I used to think my inability to get mundane and bureaucratic tasks accomplished came down to being lazy and disorganised, but thanks to a series of YouTube adverts I’ve had to listen to, I have come to realise that I actually have something called “high-IQ ADHD”.
Yes, when you think about it, the fact that it takes me a week to move a box is proof that I am very smart.
Yep. You’d better not be criticising me for failing to pick up my socks. I have a condition. Do I get to skip queues in airports for this?
I’m kidding, of course. The argument of these adverts — which promote some kind of personality test, and which hilariously features downtrodden husbands being lectured by their mothers-in-law that “most men your age are CEOs” — is that what seems like “laziness” can have sympathetic underpinnings.
There’s something to this. When I fail to get a mundane or bureaucratic task done, I sometimes tell myself: you’re busy, you’re tired, you have a lot on your mind, you get anxious about bureaucracy, you didn’t even see that sock on the floor. It’s all true. I’m not failing to do such things just because I want to sit around and watch pro wrestling. I have genuine struggles.
But laziness is not simply a failure to accomplish things. It is also a failure to try. We can accept that X and Y might be valid obstacles in front of doing Z. The point is that we should try to do it anyway.
This isn’t always possible — at least for everyone. It would make no sense to tell someone with clinical depression, say, that they should be more active. But our state of mind can make things more difficult without making them impossible. If my femur has been broken, I can’t walk. It’s as simple as that. If I have a twisted ankle, I can walk. It might be painful and tiring. I might need a rest sometimes. But light my chair on fire and I’ll walk away from it.
I think these adverts are exploiting a modern trend towards excessively medicalising common states of mind. Allen Frances was the chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force that oversaw the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV. But he became concerned about what he called “diagnostic hyperinflation”. “The elastic boundaries of psychiatry have been steadily expanding,” he wrote, “Because there is no bright line separating the worried well from the mildly mentally disordered.”
Hence, I can be told that my failure to change a lightbulb is because of “high-IQ ADHD”.
True, the adverts are promoting some kind of product which promises to “rewire your brain”. But I think a lot of people, on being told that they have a condition, would just use it as a cop-out. “Mop the bathroom floor? I’d love to. But you know — I have high-IQ ADHD. Yep. I guess I’ll just watch wrestling. Enjoy cleaning the bathroom.”
“I fear that a view that talks too much about internal biological processes makes people passive victims,” writes Suzanne O’Sullivan, author of The Age of Diagnosis:
A person who believes they are incapable behaves as if they are incapable, which provokes others to treat them as if they are incapable, and so the cycle feeds back into itself.
She’s right. Again, some people really are incapable of doing things. I’m not trying to deny the potential of mental illnesses and disorders — or life experiences — to incapacitate. I’m saying that the existence of a difficult emotional or otherwise psychological state is not incapacitatory per se. Sometimes, even if there is in no sense a moral obligation to do something, there is a moral obligation to do our best. But wrongly assuming that one is incapacitated is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Granted, I’m not sure it is generally productive to call people lazy and disorganised. I was a teacher for about a decade and I know it tends to make people defensive or despairing, because it is interpreted as an essential defect and not an improvable weakness. There are more positive ways to inspire people.
But when I think about my own failure to learn Polish or send an invoice, “lazy” is truer than “high-IQ ADHD” — not because I am not busy, tired, and distracted, but because a productive life depends on being busy, tired, and distracted, and doing it anyway. People who lie are sometimes under real pressure. People who are cruel have sometimes faced real provocation. To struggle is not to be acquitted of all responsibility.