What if we just ensured everyone has their needs met?

By JD Goulet

30 March 2024

Hang on folks, this one's gonna be a wild ride through my mind, in which I am the Masterpiece Theater version of "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders" played by Alex Kingston if Moll had been a bit more cracked. (If you've never seen the 1996 miniseries based on the 1722 novel by Daniel Defoe, I can't recommend it enough! It really is a masterpiece of theater.)

Prologue

I recently read a thoughtful and informed piece about “adult onset” ADHD. Apparently, some researchers have been discussing whether “adult onset” ADHD should be classified as a separate disorder from regular ADHD (the neurodevelopmental kind that gets recognized early in childhood as “abnormal” development).

My personal experience, and that of so many others like me, refutes this framing, which likely serves no purpose other than to open up yet another diagnostic pathway through which the Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex can profit.

It’s more likely that “adult onset” is just what happens when the training wheels of childhood come off. Once the support structures that kept our executive function propped up are removed, we slump into dysfunction.

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of JD Goulet

I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until my mid-20s. The diagnosis followed sometime after I'd been multiply misdiagnosed with major depression and anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and eventually, bipolar disorder followed by the addition of ADHD into the mix. I was improperly medicated with a powerful, compliance-inducing cocktail of anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, anti-anxiety meds, sleeping pills, and stimulants with life-long and life-altering consequences. (I was even prescribed medication with a sole purpose of lessening the side effects of some of the other drugs!)

In large part, the late ADHD diagnosis was probably due to my age (I’m 47 now). I never heard of ADHD until I was an adult. No one I knew had any such diagnosis as a kid. It just wasn't something 80s kids were really being labeled with yet, nor was autism. The effects of Reagan's (and subsequent Administration's) dismantling of mental health services and other programs for the social good hadn't touched my family yet (but it would). I first heard about ADHD sometime in the mid- to late-90s when a much younger nephew of mine was diagnosed. I didn't really know anything about autism until my first child (born in 2000) was diagnosed with it at 3, and even then all I received was misinformation, much to their detriment (and my own).

When your needs are met…

What I’m about to say might come off as bragging, but I'm setting the stage, so bear with me.

I was a highly intelligent, curious, and polite kid who was favored by most of my teachers (but universally disfavored by PE teachers). I was usually absorbed in books, my mom struggling to buy them for me at a sufficient pace or take me to the library often enough. I was formally recognized (and privileged) for my exceptional reading comprehension and writing abilities from a young age. I was published in a magazine for kids’ writing at age 8. I was the editor of our elementary school paper in 4th and 5th grade. Reading and writing at a college level before age 11, I was one of two students, one boy and one girl, who were awarded a special writing mentor for a year in 5th grade. The school hired a published fiction author to come in and spend private time with me for a few hours each week. I didn't appreciate him as much as I should have. His answers to my questions, likely aimed at a more typical child of my age, frustrated me though.

In high school, I penned civics-themed letters to the editor of our local newspaper and was editing and helping improve on my father’s written assignments when he went to university in his 50s. I would learn decades later that I was one of my debate teacher's favorite students. When she sent a message to me out of the blue on Facebook one day, she said it was because I was such an out-of-the-box thinker. (If only my many employers over the years appreciated my synthetic thinking style as much as she did.) I was president of the German Club, secretary of the Drama Club, and voted “Most dramatic” for the senior yearbook. I auditioned and was awarded a spot in a community acting troupe for teen sexual health education (which my parents flatly refused to allow me to participate in). I took second place in state theater championships for my role as Ismene in a scene from the Athenian tragedy "Antigone." In other words, I was going places. Or supposed to be...

When cracks begin to surface…

Underneath my alternating goth “girl” and grunge “boy” exterior (it would be a few decades before I shed gender identity in favor of “none for me, thanks”), I had always been fidgety, anxious, and driven to perform (and try to hide) small, repetitive physical movements that caused me distress and discomfort even as they gave me relief. I was prone to bursts of overwhelming emotion. Since I was very little, I had struggled to process verbal communication to the point my mom wondered whether I needed a hearing test because when she spoke to me, I routinely responded with “What?” Then, as she repeated herself, the information would catch up to my understanding and I would interrupt her mid-sentence with a response.

I mostly internalized my distress, so I wasn't usually outwardly disruptive to others (except for when I would finally explode from the bottled-up, overwhelming emotion), but I was very disruptive to my own internal state (the pressure and anxiety quietly building). I excelled at learning outside of the classroom, alone, but I also had an intelligent and academically supportive father, so I could more easily compensate for the fact I was usually disassociating in, or frequently absent from, the busy, stressful classroom environment. School assemblies or sports ball events were the bane of my existence, but I didn’t understand why yet. I was a chronically tardy or absent kid because crippling anxiety manifested as digestive problems that kept me close to home.

The only time I got hauled into the principal's office for a physical fight was because I jumped into a hallway brawl to defend a small freshman kid being pummeled by a much larger senior boy. (As a petite white girl from the "middle class" with good grades, I did not get into trouble for this early foray into siding against injustice.)

When the last remaining supports are removed…

I had been on a trajectory to likely go to any university of my choosing and do something meaningful with my life early on. I had big dreams. But I left home at 17 because my family life had become the opposite of supportive. Once I was out in the world, struggling to survive without support and reeling from the loss of the environment that had enabled me to compensate and cope and excel, everything fell apart. My path veered away from getting a college education because FAFSA expected my parents—who had forsaken me for refusing the Christian religion that was mandatory to be loved, accepted, and cared for in their faithful eyes—to contribute to my tuition. As an outcast bisexual atheist who struggled to perform “womanhood” correctly, I would not finally complete a bachelor’s degree until I was 40, and I still have more than enough student loan debt to follow me into my grave, which has rendered me unable to help my own kids with their education.

When unmet needs = “mental illness”

The incorrect diagnosis of bipolar disorder at age 23 resulted from a stay in an in-patient mental hospital. I had decided I’d rather die than keep struggling to have my needs met anymore, a recurring theme throughout my life. One of the questions on the form that led to my diagnoses was whether I had ever shoplifted. Yes, I had. Financial deprivation, hunger, and resentment of the corporate benefactors of the system that's put you in that situation will often lead to this method of last resort. It’s really something the way checking boxes on a form affirms your inability to get your needs met, but in the realm of early aughts mental health professionals, those same boxes merely confirmed a diagnosis of “mental illness.” I was the problem, not my unsupportive and oppressive environment, the medical establishment decided. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Instead of going to school and getting a good job, I tumbled through my 20s, marrying young for my survival. I spent part of that decade on SSI while heavily sedated, drugged for disorders I didn't have, foggily struggling through a prescribed, drug-induced haze beset by financial deprivation, unstable housing and employment, domestic abuse and neglect, divorce, and frequent health problems (often without medical insurance because there was no ACA yet).

My false bipolar diagnosis even got me a night in a solitary confinement cell on suicide watch once when my abuser had learned how easy it was to weaponize that diagnosis against me when the cops showed up to "help." My need to be kept safe from my abuser was unmet when all the cops saw was a sobbing mess of a woman with a stigmatized mental illness label in one corner and a businesslike man calmly making accusations from the other corner. They could identify with an abuser better, I guess. Weird. I walked free the next day, all charges dropped and my record eventually expunged, but it left a lifetime of emotional scars and a deep distrust of law enforcement who neither served nor protected me.

Nearly two more decades would pass before I realized I'm also autistic and always was, which explained a LOT, but again, it was my defiant ability to compensate (at great personal cost) and my intelligence that had kept me appearing “functional” to the outside world. It took having a stroke (triggered by a car accident, but following decades of prescribed stimulant use that made my blood pressure creep up) to remove the last remaining shreds of my coping mechanisms and raise my support needs in ways that made the autistic traits stick out like a sore thumb. My autistic kids said they knew all along and were happily validated that I finally recognized it in myself.

But when needs are met abundantly…

I did go on to do some things many would call successful, once my needs were finally being met. In spite of getting fucked over in the 2008 financial crisis, my life started to turn around in 2009 thanks to Obama's economic stimulus and the ACA. I founded a non-profit organization and led it for nearly a decade. I became the chair of the Democratic party in my county. I sat on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood for over 5 years. I ran for state legislature 3 times (never won, but I did move the needle in a solidly conservative district). I was a strong advocate for many just causes in my community. I've had a largely successful career spanning government environmental remediation and safety & health, Big Tech, pharma/medical, and corporate learning for an Ivy League publishing house. I had time to cultivate my love of dance.

I had enough abundance that I was able to take others under my wing. Over the years, five different queer and trans friends of my kids have moved in with us for months or even years when they lacked good homes and safe and loving families to return to. We even housed a gay man from Brazil for several months here in Portugal where we ourselves have sought refuge, because our needs were met and we had abundance.

Diagnosis: Adult Onset Resource Deprivation Social Disorder

So, it's not that there is “adult onset” ADHD, but that disability is shaped by our material environment and support structures (or lack thereof), which can change throughout life for reasons not of our own making. I think it would be more accurate to say that we have adult onset Resource Deprivation Social Disorder.

When our needs are met, we can care for ourselves, and when we have abundance, we can care for each other. A broad enough shift in our social consciousness that acknowledged this dynamic would cause profound change. Disability, deprivation, and other unmet needs would not be seen as an individual's problem to resolve alone, but one with systemic causes and solutions we’d work to find together, because we all do better when we all do better.

Epilogue

I sometimes wonder what else I could have been capable of achieving in my life had I only had my needs met from the beginning. I don't regret living the life I had no choice but to live, and without those experiences of hardship and exclusion, I probably wouldn't have done the things I did out of compassion fueled by rage, like run for office. But still… if all our needs were met, what might the world look like today?

Resources

For further reading that helps to expose the supremacist mindset so pervasive in the Western approach to mental wellness, I strongly recommend the following books:

• “Health Communism” by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
• “Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health” by Micha Frazer-Carroll
• “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture” by Dr. Gabor Maté
• "Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism" by Robert Chapman (I haven't read this one yet, but it's in my to-read pile and I have no doubt it's gonna be a good one!)

Please feel free to leave some of your reading (or viewing) recommendations in the comments! And if any of my story resonates with your own experience, I'd love to hear about it.

This was a republication of a newsletter originally shared via Substack, aka the Nazi bar. I'm trying this atproto blog out as an alternative avenue for making connections while avoiding the exploitation and surveillance of the technofascists' walled gardens. Your interaction with and redistribution of my writing is encouraged and greatly appreciated. If you liked this and you are financially able, please consider leaving me a tip at Ko-fi! My content will always remain free to enjoy, but every bit of support helps me to keep going.