As more and more people are collaborating online, and an emphasis on lived experience is becoming the norm in both research and interventions, it is becoming abundantly clear much of our scholarship on ADHD is woefully biased and inadequate. Most of what we know about ADHD comes from a deficits or medical model that centers neurotypical experience as normal and most functional. The result of this is that most knowledge, treatments, conceptualizations, and theories of ADHD are inherently ableist; practitioners see differences in functioning as less than human or disordered/deficient. When viewing ADHD related phenomena purely through a neurotypical lens, we develop a narrative that is completely disconnected from the actual lived experience of people with ADHD. This continues a scientific tradition of centering majority experiences as normal in order to pathologize or minimize the importance of a minority experience.
In the last 15 years or so, advocates have been developing a new paradigm to understand neurological brain differences. Borrowing from other social justice movements, the neurodiversity paradigm views conditions such as autism and ADHD as stemming from naturally occurring biodiversity. If we begin to understand ADHD from this perspective, including contributions from ADHD researchers, bloggers, theoreticians, and clinicians, we begin to develop an entirely different understanding of what ADHD actually is and how societal values, standard treatments, and modern hegemonies end up hurting and disabling ADHD folks, often in unseen ways. This program weds recent research on ADHD with lived experience of ADHD people under a banner of neurodiversity to inform clinicians about how to best work with ADHD from an interdisciplinary perspective.