ADHD: Diabetes of mind?

When Freud started describing human behaviour using the evolutionary background of our “animal” origin, the picture was a bit simple, but it started getting complex when we recognised the importance of our social-self and soon autism arrived on the scene to describe those with cognitive deficit in grasping social context. Then came the tsunami of depression and anxiety (which has still not ebbed completely) that I can’t deal with due to paucity of space, so I will move on to what looks to be the next wave.

With the discovery of “receptors” and “neuro chemicals”, the latest to arrive on the scene is ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and that too is becoming a darling of the young people who seek explanation for what they are “feeling”. As “being different” (i.e., feeling special/unique) is a deeply ingrained social need, just like “depression”, ADHD label is highly sought after and even the rich and famous want it and are popularising it.

Whenever the healthcare market demands something, USA is always there for two things, i.e., defining it quantitatively and “curing” it with chemicals for the sake of running its massive Insurance and Pharma industry, so ADHD is also becoming a popular diagnosis that I am not grudging the doctors for.  

My problem is with the classic hypochondria that follows every such phenomenon and prescription drugs that are slowly getting “normalised”, as ADHD may not be a native chemical “locha” that needs to be corrected using more chemicals but just a natural response to the paradigm shift in the circumstances. If we relook at the “pathology” of ADHD in old fashioned way of the manifest instead of bio-chemical model, there may be an alternative route of dealing with it.

Though I am not suggesting that ADHD and diabetes can be mapped exactly over each other, I would like to explain my stand using diabetes as we all know it (at least a bit).

Diabetes is an evolutionary enigma as it is malicious enough for evolution to weed it out and yet it is here, and at a grand scale as almost 10 % of adults are supposed to be suffering from it.

As almost all life-on-earth uses glucose as primary source of energy, the genetic base of this process is expected to be robust and yet diabetic patients are increasing every year. If I cut the chase short, “spread” of diabetes and availability of sugar seems to be linked, that, if read it the other way may mean that diabetes has arrived and spread thanks to a paradigm shift we have achieved.

Raw sugars were once preciously rare and hence our brains have evolved a reward system that encourages us to consume sweet things on every opportunity. Neither our brain nor our body have evolved with an anticipation that sugar will be available with ease (same is with porn). Our brains are not prepared/designed to deal with the excess so this increased availability may have caused the disruption we call diabetes.

There is a possibility that ADHD is the “same” phenomenon of unprepared brains suddenly facing bombardment of eye-ball-catching information every millisecond.

With the arrival of online platforms, “reality” that the brain feeds on to program itself has almost inverted itself. What was once an “anomaly”, i.e., a rare piece of data that will capture human attention is now the primary reality, while the “normal data” is almost hidden away from our eyes.

I just read a young man who finds India unsafe as he anticipates “a random dude to break the windscreen or worse my head”, while me, who has lived in India for almost sixty years have never seen anyone doing either.

This may look benign, but this means that his brain has seen “reality” where windscreen-breaking is a norm, while my brain has crunched India where it is an anomaly. 

To expect that both brains are going to get programmed the same way is a mistake that we need to recognise and start looking at the incoming brains that are consuming information from online sources to be akin to those who ended up consuming too much sugar because the risk was not recognised.

ADHD could just be a natural response of human brain as it is supposed to crawl through “reality”, more so when one is young.

A young brain is expected to consume as much information as possible in its early stage so when the child grows into an adult, it has crunched large enough dataset to be able to form robust algorithms to deal with reality. 

What internet has done in this context is a double or rather triple whammy. 

Thanks to internet, not only massive amount of information is pouring into human brain, and worse is that it is showing more rare events and that too on the limited bandwidth of text and images.

As a child is/was expected to engage more with sensorial world of touch-feel-smell and deploy a wide range of motor skills, there is/was a massive bandwidth available that is now monopolised by text and visual data, probably making it an utter mess for the brain that is tasked to program itself.

The net result could be what we see as ADHD. If this model is true, it is clear that playing around with neurotransmitters of brain is not going to correct what has gone wrong. It may offer relief from the symptoms of agitation of an overloaded brain, but it can’t “cure” the root cause.

I will leave it to the experts to find out what is the way to bring the situation back to normalcy, but with a request that allopathy is prone to stick to cause-and-effect logic of symptoms-and-relief that may not improve the situation and may even worsen it. 

If ADHD is a systemic disorder, the cure will be “outside” and we need to search for it.

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