The ADD Mythology (Part 3)

Notes to the Reader:

1. This blog post was written by Betsy Davenport.
2. Betsy detests the term “ADDer,” but she couldn’t come up with anything else. As Editor-in-Chief and blog owner, I’ve decided to use the term “ADDer.”

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Myth No. 3: ADDers Are More Sociable
The “sociable” person with AD/HD is likely to be offending people left and right without realizing it, if she is running off at the mouth and nothing to stop her; and at least one study cites childhood shyness in girls as a predictor of AD/HD (as childhood boisterousness is a predictor for boys). There isn’t much difference between saying everything that comes to mind, or nothing at all, if both options are a response to overcrowding of thoughts and the brain’s failure to sort through and automatically nudge forward the one thing one would like to have said. Similarly, chronic lateness and chronic earliness both are characteristic of people without an inner sense of time. The primary difference is that the early bird’s overcompensation may not inconvenience others as much.

People with AD/HD can certainly be inappropriate; and the sooner we accept responsibility for that, the sooner we’ll have good friends. Everyone else is not uptight, though some certainly are; but many have been able with enviable ease to learn and accommodate to our culture’s ways without any loss of spontaneity (which word, by the way, is often used by our encyclopedia salesmen as code for “impulsive”). Planning – yes, with some flexibility – increases the chance of getting to do the things we need and want to do, and at the times we later on would be glad to have done them.