Remember the movie Roxanne, starring Steve Martin as a modern day Cyrano de Bergerac? One of the more memorable lines from this film, spoken by Martin’s character as head of the volunteer fire department, was this:
“I have a dream. It’s not a big dream, it’s just a little dream. My dream — and I hope you don’t find this too crazy — is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can’t have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, ‘Whatever you do, don’t call the fire department!’ That would be bad.”
Pretty ironic, no? The notion that calling the fire department would be the last thing you should do–in the event of a fire. Recently I’ve been thinking about this quote in connection to the course on child psychopathology I took in grad school. The course in which I was only taught about the “aloof” type of autistic child, but not the passive or “active but odd” patterns of social behavior. The class where I learned that the only things children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder could focus on for more than a few minutes were television and video games. Years later, I would learn that individuals with A.D.H.D. could actually hyperfocus on things they were interested in–even academic type things.
So, it turned out that my graduate psychology course focussing on disorders which have their onset in childhood was actually one of the least useful sources of information I had at my disposal when trying to figure out the challenges we were facing with our son. And in the process of figuring out that Son in Ohio had Asperger’s Syndrome (an autistic spectrum disorder), I started to mentally revisit the challenges I faced when growing up. In a discussion with another mom I met online, I wondered if I might have had some sort of mild version of Asperger’s Syndrome, because I sure had a tough time trying to figure out how to fit in socially.
And she mentioned the possibility of A.D.D. Not likely, I said. I was a good student…much of the time, anyway. At very least, I certainly tried hard. And I was definitely as “well behaved” kid–not a rambunctious trouble-maker. To my surprise, the woman was offended at my characterization of people with A.D.D., and identified herself as an A.D.D. adult. I certainly wasn’t trying to stereotype, but nothing in my graduate level training in the field that is supposed to know about this stuff had even given me an inkling that there were other ways to be A.D.D. Okay, to be fair, there was brief mention of an “inattentive” subtype of the disorder, in which the kids did not present as hyperactive, but rather as “kind of spacey”. But that wasn’t much to go on. Anyway, this woman went on to inform me, girls with A.D.D. tend to present differently from boys with the disorder, and are often “people pleasers”.
I’m not angry with my professors, by the way. I understand that they presented the information they had. I think most of us are usually doing the best we can at any given time, and when we know better, we do better.
I also think that, sometimes, textbooks present psychological disorders in such a way as to emphasize the extremes. Maybe they do that to counteract the tendency some students will invariably have to read a list of symptoms and say, “That’s me!” But I think emphasizing the extremes can do harm as well, leading us to think of the people described as decidedly “other”.
And finally, a brief thought about labels. I understand that it’s important not to be overly zealous in applying diagnostic labels. But something a lot of people don’t seem to consider is that in avoiding diagnostic labels, we don’t usually steer clear of harmful labels entirely. The child, or adult, is still likely to collect any number of labels (goof-off, space-case, etc.) that imply a judgement. And people’s interactions with these individuals will be guided by these false assumptions.
