Are We Asking the Wrong Questions About ADHD, Neurodiversity, and Society?

I’ve spent decades living, working, and breathing neurodiversity as a parent, a professional, and as someone who is neurodiverse myself. Over those years, I’ve started to see things differently. It may be true, it may not be.

But it’s worth asking:

What if ADHD isn’t a disorder at all?

What if the problem isn’t the child, but the world we’ve built for them?

The Classroom Problem

ADHD children are often described as “distracted” or “defiant” because they look out of the window instead of at the board. But maybe they’re looking where their brains are wired to look, outside, into nature, into movement, into freedom.

They struggle with writing. But maybe humans weren’t built to sit still, copy symbols, and churn out essays on topics they don’t care about. Maybe their resistance isn’t laziness, but their personality trying to shine through rigid systems.

And then there’s the content itself. Children today are asked to listen to lessons that may or may not even be true, lessons that are “just what we’re told.” Should we really be medicating children just so they can conform to school? Maybe it’s the conformity itself that damages mental health.

What damage do the flickering fluorescent lights do to sensitive brains?

Why must our children endure all this just to “get a job” and “pay taxes”?

Why can’t the world be as beautiful as it was supposed to be?

Breaking the Bond

From the moment children are born, they’re fed processed food, bathed in advertising, and taught systems that don’t serve them. Babies are taken from their parents for nursery so their parents can work to pay taxes. Bonds between families are stretched thin so that work can come first.

Credit systems keep parents working. Tax systems keep families trapped. Children, meanwhile, are pushed to sit, obey, and conform, learning not only the curriculum but the idea that war, hierarchy, and inequality are normal.

We’re told these lessons are “education,” but are they actually indoctrination?

Do children doodle in their books not out of defiance but because, deep down, they sense the falseness of what they’re being taught?

A Spiritual Question

I’m not overly religious, but I am spiritual. And sometimes I wonder: is there a higher calling for those of us with neurodiversity?

We are the ones who ask questions. We see through the lies, the spin, the bullshit. We resist. We won’t settle for “just how it is.”

If society wanted compliance, wouldn’t it be easier to produce it? Chemicals in tap water. Fluoride in toothpaste. Heavy metals in vaccines. Chemtrails in the sky. These sound like conspiracies, and yet some of them are right there on government websites.

I’m not saying I know the truth. I’m saying: why shouldn’t we ask?

We Have Been Here Before

In 1922, Elsdon Best published Spiritual and Mental Concepts of the Maori. It was a brief but powerful run-down of the spiritual concepts of the Māori people. What stands out is how many of these concepts relate to the spiritual welfare and states of a person.

We might disagree on the causes. But the point is this: these states have always existed.

They were recognised and treated differently in earlier communities.

Many ancient peoples believed in a spirit world, a dimension that interacted with us.

Can such a thing simply disappear because a majority decides it’s no longer the case?

Is this the price of democracy?

The price of “civilisation”?

When the experiences of the many override the experiences of the individual, what happens?

If everyone doesn’t experience it, does that mean it doesn’t happen? Or is there “something wrong” with the individual’s beliefs or faith?

Wind the clock back just 200 years and these experiences weren’t dismissed as pathology or superstition. They were seen as real, meaningful parts of human life.

The Cost of Compliance

We’re medicating children, sometimes very young children, just so they can “behave” in an environment that may itself be toxic. We’re putting them in classrooms under flickering lights, feeding them lessons about war as if war is inevitable, telling them they must one day work, pay taxes, take out loans, and obey laws that mostly benefit those at the top.

If there were no such rules, would we have so many criminals?

If society were truly equal, would we need such heavy governance at all?

We put governments in power to work for us. Yet they chip away at the support systems our children need, cutting EHCP funding, tightening criteria, and reducing provisions.

Is this just budget management, or is there a deeper plan to keep neurodiverse children from thriving, to keep them from becoming the free thinkers they could be?

Could We Live Differently?

Of course, humanity has always had leaders. Maybe some kind of governance is inevitable. But could we live without the structures we have now? Could we live in harmony without war, without poverty, without manufactured scarcity?

There is enough land, food, oil, and money on this planet for everyone. But we’re told there isn’t. We’re told we must fight, compete, and conform.

And yet, maybe the neurodiverse children who can’t sit still in class, who question everything, who reject the system, are a signpost. Maybe they’re showing us a way back to freedom, curiosity, and authenticity.

The Real Disorder

Maybe ADHD isn’t the disorder. Maybe society is.

Maybe our children aren’t broken.

Maybe the system is broken.

And maybe it’s time to listen to what their brains and their behaviour are trying to tell us.