Maybe You're Just Annoying!

    Uh-oh, kids! It’s Grumpy Golfer time. Buckle up! So here’s the deal...again. I’m not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV! I just read...a lot. And my reading has led this skeptical layman’s brain to speculate that maybe, just maybe, the diagnosis of ADHD may be a tad overdone. This, in turn, leads me to the following question: Isn’t it a coincidence that it’s always the most irritating people who get diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)? Paris Hilton, Ellen Degeneres, Trevor Noah, James Carville, Glenn Beck – the list of high-profile people who have been ‘diagnosed’ with this trendy malady reads like a roll-call of morons you’d just assume jump out a high-rise window to avoid. No offense to ‘the ADHD community’, but there seems to be a boatload of people, especially celebrities, who claim to have this disorder who are basically just a pain in the ass.

    Look, hear me out: Maybe you actually have ADHD. Because I certainly am NOT saying that this disorder does not exist. But is it possible you don’t have ADHD and you just happen to be a prick? No judgement. We all have prick tendencies…even me! Oh, there’s a headline. It’s just that most of us don’t gift-wrap our maddening shortcomings as a neurological disorder requiring medical treatment. Consider the ‘symptoms’ of ADHD: over-talking, interrupting others, fidgeting, mood swings, extreme impatience, being ‘unable to wait your turn’. You might as well have just described my childhood and young adult life, as well as the young lives of millions of others. And I’m old enough to remember when we called such people, as I was constantly called…rude and annoying! And maybe a few other words. Now we have to pretend they’re mentally disordered. I might try this next time I’m late for something, which is one of my annoying traits: chalk it up to my ‘Time Perception Disorder.’ Your what?

    I’m not kidding! That disorder actually exists. I Googled it after writing that sentence. It’s called Time Blindness. Time Blindness is a ‘time perception-related’ disorder, and the symptoms include ‘chronic lateness’, ‘procrastination’ and ‘missed deadlines’. Yay! I’m not a dawdling son-of-a-bitch who keeps his friends waiting because I absolutely have to finish the last chapter of whatever novel I’m reading – I’m ill! What a relief to know it’s not my fault. I’m always 20 minutes late to meet friends, just as it’s not Trevor Noah’s fault that he’s the most irksome, vexing blowhard in the land. We are unwell, people. We can’t help it. Give us the drugs and go away.

    Whatever your bad habits are, whatever your worst personality traits, I guarantee you there will be a ‘disorder’ you can wrap them in so that you come off as ill rather than irritating. You’re ‘spiteful and vindictive’ and you ‘deliberately annoy people’? Maybe you have Oppositional Defiant Disorder. You’re deceitful, impulsive and aggressive? You might have Antisocial Personality Disorder. Your kid’s a bully who plays hooky from school and sometimes even starts fires? Maybe he has a Conduct Disorder and would benefit from ‘multi-systemic therapy.’ Or, I don’t know, maybe he’s just a little shit who would benefit from a good slap upside the head. As I’ve written before, I am convinced that many people, especially men, act obnoxiously because they never received a good ass-kicking when they were younger. Everybody needs a good ass-kicking at least once in their lives.

    We are living through a great “everything is a pathology” stage of human behavior. Everything from exam stress to being an awful human being who is always ‘seeking revenge’ has been reimagined as a psychological disorder. ‘One in four people will experience a mental-health problem of some kind each year in the U.S.’, says one report, such as ‘low mood, anxiety or stress’ to an extent that it ‘impacts… daily life’. Only one in four?! For the love of Freud, everyone I know feels ‘low’ at times, because they’re human beings, and that’s what happens to human beings. It’s not a ‘mental-health problem’ – it’s life. Just as talking over people and pushing to the front of the line is not ADHD – it’s being a prick.

    ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some cool ailment to boast about? But, and there is always a But. There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. Over in England, The London Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – wow – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18% hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man, that’s a lot of annoying people.

    The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder.’ Its reasoning was solid: ‘Much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ are just ‘ordinary human traits,’ it said. Hello? Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganized, agitated? We’re not sick…we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from turning life’s ups and downs into pathologies. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. I doubt that Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.

    The ADHD epidemic, like many faux disorders, started right here in the United States. We've been drugging kids for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs, as I type this. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one skeptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘suppress all spontaneous behavior in normal children,’ he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.

    How striking that this explosion in the drugging of children coincided with the crisis of discipline in family and school life. It seems to me that medication was brought in to do what adults were increasingly reluctant to do; make kids sit still and shut the hell up. And now these ill-disciplined brats have become ill-disciplined adults. As someone from the last gasp of the Baby Boomers (the last sane generation), I remember when fidgeting and overtalking was something that was severely reprimanded. At school, at the dinner table, in church, you twitched and chatted at your peril. An elementary school report card NEVER came home without saying, “Peter is a joy in class and a very good student. HOWEVER, he constantly speaks out of turn while not raising his hand, and never shuts up.” This, in turn, led to loud lecturing and creative punishments from my parents! Even random old men on the bus would tell us to shut the hell up. No doubt millennials and Gen Z think this sounds tyrannical, but at least we don’t need drugs to get through a 20-minute meeting. The West’s millions of ‘ADHD adults’ don’t need medication – they need a time machine so they can go back and beg their bourgeois parents to discipline them better.

    Or – and I’m really putting my neck on the line here – maybe they just need to exercise some self-control. Here’s my advice for grown-ups who interrupt people and have temper tantrums – don’t. Stop using the luxury malady of ADHD to dress up your bad habits as a ‘disorder’. Stop seeking a diagnosis to avoid taking responsibility for your uncivilized behavior. Stop being a stooge of Big Pharma and give adulthood a shot instead. How about it? In 2025 I’ll be on time for the gathering of friends and you’ll stop being obnoxious – deal? Go ahead kids, have at me!

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com