TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to tell a little story about this thing called ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This goes back about 15 years or so, maybe a little bit more. I was a therapist at that point. I’d been a therapist for a few years already, hearing a lot about that disorder along the way. But at that time, it was the tail end of me working as a musician for children. I played guitar and sang in all sorts of different environments: libraries, at schools, sometimes in community gardens in Manhattan where I live, also at festivals occasionally. Sometimes I’d get hired to play at birthday parties, so I played music for a lot of different kids in a lot of different environments.
Well, I had a job at one point. I would work maybe once or twice a month doing a gig for an hour at an Arts Center, playing for children. Well, I came in one time, and it was a group of mostly boys, but a couple of girls too. It was about 25 kids, 20 to 25 kids, and they had like four or five teachers. I thought, that’s a lot of teachers for so many kids. The director of this Art Center said, “The teachers really want to talk to you before you perform. There’s some things they feel you really need to know. It’s not a regular audience.” I said, “Okay.” I played for lots of kids in lots of different environments. I always like to interact with the teachers or whoever the leaders are to have some sort of bond with them. Sometimes they can make the performance a lot better, especially if I’m on the same wavelength with them.
So I listened, and the head teacher came over to me and she said, “It’s really important that you know with this classroom, almost all of the kids in this class, it’s a special classroom, have been diagnosed with ADHD. Quite a lot of them are on medication, but it’s really important that you know that you can’t just do a regular children’s performance with them. It’s really important that you make the songs very short, shorter, shorter, shorter. If you normally play like 20 songs, you should probably think of doing more like 40 or 50.” Well, I remember looking at her, and I looked at these kids, I looked back at her, and I thought, okay, I’m gonna try, but I don’t know if I’m gonna try it your way because I don’t know that I buy this disorder. In fact, I don’t buy this disorder, but I didn’t say that.
And also, when I think about it, when I thought back about it then, that’s like I was a kid who probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I had so many teachers who I didn’t fit into the classroom for all sorts of different ways. So my radar went up with these little guys, and I was looking at them and thinking, hmm, how is this gonna go?
So I got up, and I thought, let me try a song that I really get them interested in. One of my favorite songs for children, and children loved it all around the world. They don’t even need to speak English: Old MacDonald. Old MacDonald had a farm, eieio. Well, then on his farm he had a—let the children pick an animal—cow! Boom! And I do it really loud, and I really make animals. Well, those kids came alive. They were engaged, and I saw they all started moving like cows, and we went on and on: Moo Moo! And they wanted to do it again and again.
Then I went back to the beginning of the song: Old MacDonald had a farm, eieio. And on his farm he had a—well, suddenly they were engaged, and they all started calling out animals. But I always do it, I’m very fair about it: pick the first animal that somebody says. And it was a goat! On his farm he had a goat, eieio. With a— and the kids were engaged. We went through goat, then we went to cat with him. Now, okay, let’s make this interesting, change it up a little bit. Now let’s see if we can sing it slower. And they all were alive. I’m thinking we’re probably already a minute and a half into this song, a song that’s only supposed to be, according to the teacher, 30 seconds long where they’re not going to be interested.
We did it slower: on his farm he had a—someone said dog! Dog! And then it’s woof! And everybody’s whooping! All these kids, all the boys, all the girls, they’re all whooping. Let’s try it again! I don’t think that was loud enough. Well, on his farm he had some of them are screaming. I was like, no, no, let’s start over again without screaming. Let’s make it beautiful and loud. So they’re all trying beautifully. They sang it, we all sang it together so beautifully and loud. I was like, let’s try dog again, but let’s try it this way, this time doing it beautiful and quiet. And they all did it perfectly.
Then we switched to a different animal, a horse. They all started laughing. I was like, can you guys do a horse? They all tried to do horses, and they actually did it really well. I was like, now let’s try it beautiful and quiet and fast. Oh yeah, yeah, eieio! And by the way, I took a quick peek at the teacher, and she’s looking at me, and I think she realized what I was doing. I think she realized at some level I was bucking her authority, bucking her misconceptions, and bucking her maybe even authoritarianism because I saw the look in her eyes. She was mad because she had her concept of how these kids were, and I wasn’t playing along with her concept that they all have this ADHD thing.
And when I looked at the kids and looked in their eyes and looked at what they had that was so special, aside from the beauty of just being children, what they had was complete and undivided attention on this song, on this music, on the concepts that I was presenting. There was no distraction. There was no deficit of attention. They were engaged, they were interesting, they were having fun. Let’s do a dinosaur! How does the dinosaur sound? A snake! How does the snake sound? Let’s try to all sing it in a very high voice. Well, let’s do a whale! Let’s do a tiger! Let’s do a car! Mm-hmm. Can there be a car in a farm? Yes!
The reason I’m sharing this story is because these children, so-called ADHD kids, kids with a deficit of attention and hyperactivity, kids who can’t sit still, kids who were bored, kids who disrupt the class, who need five teachers for 20 or 25 of them as opposed to one or two teachers, we sang Old MacDonald for one hour! One song for one hour! And guess what? All 20 or 25 of them did not stray with their attention. They paid attention, they were engaged, they were focused. None of them were running away, none of them were trying to run outside. All five teachers just sat there and did nothing.
And so for me, that’s a little story that tells something to me about this so-called thing called ADHD, which so many kids need to be medicated for. They need to have their senses dulled down. They need stimulants: methamphetamine or methylphenidate, Adderall and Ritalin, Vyvanse that focus their attention, speed! Giving speed to little kids, the same drugs that work on the neural pathways lift that cocaine. We’ll work on putting these little kids on drugs for this so-called lack of attention. Why not change their environment? Why not engage them?
I was once a little kid in school who was bored. I was once a little kid in school who was bouncing out of my seat because I found school so dull. I knew a lot of this stuff already. I was like, oh my god, I have to sit here! And my thoughts would be wandering, and I’d want to—I’d look out the window, and I’d want to play outside, or I’d see a bird, and I’d want to wander over to the window and watch it and not sit there and listen to the teacher say, “Okay, A, B, C, what’s the next letter in the alphabet?”
The other thing is, I think a lot of these kids that get diagnosed, they’re just young, or maybe they can’t follow the teacher. I remember I heard this one—the number one indicator that a child will be diagnosed with…
ADHD is that that child is the youngest child in their class. There’s no other better indicator than whether or not a child is going to be diagnosed with ADHD. So it’s the younger kids, the kids who aren’t as emotionally or intellectually developed, that don’t fit into the classroom as well. They’re the ones that get bored, and they can’t follow, and their mind is wandering. Or maybe they’re more creative, or maybe the stuff that is presented to them just isn’t presented to where they’re at.
So I remember that. So with those kids, for one hour, not playing 50 songs, not playing 40 songs, or 30, or 20, or 10—one song—and their attention was undivided. And you know what? I felt that if that performance had been 2 hours, we could have continued with that. It was just a question of presenting it in a way that they found interesting.
I remember a couple of the teachers came over to me afterwards. They said, “That was wonderful, thank you so much, that was so amazing!” Except the head teacher. She said, “Thank you,” she shook my hand, and she left. No more. And it was like, I think that’s true of the mental health field a lot in general. Even though she wasn’t a mental health professional, in a way she was an agent of the mental health field. And I think it’s true what I saw with her is true with the mental health field in general.
So often with psychiatry in general, so often mental health professionals like diagnosis. They believe in diagnosis; they’re convinced that these diagnoses are true and real things. And when they have evidence that contradicts what they see, when they get data, especially lots of data that contradicts their point of view, they don’t change their point of view. They discount the data, and that to me is not scientific. And I think that’s so true of the mental health field, and I think it’s true way beyond just this thing called ADHD.
Change the situation, change the environment. Look at people’s history, look at their trauma, look at why they might be this way. Try and somehow create an environment for people that’s more loving, more respectful, more tailored to them, more individualized. Don’t just make school, make mental health, make these diagnoses be a little factory where people have to behave certain ways. And if they don’t behave this certain way, then they are wrong. Then they get a diagnosis, then they have to be medicated, and then they have two problems. Not only do they not fit in, but now they’re medicated. And heaven forbid someday they want to come off their medication. It can be horrible for people to come off these ADHD meds. I’ve heard so many stories of people coming off Adderall and Ritalin, becoming depressed and miserable, and gaining weight, and then trying to find street drugs sometimes to make themselves feel good, or other medications, or even taking antidepressants because they feel so horrible. They don’t even realize necessarily that they’re going through drug withdrawal.
So for me, this story highlights to me the sham about so many things—about diagnosis, about the mental health field, about ADHD, and maybe about school too.
[Music]