Ideas - What it’s like to discover you have ADHD after 50

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

<p>When<em> IDEAS</em> contributor Sandra Bourque was diagnosed with ADHD in her early 50s, she was relieved. Finally, everything made sense to her. Bourque became obsessed with learning everything about how her brain worked. What she found was a mountain of information that focused on ADHD deficits and challenges, ways to "fit in better and be more normal." So Bourque became an ADHD coach so she could help others cut through the misinformation, focus on their strengths and learn how their brain actually worked. <em>*This is part two in a two-part series called Myth of Normal.</em></p>

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. History is populated by figures who might well be diagnosed with some kind of brain disorder. Some researchers believe Mozart might have had ADHD, Copernicus may have been autistic, and Vincent van Gogh may be bipolar disorder. Some experts believe that traits associated with ADHD, autism, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and dyslexia may have been an advantage for our prehistoric ancestors.

But as we went from hunter-gatherer and settled into towns and cities, for many, those advantages turned into disadvantages. The pendulum is swinging. Greta Thunberg, Elon Musk, Michael Phelps, Robin Williams. The narrative around what's normal and what isn't is shifting. When I was first diagnosed with ADHD in my early 50s, I was relieved. Finally, everything made sense. This is the second of a two-part series called The Myth of Normal from contributor Sandy Bork.

["The Myth of Normal"] ["The Myth of Normal"] I obsessed about learning everything I could about how my brain worked, but everywhere I looked, I was bombarded with information about ADHD deficits and the challenges. How to fit in better, how to be more normal. I eventually became an ADHD coach to help my fellow travelers cut through the mountain of misinformation to learn how their brain actually worked and to focus on their strengths. In 1998, Australian sociologist Judy Singer coined the term neurodiversity.

She used the term to describe those who think differently from the so-called norm. The reason I came up with neurodiversity was that I needed an umbrella term, so I thought it was obvious. American journalist Harvey Bloom popularized it the same year in an article for the Atlantic magazine called Neurodiversity on the Underpinnings of Geekdom. And in 2015, Steve Silberman wrote about it in his groundbreaking book, Neural Tribes, the Legacy of Autism. Neurodiversity is the recognition that human beings have different kinds of brains, different ways of thinking, different ways of experiencing the world, different ways of experiencing

the five senses, and that our world is better for it. Just like biodiversity increases the strength and resilience of a rainforest in the Amazon. Neurodiversity increases the strength and resilience of human communities by bringing different ways of thinking and problem-solving together. Today, neurodiversity doesn't refer only to those on the autism spectrum. The term now encompasses a wide range of differences. There's many different forms of neurodivergence and the neurotypical, they tend to be linear. Ed Hallowell is a psychiatrist in Boston, Massachusetts and an authority on ADHD. He has ADHD himself.

They tend to be logical. They tend to be organized. I mean, we need that. But they tend not to come up with new ideas because they're outside the box and these folks are committed to inside the box. Neurodiversity may feel like a modern conversation, but autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and dyslexia are still cast as diseases or disorders. Many experts, including those who live with these diagnoses, argue that these conditions are not defects or flaws. They are brain variations.

Experts hold that these variations are actually advantages and go back to the time of our early ancestors. Thomas Armstrong is head of the American Institute for Learning and Human Development and the author of The Power of Neurodiversity. Well, we can't really know what went on in prehistoric society. There was certainly a survival element going on in terms of encounters with beasts and the need to find food. They needed to move as a hunting and gathering society frequently. They needed to respond quickly to any kind of stimulus in the environment, and they needed

to react. And so I think there were a range of abilities that were required in those societies that actually relate to some of the diversities that we're talking about. So we've got to put ourselves in that world to kind of think, well, you know, what would be the kind of traits that you'd want to have in people? And the amazing thing is that they're often in people with diversity. Post-industrial life can be an uneasy fit for most of us. It requires us to bend our minds and bodies around fixed timetables and regimens. We've adapted to clocks, calendars and school bells. And with all that, the idea of normal gets narrowly defined. For most of the 20th century, there was a very monolithic view

of what a healthy mind was. For one thing, it was usually male. For another thing, it was usually upper class. For another thing, it was usually white. But, you know, it was not gay, and it was not autistic, and it was not dyslexic. It was this very standard model as if everybody was supposed to be walking around with the same kind of brain in their heads.

Disorganization. If you look at my desk right now, it's like a tornado has just passed through my room. Poor impulse control. I would blurt out or do things that were not necessarily appropriate. Addictive tendencies. Difficulty concentrating when I'm not interested in something. Gabar Mate is a Vancouver-based physician and author of several books, including Scattered Minds, The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. Many people have a hard time with brains and minds that are constructed different than they are. It's particularly in this culture which assumes that what is normal is also natural and healthy. The people who don't fit the norm, they're not understood.

Having had two of these diagnoses and two of these set of experiences behind the diagnosis, myself, ADHD and depression. I know people have a hard time understanding my mind states because it's strange to them. It's outside their realm of experience and especially in the culture that on the one hand prices individualism but in the other and enforces a real kind of conformity. So that strangeness, anything that's different, if it's not understood, we tend to fear it. anything that's different. If it's not understood, we tend to fear it. I spent much of my life just enduring a lot of stigma and shame.

I grew up in a household where the only term I ever heard for mental illness, which is a term I also sort of have dropped disease language altogether, but just for the sake of the statement, the only thing I ever heard was that someone was sick in the head. And people who were sick in the head were put away. There was kind of a hush. Well, they're gone because they were sick in the head.

The 1950s was known as the era of conformity. This boy and girl coming home from school look quite content with life. They're looking forward to an important date, dinner at home with the family. Doesn't that sound exciting to you? After years of upheaval and uncertainty during the Second World War, people wanted calm, predictable, and ordered lives. I think that life became much more clearly and narrowly defined. This is what's normal. You have a job, you have a nuclear family,

you have a home. You'll see a lot of ads in the 50s that will show a businessman waiting for a train, by a track, and for women, it was often back to work in the home, and they would show women dusting or vacuuming or something. The standard model of health in the models of psychiatry and psychology that prevailed for most of the 20th century

were this very, very narrow, almost fictitious, I would dare say, model of normality. The women of this family seem to feel that they owe it to the men of the family to look relaxed, rested and attractive at dinnertime. Unsurprisingly then, the 1950s was also a new era for psychiatry. There were advances in antipsychotic and antidepressant medications. It was the era of lobotomies, electric shock treatments, and a host of other cures. A lot of what was going on was hypernormalizing.

I'm sure that affected everyone. We're certainly not like the Nazis filling out forms about whether a patient in an asylum can work or not. But I think we've really internalized that. And I've really learned if I have to go to the hospital, if there's any kind of situation where I need immediate help, one of the first things I say is, you know, I teach, I have a job. And it's sad. It's sad to me that I do that and that I feel I have to do it. But I can tell you it completely alters the response to say that you have a

social function. Brain variation was seen as a problem to be fixed. A diagnosis by definition meant something was wrong and was problem to be fixed. A diagnosis by definition meant something was wrong and was intended to identify a set of symptoms that needed curing. The problem with the medical model is it leaves out the strengths. You know, medicine, I'm trained as an M.D., is all about pathology. You don't go to the doctor because you're feeling great. You go to the doctor because you're feeling bad. So doctors are steeped in pathology. And that's the problem with the medical model. It doesn't recognize or promote strength. Ironically, it was the desire to understand how different brains functioned that generated

the idea of the norm. Listen up. This is the Idaho standardized test. This test decides once and for all how smart we are. I mean, after today, our parents will know how stupid we are. Our brothers and sisters will know how stupid we are. Now Idaho will know how stupid we are. As Thomas Armstrong explains, IQ tests helped homogenize the way we looked at the brain. It has to do with a lot of what happened in psychology

in the early part of the 20th century, because that's when we had IQ testing, IQ scores. The first IQ test was created by French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1911. There has been a long, you know, 100-year history of where the deficits of these individuals have been catalogued and researched and their brain difficulties have been measured in different ways. That's when we started seeing kids who were labeled morons, if you can believe it. Morons was actually a scientific term used to

describe individuals who scored like 70 or 80 on an IQ score. If you did a little bit worse than that, you'd be considered an imbecile, and if you scored rock bottom, you'd be considered an idiot. These were scientists who are doing this. Many of them also believed in eugenics, which suggested that, you know,

if you just breed correctly, you can provide humanity with a superior race. I'll never hear the end of it. Poor Richie. He's just not as smart as his brother, David. Our David is pre-law at Princeton this year. Oh, hi Richie. Could you take out the garbage, please?

These are the people that, you know, helped to form our special education world, our views of disability. And so, you know, I think that that heavily interpenetrated the world of education. Many of these psychologists were very dedicated to education. They developed some of the first achievement tests. They developed the Stanford-Binet, the Metropolitan achievement test, the Iowa test of basic skills. And all of these really created the bell curve, which suggested that the average person is in the middle at the top point of the bell curve, but there are at least half of the people in the bell curve, but there are at least half of the people in the bell curve who are below average. The bell curve soon became the ultimate arbiter of normal, influencing school placement, grading, educational policies, and even the everyday language of teachers.

I was taught, you know, how to recognize the warning signs of things like attention problems and reading problems and learning disabilities. Early in his working life, Thomas Armstrong was trained in special education. And I finally really got sick of it because when I began working with the students in the classroom, I could see that they had all sorts of gifts. These were kids that were being labeled as educationally handicapped. That was the term that our school district used. But I had kids that were artists, kids that were dramatists. They were good at those things that the culture

didn't value, especially the schools didn't value. My ADHD brain thinks panoramically. I'm compelled to acknowledge and weigh everything I see, hear, feel, touch, and even other people's emotions. They're always in the foreground for me, like sitting in the front row of a surround sound movie. In the wrong environment, the non-stop stimuli can be a huge distraction. It explains why sometimes I find it hard to focus. But it also explains my strengths, the way ideas come to me fast and furious, like popcorn popping. My thinking is not restricted on a linear plan. Gabor Mate My mind will see the commonality of things that most people don't see.

I just bring everything together. My mind jumps from one to the other. I can see patterns. People with these various conditions, they tend to be more on the right side of the brain, the holistic creative side. I happen to manage to negotiate both of them pretty well. If I was a computer, I'd be an Intel 286, but I'm going to have a couple of warehouses full of computers for memory. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at the University of Colorado and the author

of several books on autism, a subject she knows both academically and personally, as she's autistic herself. In autism, you tend to get extra circuits in the back parts of the brain. You know, build up the math department, the art department. So I've got big memory and a small processor. So I have some real deficits, and we have to do workarounds. It's called workarounds in engineering. For most autistic people, according to Grandin,

social interactions can really overload the processor. Part of that is sensory overload. If I'm in a noisy environment and I'm looking at the eyes, that distracts me from trying to hear. You see, I contact loads of processors. Now I can do it, but it's harder to do it in a noisy environment. People with ADHD and bipolar disorder share similar sensory issues. Approximately 40% of those with ADHD also have autism. ADHD and autism have a lot of crossover. A lot of people don't understand these sensory issues. Certain loud sounds hurt. Now somebody that does not have sensory over sensitivity doesn't understand that.

Well, that vacuum cleaner doesn't bother me, so why should it bother you? They don't recognize that other reality. I'm learning just how different highly verbal thinking is from the way I think. Let's say you go to a party. When neurotypical people enter a room, they usually take in the big picture first, then the details.

But autistic people need to take in the details before they can take in the whole picture. So when I go into a big noisy party, I can't screen out the background noise. And there's a lot of chit chat talk that kind of goes back and forth in a rhythm and The people are having a great time I can't even follow that and people say to me all the time. Will you interrupt? Well, I know I interrupt and one of the reasons why that happens is I can't get the rhythm of one to break into the conversation I just can't do it So what tends to happen with me at a party is I go find some interesting person to talk

to, maybe talk to them for 20 minutes, and then go find somebody else. As one of the first to speak publicly about her experience of being autistic, Grandin helped break down decades of shame and stigma, paving the way for others who were neurodivergent. It was associated with the publication of my book, Emergence, which would have been in 1986. It would have been Autism Society of America conference. Like most autism conferences then, and even still like many autism conferences now, there were not really supposed to be autistic people in any position of authority. They were the patients. They were, you know, being talked about behind their backs in a

sense, they were framed as nothing but a burden. And I was supposed to be just the host of one roundtable about my book. And there were other roundtables in the room doing other subjects. But as soon as Temple started talking at this roundtable, everyone in the room just sort of got quiet and started listening to her. Everybody at all the roundtables turned around to listen to what I had to say. The whole room just turned around.

And that was because what the parents and the clinicians in the room realized was that by listening to Temple Grandin, they were getting a firsthand report of what it was like to be autistic and to inhabit an autistic mind. So Temple became a primary source of learning about what autism was like from the inside, instead of these sort of sterile clinical observations from the outside.

You see, the problem with these profiles, it's half science and half conference room squabbles and you know, kids can look really, really severe when they're very young. That was another important thing that Temple Grandin did at that very first autism conference where she spoke up. She framed her autism as a handicap, which is an old word for what we would now call disability. We don't really use the word handicap anymore, but she framed it as a disability, which was very, very different from the way that autism had been framed for

decades as a disease or disorder, because for disease what you need is a cure, but for disability what you need are accommodations and a society that is inclusive so that you have a place to go when you grow up. Neurodiversity is an umbrella term. There's actually diversity within neurodiversity itself. For example, autism. You had to have speech delay to be labeled autistic. Had to have obvious speech delay. Then in the early 90s, the Asperger category was put in there.

Socially awkward with no speech delay. Then in 2013, the Asperger was taken out and merged. So now the socially awkward with no speech delay is merged into this huge spectrum. So you've got Elon Musk in there along with somebody that cannot dress themselves. I will say something that some autism parents have said to me over the years is, well, my child is not Temple Grandin. Well, when Temple Grandin was five, she wasn't Temple Grandin yet either. You know, she was being expelled from schools, considered a real behavioral problem, screaming in church, etc. I was the kind of kid that in the 50s they would have just put in an institution.

And when I was three, I looked really severe, throwing big tantrums at school and laying on the floor, kicking and screaming. I would chew up cardboard puzzle pieces and spit them out. I did all of those sorts of things. My behavior was terrible. When the kids are very small, My behavior was terrible. When the kids are very small, a lot of them look really severe. You don't know which ones you can kind of pull out of it and which ones you cannot. This is the problem. I've talked to many parents that have very severe kids. No, they're not going to do the kind of things I did.

They're not going to be able to do it. Now one of the things that tends to improve the prognosis is no epilepsy in the two and three-year-old child. And I was tested for epilepsy and I did not have it. But other than that, I looked atrocious at age three. I had, of course, heard of Temple Grandin, everyone interested in autism has heard of her, and had read her autobiography, Emergence, labeled Autistic, when it came out in 1986. This is from a 1993 article from the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, published in the New Yorker magazine.

When I first read the book, I couldn't help being suspicious of it. The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others, and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection. How could an autistic person write an autobiography? It seemed like a contradiction in terms. And another important thing that Temple Grandin did was that she allowed Oliver Sacks to write a profile of her for the New Yorker magazine, which became the centerpiece of Oliver's book, An Anthropologist on Mars. Oliver was a neuroscientist, and what he did was what he did with all of his patients. Instead of just examining them in his office in this very artificial situation, he went to visit Temple and hang out with her in places that

she liked. This again is from the New Yorker article by Oliver Sacks. I made my way to the university campus and located the Animal Sciences building where Temple was waiting to greet me. She's a tall, strongly built woman in her mid-forties. Her clothing, her appearance, her manner were plain, frank, and forthright. So they went to like a, you know, a sort of a cowboy restaurant that she liked and they had like ribs and beer.

We ate heartily and talked throughout the meal about the technical aspects of Temple's work and the ways in which she sets out every design, every problem visually in her mind. Then they went hiking in a natural area and what Oliver was able to do was to understand that Temple's mind was not just a laundry list of deficits and impairments, that some of the ways that she experienced the world as an autistic adult, an autistic adult woman, actually made her better at her job. She said as we drove to the farm, if all your thought processes are in language, how could you imagine how cattle think? But if you think in pictures… And kind of just a really interesting and colorful person, not just a person with a list of symptoms

and deficits. She thinks that she and other autistic people, though they unquestionably have great problems in some areas, may have extraordinary and socially valuable powers in others, provided that they are allowed to be themselves. Autistic. She said that she could understand quote, simple, strong, universal emotions, but much of the time she said, I feel like an anthropologist on Mars. The profile of Temple that Oliver wrote was really one of the very, very first profiles of an autistic adult in full, you could say, with their lives, with their passions, with their, even their philosophical thoughts. And it should not be underestimated how much Oliver himself had to evolve in order to be open to Temple's experience that way.

You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also get our podcast on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayad. Neurodiversity as a phenomenon isn't new, but we've only recently found a popular vocabulary for it. The space for this reconsideration has been opened up by neurodivergent people, like scientist Temple Grandin and by sociologist Judy Singer, who first coined the term neurodivergent. I sensed this emerging movement was going to be really important. sensed this emerging movement was going to be really important.

Advocates of the neurodiversity model are clear that accepting our brains vary doesn't mean ignoring individual needs or difficulties. We need to help individuals if they have difficulty communicating. We need to help individuals if they're having difficulty being literate. We need to help individuals if they're having difficulty being literate. We need to help individuals if they're having difficulty paying attention to things. And there are a lot of skills and tools that we have. The bigger challenge for many neurodivergent people isn't limitations from within, but the stigma from without. This is the second and final part of a two-part series called The Myth of Normal by contributor Sandy Bork. Ed Hallowell is a psychiatrist and expert on ADHD.

The damage that's done is the stigma. The damage that's done is born of the misunderstanding, the flat out ignorance on the part of the general public where they're still stuck in the smart stupid dichotomy in terms of ranking minds. And it's such a crude and misleading metric, you know. I mean, the important question is smart at what and stupid at what and most of us with ADHD are brilliant at some things and really bad at others and So you can't give us a smarter stupid designation

you can say well, he's brilliant and creative at this and I wouldn't rely on him though to make out a schedule or be on time, you know, so he's not very good at that. And that doesn't sum up to a score that makes any sense. I think the important thing is to think about a person who has a great imagination. How is school going to feel to you? Laura Honus Webb is a psychologist and author of The Gift of ADHD. You want to solve problems. You may be thinking 10 steps beyond what the teacher's talking about. And you have this vivid imagination of possibilities and ways to solve problems.

And yet, none of that gives you good grades. In fact, that's considered a distraction. Someone says they have ADHD. I say, great, let's find out your special talent. You're an X-man. You were born with special talents and you need some training to develop them. But I would say the same thing applies to depression. You know, that most people who have depression also have tremendous creative talent.

You know, and I would say the same thing applies to bipolar disorder. You know, you go down the list anxiety disorders, and that's what's so interesting about it. All of these conditions, there's an upside and a downside. And unfortunately, the medical model only stresses the downside. So one of the things which everybody is very unhappy about, more or less. It's a diagnostic system. It feels that it doesn't adequately capture or explain or describe the range of human diversity. Those who want to be diagnosed must use what Temple Grandin calls a clumsy system of behavioral profiling using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, published

by the American Psychiatric Association. Autism is a behavioral profile. Don't get hung up on it. There's no lab test for it. I'm trained as a biological scientist. Okay, if I go in and I do a test for COVID, they could tell me exactly what strain of COVID I was positive for. Now that is a precise diagnosis.

It's done in the lab. When it first came out in 1952, the DSM listed 30 different brain disorders. In the 1970s and 80s, the pharmaceutical industry was expanding, and there was a huge push for more classification. And with that push, the number of categories for

mental disorders rose to almost 300. Today, the DSM is nearly a thousand pages long and weighs more than three pounds. Before the DSM, people didn't know what they were talking about. You know, nobody could agree on what's this and what's that. So it's a taxonomy, you know, it's a could agree on what's this and what's that. So it's a taxonomy, you know, it's an objective description, but it shouldn't be thought of as, you know, the manual of human nature. I'd paraphrase Shakespeare and say there's more in heaven and earth than was ever dreamt of in the DSM. You know, there's more in human nature than the DSM could ever begin to cover. Over the last 50 years, the number of disorders, illnesses, conditions, and syndromes listed in the DSM almost tripled.

Diagnosing reduces people to a set of dysfunctions. So to say so-and-so is schizophrenic, so-and-so is ADHD. By identifying the person with their dysfunction, we're not doing them any favors, nor ourselves for that matter, because we can't see the whole person. If you continue to get negative feedback at the youngest age,

if you're continuing to feel like you can't belong, if you can't enjoy your education, what do you think that leads to? And often it leads to addictions. According to Ed Hallowell, it's not just the labels used by the medical profession that should be reconsidered. The words we use for mental differences are crude. In fact, it's one of the few realms that political correctness hasn't touched.

It's still socially acceptable to call someone a wacko or a nutcase or a weirdo or a sicko. And we've cleaned up the language when it comes to other racial differences or religious differences, but when it comes to the mind, we're still allowed to use the crudest, most insulting and demeaning words imaginable. I like to say I don't treat disabilities. I help people unwrap their gifts. If you help people unwrap their gifts, then they will contribute. You see, it costs society a tremendous amount. I mean, the ultimate example is the prison system. We are wasting, wasting, squandering incredible resources in these gifted people that we are at best misunderstanding and at worst incarcerating them in the prisons are full of people with undiagnosed, untreated mental differences.

Could be helped by informed, intelligent, fact-based interventions that we have that the system won't even allow to be implemented. We can also do things like design our cities and so on to make them more geared to human nature rather than expecting human nature to gear to them. So ways which allow people to relate to each other, which give people a sense of belonging to their neighborhood because we know that's an important factor in mental health. And when people do have psychiatric difficulties which make them unable to cope, then obviously we need to provide humane and caring services for those people. And they're not particularly humane and caring at the moment.

When does slightly nerdy and slightly socially awkward get an autism label slapped on it? You see, it's a continuous trait. You get more and more nerdy. You might get better at art or better at math or better at some specialized thing. And then there's a point where there's so much problems with the brain that the sensory information is all scrambled up. And I see the continuum. Those people who are more sensitive and therefore more likely to be diagnosed with this, that or the other, they do suffer more, they have more challenges in life, and they also create challenges for the

people working with them. But again, the problem is not because of the differentness, the problem is because of how the society doesn't understand how it itself generates a lot of the problems. For Armstrong, these problems begin in the classroom. We have this kind of what's called an ableist perspective. It's like racism only for disabilities. That if you can't socialize in the normal way, quote unquote, whatever that is, then you must have something wrong. Or if you can't read in the normal way, you know, if you need a spell checker or a speech to text software program in order to write something

down, then you must have a problem of some kind. A communication disorder, a sensory processing disorder, auditory sequential dysfunction. I mean, when I got into special ed, these terms just came right and left and just flooded my professional brain and really left very little room for an intuitive understanding of the rights of individuals to be who they are. There are many kids that their primary gifts are going to be expressive, dramatic, and making things. And that can be what's really confusing to kids. When they're learning something and they know there's a right answer and they have to figure out the right answer,

but they don't know what the purpose of learning it is. And that can be what's really missing. I think one of the worst things the schools have ever done is taking out all the hands-on classes. Woodworking, auto shop, cooking, sewing, music, theater, these are all things where you can get exposed to things that can become careers. But the thing is it's sort of like growing a flower garden. Let's say Einstein had never been exposed to higher math books. It wouldn't have happened. I know two people, very successful in the livestock industry, a single welding class

saved them. And one of them, I don't think even graduated from high school. Really concerned too many kids today aren't getting exposed enough to find out what they're good at. Whether that be tools, art classes, musical instruments, or math, educational materials, programming material. They're not exposed, not going to learn it. Parents are way too overprotective. You need to be hooking these kids a lot younger. I was using tools in second grade.

I don't think we'd be here if we didn't have a school system that was incredibly narrow and was focused on what's at the back of the book, I think it comes back to that. Every person who's going to deal with children, parents, daycare workers, teachers, physicians, all the way through adolescence, need to be told about differences, not to try and fit every kid into the same square peg. So as children are growing up and their focus is on getting good grades. And so that means you have to be good at everything, rather than finding some exceptional gift

that you have and building that. The people that are going to innovate and advance culture need to know what their gifts are, and they need to be able to develop those. Anyone can lose their sense of self-worth, self-efficacy, and confidence if it's always focused on patching up our weaknesses. We would not scare parents that if the kids are different,

therefore they're quote unquote abnormal. We would need much room for diversity. We would in fact welcome it. And we would seek out the contributions that these people with somewhat different wiring can actually make to culture and to society and to everyone. It is important to help every child

build that sense of confidence and to use their natural talents and their natural gifts. And so I think of ADHD, and it's a bit of an overgeneralization, but the research shows that ADHD people are more creative in terms of divergent thinking. They tend to be empathic, and you can imagine that empathy is a distraction because you're paying attention to other people, not the context

of the books and the learning. And that they tend to have intense emotional experiences, which also are a distraction. If you're upset about something, it's hard to focus. They also tend to be what I call nature smart. And in fact, there's a lot of research that time in nature increases our attention and our mood. And the hyperactivity, we could just call exuberance, a lot of energy. There's this really big gap between what we think of as normal and what the world needs in many different situations that we don't ever think about. We define something like impulsiveness and hyperactivity is inherently bad. I mean, think about how much of

our life and how many job descriptions involve threat, chaos, that that's really how we survive and thrive. And if you can't have that hyperactivity or you can't have that impulsiveness to manage really intense situations, think about our firefighters, think about our EMT people, think about our firefighters. Think about our EMT people. Think about emergency surgeons. They are constantly facing emergencies and yet they thrive. And to focus on that hyperactivity or that impulsivity or that stimulation seeking, which is going to create lots of problems in a school room, is going to be required for many job descriptions.

Our understanding of neurodiversity has greatly increased just in the last few years. For example, when I started researching neuro-tribes, it was very, very rare that an article about autism quoted an autistic person. It was like having hundreds of news articles and TV broadcasts every year that, you know, was supposedly focusing on feminism, but interviewed only men. Or you know, having a series of articles about racism that interviewed only white people.

Diverse groups of organisms do better and are better at tackling unforeseen challenges than groups that are you know so-called monocultures and I think that's playing out now in that we have neurodivergent people like the young climate activist Greta Thunberg. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! And it's because they're not so concerned with peer pressure or they're not so gullible for some of the messaging coming from older politicians who are making excuses.

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away? They see very clearly what our situation is. My message is that we'll be watching you. Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk! I'm actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger's to host SNL. Or at least the first to admit it. And I was really happy when Elon Musk announced publicly because then then I can talk about it, because that's public information now. Look, I know I sometimes say, oh, post-strange things,

but that's just how my brain works. To anyone I've offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. The... The... The... The...

The... Did you think I was also going to be a chill normal dude? Well he was the awkward kid, bullied in school, horribly bullied in school, shoved down the stairs and his face smashed in. That's a common problem. I was bullied in school. And I think it's important for teachers and educators to know that. Add to the growing list of neurodiverse people,

actors like Dan Aykroyd and Anthony Hopkins. More recently, British news presenter Melanie Sykes. He just said, you know, I think you might be ADHD and I think, you know, you might have an autistic profile and it started to make sense. And it's such a positive diagnosis for me. It's kind of fascinating. It's a trending topic. It's actually a dominant theme and we'll see that a lot of times it looks like a strength-based approach. On TikTok and Twitter there has been a real explosion of embracing diversity. Something that has shifted in neurodiversity

are influencers. Neurodivergent investments that have helped my day-to-day life that could help yours too. So instead of having to change my glasses when the light is bothering me, I just clip the clip on and we get to go. Do you have ADHD? Well, do I have the app for you? It's a mixture of some groups saying it's a superpower, and another group saying it's ruining my life. Number one, I cannot control how much I'm talking sometimes in meetings, especially in a meeting where I'm introducing

myself. I have no clue how to do that. I hate when neurotypical people are like, bitch, read the room. Okay, where in the room am I reading? Is there something on the walls? Apparently, neurotypicals could filter out background noises, which sounds fake to me. You're telling me that you don't lie awake crying because you can't get to sleep because the noise of someone's stupid computer on humming in the background is like making your ears bleed, or the refrigerator is so frigging loud you can't drown it out.

It's all you can focus on. That doesn't happen to neurotypicals. You're telling me the hum of electric lights overhead doesn't make you want to burn down the whole building? What is wrong with you? Hi, is there any way you could turn that down? I have sensory issues and I'm finding it really loud. Well just move. Why should I have sensory issues and I'm finding it really loud. Well, just move. Why should I have to change my lifestyle for you? Yeah, here are some traits

that I display as an autistic person. I do that too. That doesn't mean you're autistic and you're nothing special. People can find themselves, find their tribe, and communicate and realize they're not alone. What's that thing that you're playing with? Oh, this? Oh, this is just a fidget.

It helps with my ADHD. Oh, you have ADHD. Oh, look, a bird. Am I right? I mean, according to cliche, yes. But no, in reality, I just saw three birds fly past the window, and you do have a nest in that tree, but you also have a couple, so there's four birds total living here.

Also, your shoe is untied. But while public acceptance may be growing for people with autism and ADHD, those who are bipolar or schizophrenic face quite a different reality. Using the word bipolar gives people a quick pricey of something about me. But to me, that's not really a meaningful distinction. It just is me. There is no other me. And there's not something in me that's a disease to be cut out. I'm not a mental invalid who needs to be rescued.

It's definitely not cool to be schizophrenic because it's not something you want to talk about parties or anything like that. People, it's got lots of pejoratives attached to it. But why can't we try and help people hear voices, accept hearing voices, and just see it as part of themselves? BT. Look at cultures that in some ways have persisted in at least certain of their traditional cultural ways. And the way they responded to somebody with what we would consider perhaps a schizophrenic behavior, a bipolar behavior, they would immediately put them under the tutelage of a shaman in the group and then just wait to see what gifts would emerge when they were put in that situation of not being controlled or isolated or constantly given whatever sedatives existed, but were encouraged

to develop the gifts that they had and to consider those gifts something that would be a gift to all of them. R. Neurodiversity is really an idea whose time has come. And it simply says that we should take the kinds of attitudes that we have towards cultural diversity and biodiversity and apply them to the human brain. Why shouldn't there be lots of diversity in the brain? Why shouldn't there be lots of diversity in the way in which people show their ability to read or their ability to attend to a stimulus or their ability to socialize? to read or their ability to attend to a stimulus or the ability to socialize, or their mood, for example, their ability to organize internally using executive functioning and so forth. So we ought to acknowledge those differences and to some extent celebrate them.

I'm just reminded of the famous dictum from Max Planck which is he said science advances one funeral at a time. You know, that the old guard has to die off but the old guard is dying off and a much more rich view of these things is emerging. There's no that we know of there's no more complicated complex intrinsically unique piece of matter on in the universe than the human brain. And so we've really got to change our ideas about the human brain itself. Looking back, I'm glad I didn't know I had ADHD when I was younger. The stigma and shame of being labeled with a brain disorder might have discouraged me, made me feel less than.

But today, more and more neurodivergent people are speaking out, and I tell young people who've been diagnosed with ADHD or autism that they're fortunate, fortunate that they get to learn at an early age how their brains really work. The ranks of the autistic are growing, and I want to say it's part of the modern age of technologized pain, that perhaps we need more of those who can give a simple, intestinal response. Though I know that's bromanticizing evolution. Or think of Van Gogh in the asylum with color pouring out of him

as the rise of industrialization painted the skyline gray. Or depressed Abraham Lincoln on suicide watch. It's like they need us, you know? Like we're filters for all the emotional shit that's out there. For who knows what kind of brain we'll need for our most uncertain future. You've been listening to part two of a two-part series called The Myth of Normal from Ideas contributor Sandy Bork. Guests in this program, writer and poet Suzanne Antonetta, psychiatrist and ADHD expert Ed Halliwell, Lara Honos-Webb, clinical psychologist specializing in ADHD, Temple Grandin, author

and professor of animal science at the University of Colorado, physician, trauma expert and author Gabor Matei. Psychologist Thomas Armstrong, executive director of the American Institute for Learning and Human Development and Steve of autism and the future of neurodiversity. This episode was produced by Sandy Burk and edited by Nahid Mustafa, technical producer for Ideas, Danielle Duval. Additional audio recordings by Laura Antonelli. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. So I'm going to play ac.ca slash podcasts.