When I was a boy theautism he had a specific face and it was that of Rain Man.Autistic meant Raymond Babbitt, that is Dustin Hoffman who counted cards remembering every number, he didn’t understand the world but he was a genius. For a time, culturally, we were all Raymond Babbitts, or rather, we all aspired to be. When I heard about someone who had an autistic child I would ask: “Wow, and what can he do?”, and the parents would look at you badly, rightly so.
Also because they were not geniuses, they did not count cards, they had no compensatory talent and the families had to live with very real daily difficulties. On the other hand, cinema had done its job: it had created a myth, and the myth, when it works, doesn’t have to be true.
In the following years, autism stopped being just an exceptional cinematic figure and became an identity. Changing shape and variant, slowly. Public figures have started to talk about it as a distinctive trait, as a key to understanding their way of being in the world, from the usual Greta Thunberg who defined his Asperger’s as a strength, also put it in his bio on social media (by the way, do you know how much energy social media consumes?) and Elon Musk he has often been described as an example of neurodivergent genius (from autism to Asperger’s, he has them all, according to him).
So far, however, nothing that really concerns society, if anything the problem arises when the next myth takes the place of the previous one and is even more comfortable, and I’m referring to ADHD. You’ve already heard it, right? Hell, everyone has it. Or rather: everyone says they have it.
They write it in the bio and explain it to you in the reels and tell it as a combination of superpower and universal justification, it seems like a superpower of the Stranger Things kids. I can’t concentrate, so I have ADHD. So I’m bored ADHD. I open my phone every thirty seconds, so ADHD. Have you had a neurological diagnosis? No, I read it on Google. Better yet: ChatGPT told me.
Some numbers, however, exist. In the United States, diagnoses of ADHD in children have risen from about 6 percent to more than 10 percent in just over twenty years. Warning: this doesn’t say that brains have suddenly gotten worse, it says that the diagnosis has changed, and with it the way we interpret any attention difficulties.
The paradox is that, if attention problems are truly increasing today, the cause is not mysterious, it is biologically environmental. This applies to adults, let alone children, who are born with smartphones and Tik Tok and Instagram: infinite downscrolling, and continuous notifications, and content designed to interrupt you, in short, platforms built to prevent any form of prolonged concentration. If you put a person in an environment that systematically destroys attention and that person can no longer concentrate and becomes stupid, perhaps the problem is not the person.
This explanation is uncomfortable, because it would call into question the system, education, the laxity of parents who are never seen with a book in their hand but who also shake, everything shakes. Much better to transform the symptom into identity. Much better to say “that’s how I am”. Even better to say it publicly, with a hashtag, and the algorithms help: you watch a video on ADHD, they suggest ten more, then twenty, then fifty, until it seems statistically impossible not to recognize yourself (also because otherwise you wouldn’t be there to scroll). It’s not a diagnosis, it’s a feedback loop.
It is no coincidence that the most recent studies do not agree on a real increase in biological prevalence and above all the requests for diagnosis, the visibility of the topic and prescriptions are growing. More than a neurological epidemic, it seems like a cultural mutation of discomfort.
In short, we went from the autistic genius of Rain Man to the Instagram bio that says “ADHD, neurodivergente, overstimulated“. Previously cinema simplified, today social media simplifies. Before there was a rare and elitist myth (false, and painful only for those who experienced autism first hand) today there is a mass normalization of a convenient “disease”.
What I mean is that in the 1980s autism was
Raymond Babbitt who counted cards, while today ADHD is a feed that never ends. In between humanity has become more fragile to be without idiotic stimuli. And, curiously, almost no one puts this in their bio.
