Is it ADHD, or the Symptoms of Constant Exposure to Technology?
I am someone who has been diagnosed with ADHD about seven years ago, so since the time I was 14 years old. I am also someone who was isolated from the outside world since the age of ten, due to being homeschooled and battling depression and other mental illnesses. Therefore, due to my social isolation and my limited contact with other human beings “in real life”, my communication with any other humans and my schoolwork relied entirely on technology. Even though I now have more friends in person, engage in other stimulating activities, and go out more often, I still find that my attention span draws me right back to my cellphone, or my laptop, or my Nintendo Switch. It is as if my brain and attention span had been hardwired to only crave stimulation through technology — and a lot of youth in our current generation is starting to see similar effects. And it’s not just technologies fault, it’s also the constant exposure to the stimulus around us.
It is of my belief that growing up with constant exposure to ridiculous and unnatural amounts of stimuli probably does stunt some part of brain growth, which causes people’s brains to be permanently or nearly permanently altered. Many parents think that putting a child in front of a computer counts as parenting, and now many of us who grew up in the same conditions struggle to make it through a book or even an article without getting distracted.
We were not born this way. Our grandparents and their parents and all of our aunts and uncles who grew up without screens can read books just fine. It takes a lot of effort and retraining of the brain to get past it, but I do believe people who grew up this way can go back to “normal” with much, much effort.
The second part of what I think contributes to symptoms of ADHD is that we do so much pointless, frivolous things that human beings naturally don’t want to or can’t focus on. Kids don’t want to learn about the civil war, ww2, and then go through basic algebra over and over for 12 years. they want to go and play and create things and exercise their bodies and minds. Adults don’t want to sit in a cubicle pretending to care about spreadsheets for 40+ hours a week with absolutely no creative or relaxing outlet for their natural human feelings, seeing only the same office/warehouse/etc. and rooms in their house over and over for years. Of course, we’re going to get fatigued with it and our brains will get altered in unnatural ways.
A lot of people will probably disagree with me for writing this article, but I’m not saying their ADHD is the fault of the individual who suffers from it, I believe it’s a totally normal reaction to how people grow up these days. I think that our way of dealing with all of this is beyond evil. We drug people up with experimental chemical cocktails that have the potential to give them cardiovascular issues or possibly even colon cancer and cause them to be severely under/overweight, and we use the same chemicals on growing children to punish them for not being purposeless cogs in the system when they’re at an age where they should be anything but that.
I have all of the symptoms of ADHD and it’s simply more effective to admit that it has nearly nothing to do with one’s genetics, but rather almost everything to do with living in a system that is designed to turn you into a semi-vegetable and actively fighting against this every day instead of giving in to it.
As for me, my symptoms only worsened as my only friends and communication with others relied on social media, as aforementioned. This is not our default state of existence and all of this rapid advancement in technology — coupled with increasingly high societal expectations — as well as our lives revolving around consumerism; this just isn’t how we are meant to live. Of course, these outside factors are what are driving a lot of our negative mental health symptoms and affecting our attention span.
The psychology field, even though I’m majoring in it (I plan on focusing more on researching within the field as opposed to becoming a therapist/psychiatrist/etc.), is still relatively new in terms of doctors not just straight up carving the front of peoples brains out for people being a little weird and actually acknowledging the neurodiversity of the human brain.
Psychiatrists/therapists/etc. tend to be no different than the doctors you see for physical illnesses. They are eager to prescribe you anything and everything to make a quick buck without actually working through the root causes as to what is causing your symptoms and how to naturally improve them. They also tend not to have any personal experience regarding the mental illness of their own to better empathize with their patients.
What’s funny is that even though I’m not a licensed professional (yet), I once had to get on my mom’s psychiatrist (who should know better than a 19-year-old at the time) for being ignorant regarding my mothers' schizophrenia and prescribing her a cocktail of drugs to treat individual symptoms without actually acknowledging that she had schizophrenia. Once I explained to this woman — who held an actual degree and was approved to treat real people — what psychosis was and the exact type of medication that my mother needed (and that the cocktail of drugs that she was prescribing my mom was wholly unnecessary), my mother found that she and her symptoms improved tremendously when she was taken off all those drugs and placed on a simple atypical antipsychotic.
In addition, I realized I had the previously mentioned problem a few months ago. My brain and attention span was ruined because nearly all of my life and activities revolved around technology, so I made the effort to start engaging in other activities such as reading physical books and have even picked up writing stories of my own, I started gardening and drawing, teaching myself how to do things myself.
Unfortunately, I still rely on technology more than I would like to because of schools being closed (I managed to get out into the real world and attend school in person right before corona hit and set me back, but that’s okay! I still intend on going back on campus for my education when all of this is over).
I’m not going to lie, I know what it’s like to be prescribed drugs upon drugs upon drugs for illnesses that my therapists/psychiatrists weren’t even sure I had. Instead of them being like, “Hey, you say you’re depressed and wanna kill yourself. You say your attention span is bad. Why is that? Let’s get to the root cause and see what we can do to naturally resolve your stressors and what’s making you feel this way before we try getting you on an antidepressant (or any other drug).”
Despite all of this, we should always keep in mind that these conditions are, of course, real. ADHD is real, depression is real, schizophrenia, etc., but more often than not, there are outside factors that are driving 95% of the symptoms these disorders have. This leads to people being diagnosed with these types of illnesses, when in reality their symptoms are being caused by something else and can therefore very much be fixed — or at least greatly improved — without the need for medications.
That’s not to say that some people don’t need these medications either, it’s just that as aforementioned, we live in a society where consumerism and the pharmaceutical industry are pushing these medications on people without much care and empathy regarding how these medications will work/affect certain people — and without even attempting to work through people’s problems and the resulting symptoms beforehand.
Again, we should also not forget that there are those who suffer from these conditions and not because of technology or even social media, and that their illnesses are very much real and deserving of treatment. These illnesses can be genetic. However, in my experience (and the experiences of many others whom I’ve talked to about this subject), the way we are going about treating mental illness is completely wrong and can often worsen symptoms for people. There needs to be a drastic change in the psychiatric field where people have their symptoms assessed to see if the issues can be addressed and resolved naturally before just throwing about prescriptions.
