things. Unfortunately with the way social media spreads, many people are stigmatizing ADHD, Autism, Borderline Personality Disorder, and many other illnesses by spewing misinformation and misleading followers.
YouTube personalities like Gabbie Hanna or Trisha Paytas have a dangerous pattern of stigmatizing disorders by making excuses about their behavior and using their mental health as a crutch. With their millions upon millions of followers across all platforms, this is a hazardous game to play.
Paytas, for example, has a long history of pretending to have certain disorders (most recently and notably Dissociative Personality Disorder) and therefore discrediting the very real experiences that actual DID patients have. The way they portray these disorders is often times satirical or flat out discriminatory towards people who actually have them. For a while, Trisha even claimed that they were a trans man and would be transitioning physically. After one more video though, they were back to their old self and pretending that their “coming out” had never happened.
Trisha has since come out as non-binary and uses they/she pronouns.
Hanna on the other hand as taken it upon herself to spread her ADHD diagnosis like wildfire across the internet so that everyone knows that she can’t be blamed for her actions. When she misgenders transgender people online, it’s not because she’s rude, it’s because she has ADHD. When she doesn’t fill out medical records and food request forms on a film set and then throws a temper tantrum when she doesn’t get her way, it’s not because she is at fault, it’s because she has ADHD.
My ADHD makes me do a lot of things but it has never once made me a mean, vindictive person. It has never made me spew hatred at people and say things I didn’t mean. It has never made me misgender someone repeatedly without ever correcting it or simply apologizing.
My ADHD has made me forget appointments, not allowed me to eat for an entire day because nothing sounds good, and made it impossible to concentrate on a single activity at a time. I’ve had meltdowns, I’ve been emotional, I’ve spent a hundred dollars at Target because I wanted to feel something. I’ve never once used my ADHD and executive dysfunction as an excuse for poor behavior.
There’s a massive difference between using something as an excuse and using it as an explanation, and the key difference between them is whether or not you are acknowledging that what you did was wrong.
Furthermore, if someone calls you out for doing something wrong, calling that person an ableist doesn’t help matters much compared to the disabled people out there who genuinely do deal with ableism every single day.
When we talk about mental health and illnesses, we need to be cautious about how we talk on the topic. If we are excusing poor behavior, racism, or ugliness with “oops, I have ADHD" that doesn’t help anyone else in the neurodivergent community.
It is absolutely wonderful that people are speaking up about their mental health problems and normalizing diagnoses, medication, and treatment plans. What isn’t helpful or useful is when other people take advantage of their disorders and use it as a crutch for doing bad things.
If you do a bad thing, that’s that. ADHD doesn’t make someone bad, just like DID, BPD, Bipolar Disorder, or anything else doesn’t make someone bad. People just do bad things sometimes. And yeah, sometimes there is a contributing factor of a mental illness that creates impulsivity, dissociation, memory loss, and overstimulation but that doesn’t mean that someone is allowed to treat others badly because of it.
I have never thrown a fit at work because I didn’t get the snacks I wanted. I have never used racist or prejudiced language because I was feeling impulsive. I have never called other people mean names or claimed they were narcissists because I didn’t like the way they felt about me.
The way that ideas like these can spread is harmful to those of us that are still learning and understanding our own ADHD and neurodivergencies. People are not going to feel comfortable speaking out about having ADHD if there are people like Gabbie Hanna making it seem like we are all bad people.
