How the Media Unfairly Portrays Those With ADHD

In the linked Vlog, Jessica McCabe explains how the media poorly portrays people with ADHD. She shows us a few clips from television shows of actors pretending to have ADHD. Watching them gave me feelings of cringe, despair, and embarrassment as I checked the boxes in having some of the symptoms shown by the actors (sometimes in an exaggerating manner) in those clips.

Those symptoms include impulsiveness, poor time management issues, doesn’t listen, being easily distracted, having trouble waiting my turn, intruding on others. And some of those television shows went on to portray people with those symptoms as “bad” and not “normal”. In the popular medical drama “House MD”, Dr. Gregory House displayed many traits that a person with ADHD would have: fidgetiness, inattention, and impulsiveness. Unfortunately, he also has an addiction to pain medication, and as we know, many people with ADHD are vulnerable to addiction.

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I’m glad Jessica is calling out these harmful stereotypes and hope that there is more effort for people to be more accepting of those with ADHD because of advocates like her. But unfortunately, while we sometimes can do a great job of masking the symptoms, there are times that we can’t, and that’s because of a variety of factors. Such as when we have health care providers not prescribing the proper treatments or our insurance companies preventing us from accessing the right ones.