“Don’t get hysterical”: Capitalism, Patriarchy and ADHD
Aisling Sheehy examines the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy in the historical and current marginalisation of women’s health, with a particular focus on diagnoses of ADHD.
Here are some quick-fire facts about women’s health:
For centuries, doctors readily diagnosed women experiencing seizures, hallucinations and anxiety with ‘hysteria,’ the treatments for which included (among a myriad of other things) getting married and engaging in heterosexual sex.
Endometriosis, despite impacting around 1.5 million women in the UK, can often take up to 8.5 years to be diagnosed, due to misconceptions about the condition at best and outright gaslighting from medical officials at worst.
Most women with ADHD receive a diagnosis in their late 30s or early 40s. Most boys are diagnosed before the age of 12.
Hysteria is an incredibly early example of medical bias leading to women not being taken seriously as patients. For centuries, women experiencing ill-health were told that they simply needed to assimilate better into Western patriarchal society. And though we’ve made considerable strides in the medical and mental health fields, gender bias is, unfortunately, still alive and very much well.
It will be news to no-one who is familiar with both the misconceptions surrounding neurodivergence and the state of the British healthcare system that the process of being diagnosed with ADHD takes an incredibly long time, and even more so for women. The reasons for this are complex and intersecting, but structural sexism is a huge factor.
Hyperactivity presents much more openly in boys than in girls. When born female under a patriarchal society, girls understand, however unknowingly, that their behaviours must be minimised, dialled down and made fit to accommodate others. In other words, girls learn to mask, effectively diminishing and suppressing their neurodivergence.
I was one of those young girls, a ‘gifted child’ capable of long periods of focus in what I now realise was hyper-fixation, but I was also inattentive, incapable of regulating my attention and often unable to sit still. Years of hearing about my deficiencies from caregivers and those in the education system led me to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with me that I needed to cover up and hide.
A diagnosis is often the first step out of this cycle of blame, suppression and self-hatred. Diagnosis comes with acceptance that you’ve been pushing yourself to fit into a neurotypical mould which just won’t fit. For me, this meant being easier on myself on days where I found attention regulation difficult, and I had another huge step forward when my symptoms subsided significantly with medication.
Then something happened I didn’t expect. Because I started to find things easier, I started to question the legitimacy of my struggles. This is what I’ve heard less people talk about: the feeling that, even after being diagnosed, you don’t actually have ADHD.
The pervasive, sinister, and misogynistic push to package yourself into as small and unobtrusive an identity as possible is something that every woman will be familiar with. I also believe it is one root cause of what I now know to be ADHD imposter syndrome - the self-sabotage that comes hand-in-hand with the diminishment of self.
Patriarchy teaches women and girls to make ourselves smaller, to take up less space, to take up less of other people’s time. It’s true that women’s health is not treated as a priority by the healthcare system. But the twisted and ingenious nature of patriarchy is that we de-prioritise ourselves, too.
And this urge to diminish ourselves and our needs also has its roots in capitalism. (We’ve all heard the phrase “time is money”). Under capitalism, time is commodified, and if you have a developmental disorder, you become increasingly aware that time being spent unable to focus is time that's not being spent finishing that report, compiling those statistics—time that, if you're not careful, could have disastrous consequences for you and your career.
In certain situations when I find it difficult or even impossible to regulate my attention, it’s difficult to see myself as someone with ADHD and a lot easier to see myself as someone simply refusing to apply themselves. My neurodivergence diminishes and, in its place, there is a new, much darker self-perception: that I am, simply, lazy.
Capitalism wants us to give into these self-hating thoughts, requiring all its citizens to have in their heads the drive to ‘be productive,’ even if it comes at a personal cost. Capitalism needs order, stability, and rules; it needs consistent, reliable citizens to do its bidding. ADHD’s unpredictability and disorder make it not just inconvenient; it threatens to disrupt the entire system.
Asking ourselves how we overcome this imposter syndrome is akin to asking ourselves how we overcome the evils of capitalism and patriarchy. Unsurprisingly, I don’t have the answers here (I wish I did!). But if I could offer one piece of advice that’s helped me, it would be that practising self-compassion in a world that values you on the condition of your productivity is a radical act. Imposter syndrome feeds off negative self-talk. Taking the time to recognise your struggles and that you are doing your best is one of the best and most crucial steps into feeling empowered in your neurodivergence.
