Are we all ADHD?
Against Moderation
by Robert R. Harris
New York Times (May 6, 2007)
A Review of: THE JOY OF DRINKING
by Barbara Holland (Bloomsbury)
This new book reminds me of the suggestion that the United States gene pool is slanted towards producing offspring with Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD).
Noted authority Edward M. Hallowell suggested that the American gene pool is “heavily loaded for ADD” because…
”The people who founded our country, and continued to populate it over time, were just the types of people who might have ADD. They did not like to sit still. They had to be willing to take an enormous risk… they were action oriented, independent, wanting to get away from old ways and strike out on their own.” (Driven to Distraction, p.191)
Along these same lines, Paul Steinberg recently wrote in the New York Times that…
Essentially, A.D.H.D. is a problem dealing with the menial work of daily life, the tedium involved in many school situations and 9-to-5 jobs. Another hallmark, impulsivity, or its more positive variant, spontaneity, appears to be a vestige from lower animals forced to survive in the wild….
In her newly published book, Barbara Holland records a vivid vignette from early American history which is passed on to us by Robert Harris in his review:
She reminds us that in 1787, two days before their work was done, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Note the 55 delegates and 54 bottles of Madeira. Which founder was slacking?
ADHD “may be associated with an increased risk of alcohol and drug abuse” (Mayo), although alcohol use could conceivably sometimes be seen as an attempt to self-medicate in order to achieve a measure of what can now be better achieved by prescription medications. Alcohol was the most convenient drug of choice if this partly accounts for their drinking behavior.
The early colonists were known as heavy drinkers, more so than the Europeans. America’s drinking habits eventually led to temperance movements which mutated into a religiously motivated abstinence movement by the mid 19th century and resulted in the prohibition amendment in the early 20th century. As conservative Protestantism developed and then became identified as Fundamentalist, it continued the stance that virtually made drinking alcohol a sin or at least a questionable activity, a stance that many mainline churches have moderated.
Although the prohibition amendment was repealed, the legalistic approach to drug issues persisted, and has resulted in an American inflexibility that makes it difficult to address drug abuse in our society with equanimity, and may actually have accelerated the problem since prohibition fostered the development of organized crime.
Today we not only have high rates of illegal drug abuse; we also have high rates of prescription drug use and abuse ( 1 2 3 ). U.S. prescriptions for ADHD treatment exceed those in Europe, although authorities believe this is because of inappropriate prescribing.
All this makes you wonder if it is possible to learn from our history. And I wonder if there really is a possibility we actually do have a national tendency towards ADD/ADHD? And if we became convinced that we do, would it make any difference? How we envision solutions to problems has everything to do with how we envision the causes of those problems; so that fact more than any other may well determine whether we will allow ourselves to consider this possibility.
