ADHD & The Influence of Words

How much influence does language have on our perceptions of ADHD? Explore how societal norms and terminology have contributed to negative biases against neurodivergent individuals, leading to internalized stigma and self-hatred. In this episode of Hypercast, we examine the impact of terms like 'disability' and 'social deficits' and their role in reinforcing harmful perceptions. We also highlight the often-overlooked irony of pathologizing neurotypical behaviors and discuss the urgent need for a shift in how we describe and understand neurodivergent experiences.

Melissa's Contact:
Email: melissa@likemindcoaching.com
www.likemindcoaching.com

Brianna's Contact:
Email: info@understandingadhd.ca
www.understandingADHD.ca

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Chapters

• 0:00 Power of Language in ADHD Stigma
• 15:09 Reclaiming Power Through Language Acceptance
• 24:13 Navigating ADHD Support and Community

Transcript

Melissa: 0:00

Hi, there you're listening to Hypercast, an ADHD podcast. I'm Melissa, an ADHD coach and advocate.

Brianna: 0:07

Hi, I'm Brianna, an ADHD coach and soon-to-be therapist. We are here to explore all things ADHD, from unexpected challenges to unique strengths.

Melissa: 0:15

Join us as we share insights and strategies that empower you to live your best ADHD life.

Brianna: 0:21

Ready? Let's dive into today's episode.

Melissa: 0:30

Welcome to Hypercast. Welcome to Hypercast.

Brianna: 0:34

Hi Brianna, hi Melissa. So today we're talking about a topic that I'm very excited to talk about. We're talking about the power of language and how it can be used against us people with ADHD, and has real life, physical impact on our minds, on our well-being, on our body and how it's baked in, and you might not even notice some of this stuff.

Melissa: 1:02

Absolutely. It has real life consequences.

Brianna: 1:05

Why are we talking about this today, Like, why is it important for you, Melissa? Why did you agree to?

Melissa: 1:10

let me rant about this First you're really excited about it, but I think it's really important to take a look at the roots of why we may feel the way we feel about ourselves, the way society views ADHD, the way we feel about ourselves, the way society views ADHD and where the roots of all that comes from.

Brianna: 1:29

I absolutely agree. I'm promised not to rant for too long on this episode, I promise, but I do need a little rant. The history of ADHD and the medicalization and the pathologization of ADHD and autism spectrum disorder, all those type of things, is because we live in a hierarchy and our differences mean we've been placed at the bottom of that hierarchy and they needed language to keep us at the bottom. There is a social hierarchy and because we're different, because we don't fit in, we are seen as other and therefore there needs to be language surrounding that other.

Melissa: 2:09

Other usually makes people nervous, especially if you haven't encountered that other before. You may have heard about it in the wild, you may have heard about it on the internet, you may have seen it on TikTok. But what does it look like in real life? What is it? What is it like to actually communicate with someone who is neurodivergent? Those are things that people may not always experience. Even if they may know someone who is neurodivergent, maybe they don't actually know that person may have not disclosed to them, or the person themselves isn't even been diagnosed yet, and so they just don't know how to put things in context.

Brianna: 2:43

You might not even know yourself. Basically, it's this us versus them. Mentality of something about them is different, same for every minority, the visual ones, of gender or race or whatever. And then there's the invisible ones, like neurodivergences, where you can mask and you can hide your differences, which is really draining for us, but it allows you to camouflage and blend in and be a part of the us and not feel the consequences of being the other. So the discrimination, the stigma. And then what happens when you internalize that discrimination and stigma is that self-hatred piece.

Brianna: 3:20

My favorite piece the reason we were othered and pathologized in the first place was to keep us in our place and the language that they used around that was this very disability, disabled diagnosis disorder, social deficits are baked into the autism diagnosis. What on earth is a social deficit? It's a difference. What on earth is a social deficit? It's a difference. There's been studies, and studies abound, that demonstrate that our version of communication is not broken. It works just fine for us. I can talk to neurodivergent people all day long and we communicate really well. Imagine if the neurotypical was pathologized. Have you ever thought of that, melissa, where you're just like, oh you, poor neurotypical person apologize. Have you ever thought of that, melissa, where you're just like, oh you poor neurotypical person. It must be so rough to always think in straight lines and not have a million thoughts going on. You lack creativity. That's so sad. You don't you make eye contact. That must be so uncomfortable for you.

Melissa: 4:18

Oh my God, I wish I could think that way. I'm always thinking it's so damn easy for you. And yeah, I think that's. What makes it hard is that the world is built to cater to one sort of brain orientation and that one is not necessarily ours. And it does make fitting in difficult. I know that society has certain expectations of me, and then it's almost like I'm letting myself down if I can't live up to those expectations.

Melissa: 4:46

Yeah, but who put those expectations in place in the first place Was it us no, but I feel like I have been conditioned to make sure that I'm constantly reminded that I don't fit in and that I must live up to those expectations.

Brianna: 5:01

And why have you been conditioned and feel that there is this constant monitoring of your behavior and that you have?

Melissa: 5:08

to fit in, because my behavior was constantly monitored and I was constantly told that I should act in certain ways.

Brianna: 5:15

Yeah, that policing of behavior through language. Have you ever been called crazy, lazy, my least favorite stupid? But that's the power of language. It is used to police our behavior, it is used to make us feel different, it is used to make us feel othered and it's so simple to just slip into the conversation Like it's so subtle. Are there any examples that you can think of in your life where it's just been like subtly slipped in and it's made you feel icky but you didn't really know why that whole piece of being put in my place.

Melissa: 5:48

I feel like that's happened since I was a young child and then it made me feel like my opinions weren't valued and I would just close my mouth and wouldn't share things and people thought I was stupid. I was always checking myself Am I being too loud, Am I being too much? I was always checking myself Am I being too loud, Am I being too much? And because of that I just wouldn't open my mouth and wouldn't even volunteer my thoughts, which are valid. I have all these things that were going on inside of me and people who know me now as an adult, I don't think they even know me. I've gotten looks like I don't know who you are, because the things that I was saying on the inside I'm now saying on the outside and I'm just more confident about it because I can now accept who I am. Yeah, that self-acceptance is.

Brianna: 6:34

I've been working towards it for years and it is a beautiful thing, but it is also it's still very ostracizing. You have to be so confident because there are still going to be people out there who try, and you make them uncomfortable by being authentically you and not trying to fit into the box, so they'll try and put you in that box. Why does it have to be? Because it makes you uncomfortable. Yeah, I'm different, and different is uncomfortable sometimes because we have been pathologized, because we have been considered disabled by medicine. Oh, if only we could fix you, if only you weren't broken, if only we could give you this pill, this cure, this treatment. Then you could be like us, then you could be worthy, then you could be better, even getting better. It's a thing that happens when you're sick. You get better from being sick. That is not the case for adhd, and yet that language is still used. There is no curing adhd. We don't need a cure. Pick that x-men, mutants movie. We don't need a cure.

Melissa: 7:34

We're not broken, we're just different and in some areas we're better and it's crazy because it's almost like we've gone backwards, because if you take a look back in history at like the Renaissance era, where brains like ours weren't just appreciated, they were like super valued, they were the core of the Renaissance era, and now the tendencies that we have are considered flaky or irresponsible.

Brianna: 7:58

Yeah, and it's all a part of society. Back in caveman days, our ability to stay up late, ability to get distracted by things there was something running in the distance, there's prey I gotta go chase it. All of that stuff that's hardwired into our brains was an evolutionary advantage. And then all of a sudden, systems got put in place where we have to do taxes and forms and decisions all day, every day. So suddenly we're broken and wrong, whereas if we were just given the opportunity to thrive, we're given the supports or accommodations, which is the social model of disability that it's the environment around us that's disabling. It's not an intrinsic moral failing that we have.

Melissa: 8:38

I recently had this conversation with a family member who was a middle school principal and he said that late in his career he started educating himself on the value of different brains and he actually had to have conferences with his teachers to say you need to stop hating kids with quote unquote disabilities. It's not that they're disabled, we're just not teaching them the way that they need to be taught.

Brianna: 9:02

Yeah, it's built into every piece of medical thing. Even intelligence scales like IQ, it's only one type of IQ. It doesn't test artistry, it doesn't test musicality, it doesn't test linguistics, it doesn't test like spatial problem solving. So, like builders and people who are really good with Lego, which are all signs of intelligence, which are all highly valued and highly needed in different fields have you ever been called special or segregated? Oh, like special ed or whatever. Yeah, what is that about? Because separating people physically, taking them out of the classroom and be like oh, you're special and I heard a lot growing up special with a capital R, so they had taken the word special and made it derogatory and made it something dirty and it hurts.

Melissa: 9:52

And sometimes you get the double edged sword. You're both gifted and you may have ADHD or you're on the ASD spectrum or both, and I feel especially at certain points of my education. Teachers didn't know what the hell to do with me. Sometimes I was bored out of my mind. I had one teacher that let me make lesson plans and teach the class, and I learned more in those classes than I did in any other class. The teacher took the time to see what my strengths were and accommodate my need for learning. And let me do something.

Brianna: 10:25

I found fun, but that's another piece of this language thing is she let you do that without necessarily adding derogatory language to it. Even an individual personalized lesson plan, which is designed to help, still somehow segregates you, if that makes sense, instead of just building it into the classroom. Building it into this is available to any child who wants it and celebrating different ways of learning and saying, oh, isn't it cool that this kid learns this way and you learn this way. Wonder what you could learn from each other rather than, oh, you're doing it the normal way. Little Sally needs special help, or she gets special things, or she's different, so she gets this. It's still segregating. Even though it's tending more towards the positive, it still has that same effect of being socially isolating.

Melissa: 11:11

And of course that affects us. We will tend to not want to stand out in the crowd, so we won't ask for accommodation because we don't want to look like we're less than or that we're broken. So if we're in a large group of people, that makes it harder for us especially when we're young to ask for accommodation.

Brianna: 11:30

Yeah, that's the thing, though. Being socially isolated can have so many negative impacts. It is built into human DNA that we are social creatures, that we rely on the social structure, that we rely on one another, and if you are taken away from that, it is a huge evolutionary disadvantage and it impacts everything Self-esteem it can actually cause trauma, like trauma symptoms if you are being socially isolated. Here's the thing Stigma causes diagnostic delays, which causes treatment delays, and untreated ADHD causes so many issues of increased car accidents, lack of education, low employment, incarceration, teenage pregnancies, homelessness. All of these pieces can be attributed to untreated ADHD. If you have it, you're not getting diagnosed, you're not getting treated Because of the stigma piece. Your life has a much stronger trajectory towards the negative.

Melissa: 12:34

The importance of diagnosis, even if you never, ever pick up a prescription from the pharmacy, is that it actually shifts the lens through which you view yourself, that shifting of that lens, because you start looking back at your life and it makes sense. I wasn't slow or stupid, I have ADHD. When I look back through that ADHD lens I go, oh, that makes sense. Maybe if I had a certain accommodation or if I had certain support, things could have been different. It just changes things within yourself. For me at least, it allowed me to give myself more grace.

Brianna: 13:15

That's the biggest piece. Yeah, for me as well. That piece of once I understood that it wasn't personal, that it wasn't a moral failing, that it wasn't something that I could fix, that I just wasn't trying hard enough to fix that there was a reason. I was immediately able to understand myself better, to give myself that grace of just not feeling so bad about everything that I struggled with, because I knew that there were other people out there like me, that I wasn't like broken, that there was a reason, there was a cause, there was something that wasn't my fault that I could point to as the cause of what was going on. Just that was enough to make me shed all of that internalized stigma, all of that. It took time, it wasn't immediate.

Melissa: 14:00

I feel like for me, there's still shadows of it, like it still exists in there, and there's times where I have to talk myself down, yeah, like just the other day someone commented oh, you're fidgety today, and I immediately put on that mask.

Brianna: 14:15

I stopped shaking my leg, I stopped stimming and I was like, oh, that was a trauma response. That's what that was. It took me right back to all of that. An interesting thing I came across in my research is that often the high functioning in quotes so the low support need individuals tend to receive stronger stigma than the low functioning or the high support needs because there's this expectation of that mask, of that you can fit in. You were doing it before, you were doing it yesterday. What's different about today.

Melissa: 14:48

If you have a strength in one area, why can't you have a strength in another area?

Brianna: 14:53

Exactly, precisely because you have this intelligence or this capability and you have volitional control of some things, that other pieces should be under your control or shouldn't be this way, and there's this huge stigma piece that's attached to that.

Melissa: 15:09

What power do we have to do something about it, reclaim the language?

Brianna: 15:14

Okay, a great example is there's been a shift recently to identity-first languages. I'm autistic or I'm an ADHD-er, which is a little bit more cumbersome grammatically, but you get the point. That's a way to take back my power, because I'm saying that there's nothing wrong with identifying that.

Melissa: 15:32

And a part of that is, like you're saying, take the language back. Part of that is self-acceptance and part of that is understanding that we ultimately are not broken.

Brianna: 15:42

One of the biggest pieces that helps is having parents or friends. This research was about children, so parents specifically, who celebrated your differences, who celebrated you, who supported you, and it reduced the number of adverse childhood events, because they still haven't called that trauma in children. So if you have parents who believe in you, who say, of course you can do anything you set your mind to do, you might just have to do it a little bit differently or you might need to ask for some help, and that's totally OK. That kind of acceptance in parenthood makes a huge difference, and so if we had that level of acceptance with parents or teachers or friends or society, we would be so much better off.

Melissa: 16:27

Yeah, sometimes we're not lucky enough to have that, unfortunately. We've talked a little bit about trauma, but we may not be in a position, as children especially, to have that positive support surrounding us. Some of us either haven't or may not have that opportunity to have that ideal situation.

Brianna: 16:47

Yeah, and if you have parents who are like undiagnosed themselves and they've received all of this stigma and discrimination their whole lives, which they've internalized, so now they have this self-stigma and they see that behavior in their child, they're going to police that behavior. They're going to see that behavior in their child and say, I don't want my child to have to go through the same suffering that I went through. So they're policing that behavior. So things like, instead of calling them like decisive or passionate, they're going to call them like impulsive or over-emotional, consistent versus inflexible, enthusiastic versus rambling, like dedicated versus obsessive, like just that shift in language for the same behavior that the parents have, the child has, that the society has policed, just that shift is this behavior is good, this behavior is bad and behavior shouldn't have that moral attachment.

Brianna: 17:35

Yeah, right, before I was diagnosed, I thought I was just bad at being human. I just thought I couldn't adult, I couldn't human, I couldn't people. I literally said that I thought I was a robot because I couldn't people. I just leaned harder into being a robot and be like, oh, I'll just analyze all this behavior, I'll analyze it. And I just thought I was bad at being a human. And then I was like, oh, I'm not bad at being a human, I'm just being a human differently.

Melissa: 18:02

In your experience, you had created a definition of what human was supposed to look like and how a human was supposed to behave. I was given that definition.

Brianna: 18:09

If I had been able to create it, I would have created the definition of human differently. When I was told that I was bad at a lot of things, I just thought I was bad at peopling and then I realized that I wasn't, and it was so freeing let's bring this back to the self as children.

Melissa: 18:27

maybe we did grow up in a supportive family or had supportive friends, but maybe we didn't. Regardless, we are where we are now and we are who we are right now. And how do we do our best, once we've been diagnosed, to embrace ourselves. Even if we've got a diagnosis as a child, it does not mean that we fully accept ourselves now. How do we get to that point? How do we become more accepting?

Brianna: 18:59

of ourselves and maybe minimize this language that we've internalized.

Melissa: 19:01

A lot of therapy, you're probably not wrong.

Brianna: 19:06

Yeah, here's the thing I push this identity-first language of ADHD-er. But some people aren't ready to go there yet. It's a process to shed the layers of self-stigma, to build the confidence back up, to then confront society's stigma right, public stigma, if you're like okay, I'm going to shed the layers of self-stigma. I know in myself that I'm not broken or different. That's one thing which requires a lot of therapy to get even get that far.

Brianna: 19:38

But then, after all of those years of that self-stigma, to then rebuild the self-confidence, to then go into society and claim this loudly and proudly is another process. There's this personal reclaiming of the language of I'm not lazy, I'm just having a bad brain day. There's the ability to segregate your brain from your body, separate it, so it's not you that's being bad or broken. It's like I'm just struggling today I'm not lazy, I'm not broken, and there's that one piece. And then there's the other piece of the I'm in ADHD or there's nothing wrong with that, and that comes with a lot of fights and a lot of confrontation and a lot of microaggressions and a lot of pushback from society and it can be really hard. But if you find a community, it can also be really empowering to, to claim that loud and hear you say that and then hear it be celebrated back to you.

Melissa: 20:34

That's really affirming there are online support groups, various online groups that you can become involved with and to start that journey of being able to appreciate yourself amongst your own peers, and then there's the separate piece of being able to appreciate yourself amongst everyone. You're right, they're separate pieces, but I think it's also important to have allies and people that you can talk to in both arenas, because once you know that you're cool in both places, you start building the confidence, exactly, yeah.

Brianna: 21:09

And then, if you want to take it one step further, there's the advocacy piece where you can start stepping forward for people who don't have a voice yet, who are working towards building their voice and create those safe spaces for people, and call out language. That's all it takes right One person to step forward and challenge that language and then other people see that language being challenged. They start to challenge it themselves. That allows for people who are actually impacted by that kind of statement to then feel safer in those environments and then begin to feel safer to challenge it themselves. So that's where I'm at. I'm at that level of advocacy where I can step forward and say, hey, that's not cool, and then other people can see that and it trickles down.

Melissa: 21:54

There's a trickle down effect as they open up, they accept themselves more and the people around them accept them more, and it just builds from there.

Brianna: 22:03

Yeah, but that's the piece that I find so heartwarming about all this. Yes, language is built into our medical systems. It disables people. It disadvantages people, it causes physical, emotional, social problems. But we can start to take that back and we've seen the power that can come from movements, from advocacy, even from education. There's so much more acceptance these days than there was before.

Melissa: 22:32

I've had members from generations before me come to talk to me about this topic, because they know, they're aware that things are shifting and changing and they're like this is what I know and what I was taught growing up. What am I missing?

Brianna: 22:49

Exactly, and you can see it in like the shift in mental health as well. Like back in the olden days, like therapy was a dirty word, you would never admit to going to a therapist or a counselor, and now every conversation I have with my friends, oh my God, my therapist was telling me this thing. It's just so open nowadays.

Melissa: 23:09

Some stupid dating show I was streaming. The contestant said I will not date a man unless he's been to therapy Also just a pro dating tip.

Brianna: 23:18

If you're still in the market, ask if the person's been to therapy, and if they haven still in the market, ask if the person's been to therapy and if they haven't run away.

Brianna: 23:25

This is true, okay, I think we've said a lot today. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Hypercast about the power of language and hopefully through this you can learn a little self-acceptance which we love and then also maybe think about the ways that language has been used against you or other people in your life and then correct it or at least have an awareness of its power. Don't put on your blinders and just go through life thinking that your words don't hurt people. We were taught from a very early age that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words may never hurt me. Not the case.

Melissa: 24:03

Words have a lasting impact and can be more hurtful than sticks and stones, and it's not always possible to just rub some dirt in it and walk it off. If you would like further support or resources, brianna and I are both ADHD coaches. You can find me at likemindcoachingcom. You can find Brianna at understandingadhdca thank you for joining us and until next time, bye, bye.

Brianna: 24:40

thanks for joining us on this episode of Hypercast, if you've enjoyed today's episode and want to stay connected, be sure to rate and subscribe, and check out the show notes for links to our social media and websites, whether you're seeking practical tips, heartfelt stories or just a sense of community, hypercast is here for you, remember you're not alone in your ADHD journey. Together, we can navigate the highs and lows with courage and compassion.

Melissa: 25:04

So until next time, take care, stay curious and keep embracing your unique neurodiversity.

Brianna: 25:10

Catch you on the next episode of Hypercast.