If we are to believe recent press reports there is a highly visible epidemic - ADHD and dyslexia and all manors of ‘special’ needs. It is well documented that these difficulties often present themselves through challenging behaviours.
According to Darwinian laws, if dyslexia inhibited survival it would not be present in the gene pool and yet it is. The incidence of dyslexia in western society runs at a consistent 10% of the population ranging from 4% seriously affected to mild symptoms. It seems difficult people have a purpose. And ‘special needs’ can mean ‘special gifts’. Certain groups have increased predisposition to dyslexia and ADHD – entrepreneurs, creative services and sports requiring super fast visual processing… Being loosely wired can for some be a positive advantage. If dyslexia is related to creativity then we can assume that society naturally needs 10% of the population to be dyslexic it follows that a healthy and functioning group should employ 10% dyslexic people… But there’s a problem, anxieties associated with the presentation of these psychological and behavioural symptoms are reaching an all time high. Society is begging the question – ‘How can we cure these people before they seriously threaten us…?’ These children are ill. We must fix them up. A society populated by ‘special needs’? What a terrifying prospect?
So, we are galvanized to cure these problems – with drugs wherever possible! Let’s turn these ‘wrong’ behaviours off and homogenize these dysfunctions, sanitize and subdue – “ahh that’s better,” we say…
Maybe ADHD or dyslexia is not the scary thing – but, it is society’s response and the denial associated with the proposed treatments which is terrifying.
It’s a weird thing to consider that at a time when allegedly we have more freedom than ever (particularly in the areas of conspicuous consumption i.e. we can happily indulge ourselves - or is that gorge ourselves…- to death) we are conversely less free than ever to explore and express ourselves as individuals and that this repression is manifesting itself in increasingly neurotic behaviour – like overcrowded rats our creative drives, desires and passions become destructive. We can eat and fuck what we like; and we can buy anything off eBay, but we are more controlled than ever in what we can think, say and do. It is a gratuitous fatuous freedom within high-voltage conformist electric fences. Step over the line and be hospitalized, sued or charged.
Do parents live in fear of their neighbours, their children’s peers and friends? Is playing in front of the computer accepted as somehow safer than playing in the street, or across the fields. Children can eat excessively but they can’t go out to play. Things are getting dangerously out of balance.
Our children are restricted psychologically, emotionally and physically. Ultimately it is their creative drives that are suppressed and this repression must contribute to the psychosis which presents itself as excesses of introversion or extroversion. At the most prosaic level, it must be mad that children are banned from exploring the creative arts of paper aeroplanes and conkers because of ‘health and safety’ and yet they are free to express themselves creatively by hurling rocks and knives at each other during the lunch break – a true story, my sister is a teacher and she is unable to open the window in case little Jenny or Johnny feel the urge to throw themselves out. Creative energy must be liberated or it becomes a destructive psychotic force.
Put simply the psychology of some people is more predisposed to creative function and psychosis than others – we must accept that some brains are more loosely wired.
This is the context for many current behavioural dysfunctions that are presented as psycho clinical conditions. This is not to say that these conditions do not exist but the repressive environment we find ourselves in, made worse by masquerading as freedom goes some way to explain why our children and the wider society is suffering. And the more we try to control the situation with medication the worse it is likely to become.
Societies value sameness and wish to ‘cure’ and suppress difference.
This is not a new phenomenon but it is made worse by our increasingly chaotic post modern age. The more our boundaries breakdown – globalisation, internet, and technology – the more we will desire control and yet the more elusive that control will become. It’s ironic that the creative drives that fuel the development of urban, production based civilisation creates societies populated by peoples expected to perform within a given repeatable ‘spread sheet’. The tools that have been created to serve us, to make our society predictable and controllable are now fragmenting it. As we strive for more control our technology and urbanisation has the undesirable bi-product of increasing our chaos.
Paradoxically in chaos creativity thrives. We should embrace it not control it. Now here’s a thought - maybe these children we vilify so much in the media they do not threaten us but provide us with our hope. Potentially these are the creative people that can show us the way.
We cannot be absolute – in any community there must be significant levels of conformity to function and process things, to repeat and scale-up functions to create wealth. In organisations and businesses and groups conformity helps everything fit together and provides competitive advantage – things and people conform and get along together.
“When we find ourselves in groups we inevitably find ourselves in the minority occasionally. Generally speaking, we will feel a little uncomfortable with that situation, which explains why we generally seek out groups with interests similar to our own. Imagine, though, that you are in a group where you are sure you are right and everyone else is wrong…”
If we were all different all the time we could not repeat things with any degree of success, society or a business can not function with excessive experimentation. There needs to be sameness so that groups can coagulate to perform as communities. But we have gone too far – in the past the Brits were renowned for celebrating the eccentric, the outsider, the innovator – not now.
As established boundaries break down and chaos increases the quest for conformity won’t save you. It is difference that you need. Different ideas, different approaches delivered by different minds. Are we recognising difference and the important role it plays in a healthy society or are we subduing and repressing it?
The creative mind could be being seen as disruptive rather than valuable and the more we control the more the psychosis of repressed creativity becomes evident – ADHD and dyslexia. These behavioural challenges are more often viewed as illnesses to be cured rather than indications of special gifts and talents. They are judged as weaknesses to be overcome not strengths to be nurtured. To celebrate them rather than fear them would be a challenge to our modern view of the world. In our modern times unstructured creative behaviours are more taboo than ever. It takes the most visionary parents or the strongest character to survive outside the accepted spectrum of ‘normality’.
Maybe it is not so strange that surveys of dyslexia for the prison population and among entrepreneurs are similar:
For the first time, new research shows that entrepreneurs are five times more likely to suffer from dyslexia then your average
UK
citizen and this has major implications for this Government’s key aim of creating a more entrepreneurial British society through initiatives such as this week’s National Enterprise week.
The research carried out by Simfonec, a science research centre based at Cass Business School, found that 20% of entrepreneurs (business owners employing at least one person) studied were dyslexic whereas employed managers (those who supervise at least one person) reflected the UK national dyslexia incidence level of 4%.
The research also found that 70% of dyslexic entrepreneurs who participated in the second, more in depth stage of the research, did not succeed at school. Researcher and Director of Simfonec, Dr Julie Logan notes that some of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs such as Sir Richard Branson, Sir Alan Sugar, Anita Roddick and Sir Norman Foster allegedly suffer from dyslexia and says this research not only links dyslexia and entrepreneurship for the first time but it also has fundamental implications about how entrepreneurship should be fostered.
A 1996 study by the National Probation Service found that 52% of prisoners in London
exhibited signs of dyslexia. A study earlier this year by the British Dyslexia Association and the Youth Offending Team in Bradford found that over half of the young offenders were dyslexic. Cass BusinessSchoolLondon 2006.
Are the indicators of dyslexia and ADHD problems a reflection of their sick minds or does it reflect societies inability to embrace, understand and nurture the special creative talents of this minority group. Dyslexia and ADHD can often present itself as disruptive and even anti-social behaviour undoubtedly, but is it right that the reaction is to cage it and cure it rather than nurture it.
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