ADHD Website Tells Women They’re Annoying in Relationships

by lisa, Nov 10, 2009, at 10:43 am

Annelise M. sent us a link to a relationships advice slide show at ADDITUDE, a website for people with Attention Deficit Disorder and other learning disabilities. The slide show title is “7 Tips for Better Communication in Your ADHD Relationships.” However, even though men are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD two to four times more often than women, the subtitle makes it clear that the advice is for women only and the text specifies “ADD women” and the “partner” or “spouse” is always a “him” (so also heterosexist). The advice was gender-neutral, but the authors decided to go with gender stereotypes instead.

The slide show begins with this image reminding us that women are always talking at men:

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Continues with this image reminding us that women are always talking period:

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Then turns to this image to make sure we understand how annoying it is when women talk:

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And finishes up with this image illustrating just how crazy women are:

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You could easily have read this in Cosmo or Glamour, replacing “ADD women” with “women,” and it would have been just another typical advice list for women (who, with or without ADD, are totes annoying, amirite?).

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Tags: disability, emotion, gender, gender: femininity, gender: health/medicine, gender: marriage/family, health/medicine, marriage/family

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Comments

Quijotesca 10:46 am on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

Ug, I hate crap like that. It’s “Cassandra Syndrome” all over again only about ADHD instead of autism/Asperger’s and with more obnoxious pictures.
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist 11:30 am on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

This makes me angry, too.
K 12:28 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

Deborah Cameron, linguist and feminist, has written a lot of fantastic popular and scholarly articles about the myths of gendered language. In one paper, which seems to have disappeared from the internet, she convincingly argues that cultures worldwide hold that women talk too much because the ideal women would not talk at all.

Anyway, here’s another great popular article by her, in which she criticizes that idiotic book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/oct/02/gender.familyandrelationships

Cameron has also written some insightful and level-headed articles criticizing trends in sociolinguistics that perpetuate and conceal gender roles.

I’m probably biased, since I come from a linguistics background. But the perceptions and realities of the interplay of gender and language provide a fascinating and dispiriting window into the institution of sexism. I think anyone who’s interested in both the cultural concept of gender and the practice of sociology as a field of study would do well to look up more of Cameron’s articles.
- Sabriel 12:45 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Thanks! This is all very cool.
  - Sue 12:53 pm on November 13, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    Excellent piece. A lot of the “miscommunication” can be explained by disparities of paper. If you have more power you listen and respond to what you choose.
    - Sue 12:56 pm on November 13, 2009 | # | Reply
      
      I read it a long time ago, but I hated Deborah Tannen’s book because, first of all, I did not speak in the tentative way she suggested all women speak, and second, she didn’t address the underlying social reasons why some women speak as she claimed.
      
      Furthermore, many women, including myself, have had the experience of being ignored notwithstanding that they’re direct. Or they’re criticised for supposedly being bossy when a man would be considered straightforward. You can’t win.
      
      As I said, it’s about power.
- p sears 12:32 am on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Here’s an article I wrote about some research on who talks more and who is perceived as talking more:
  
  http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/columns/journal/wb/wb/xp-126049
  
  For instance – Susan Herring, author of “The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online,” found that men perceive women as talking more than men in situations where women are actually speaking less than one-third of the time.
- Fangirl 6:20 am on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Do you happen to remember the title of the specific article you mentioned, or is there a book of her work you’d recommend? I’m fascinated.
  - P Sears 11:06 am on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.”
    - Dale Spender
  - K 12:38 pm on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    I’m afraid I can’t remember the title, and a quick google search didn’t turn it up. It’s a pretty popular article, so I’m sure you can find it–especially if you have access to online scholarly journals.
    
    I would actually really appreciate it if someone could find it. It’s a great article.
    
    The article also discusses other aspects of how much women and men talk, relative to each other. In reality, studies on the subject suggest that women and men say pretty much the same number of words each day. However, men tend to spend more time talking in contexts like boardrooms or classrooms, while women tend to spend more time talking in social contexts. This stems in part from a phenomenon known as the 80/20 rule. That is, in a mixed-gender conversation where everyone is otherwise of the same social status, males will talk 80% of the time, and females will talk 20% of the time. Everyone involved in the conversation is very likely to perceive this as an even 50/50 split. If females talk more than 30% of the time, then people think that the females are hogging the conversation. This phenomenon is also seen when teachers call on students in mixed-gender classrooms. At least one study suggests that boys are called on 80% of the time. When the teacher made sure to call on girls 50% of the time, the boys actually complained that the teacher was favoring the girls.
    
    Keep in mind that all of these studies took place in Anglophone countries, such as the United States and New Zealand.
    - Sue 12:59 pm on November 13, 2009 | # | Reply
      
      What’s troubling is when passive, compliant women gang up on assertive women who try to get their share of the floor by ignoring them, cutting them off, paying attention only to men, or otherwise undermining them.
Cedar 1:00 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

Geez–as bad as the pictures are, the language of the site is even worse, in my opinion. Losing focus is recategorized as being “flighty,” being confrontational is making up “drama,” and the word “anxious” is on two of the slides.
- Natalie 3:22 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Ah, and if you do tend to be confrontational there is a solution:
  “If you are a drama queen, talk to your doctor about tweaking your treatment plan, or ask your therapist about the reasons for your antagonistic posturing. ”
  
  Your ANTAGONISTIC POSTURING? Sounds… confrontational.
Edie 1:29 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

It was probably way easier to find stock images of women being annoying to men then men being annoying to women. Probably cheaper, too.
- kate 6:21 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  this is what I came here to say. I think this is more of an issue about stock images than an issue about disability, emotion, or health/medicine, as the tags read.
  - Ben 7:31 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    This would only be a cogent argument if stock images were a naturally-occurring resource harvested by humans. As far as I know, humans create stock photos, so if there is a skew in the type of images created, you haven’t explained away the sexism, you’ve simply moved it upstream.
    
    Also, I don’t know that the argument even holds, because I did a comparison of the google image search results: “annoying man” = about 7 million images, “annoying woman” = about 4 million images.
    
    A search for “ADHD” yields mostly pictures of children, brains, and mothers whose children are stressing them, which reflects the reasonably wide view that ADD and ADHD are children’s problems.
    
    A search for “ADHD adult” yields pictures of men looking frustrated with themselves.
    
    So I’m not really finding support for this “oh it’s just the photos there’s nothing gendered going on here” angle.
    
    I think there’s a separate issue here of why a legitimate set of psychological disorders are being reduced to photos of irrational and / or annoying women. Makes me feel like the subtext of the presentation is: “Is your psychological disorder making the man in your life irritated? Learn how to annoy him less!”
    - kate 5:35 pm on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
      
      um, I wasn’t trying to explain away the sexism; I was saying that the issue in the pictures was an issue with sexism in the available stock photos.
      
      The issue in the language and content of the article is clearly an issue of sexism as well. But that isn’t what the original post was focused on.
SJL 2:09 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

There is also the assumption that women primarily bear the responsibility for the quality of a romantic relationship. If it’s the man who has the cognitive issue, women are given advice on how to cope and compensate for it. If it’s the woman who has the cognitive issue, she is given advice on how to mitigate the effect of her condition on her relationships. What kind of advice are men getting with regards to their cognitive issues or dealing with those of the their partners?
- junequest 8:10 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  I’ve noticed that, too–almost all relationship advice seemed to be directed at (heterosexual) women, even on supposedly gender neutral websites.
  
  Women seem to be held fully responsible for the direction of a relationship. If it’s going downhill, she’s got to figure out what’s wrong and fix it herself. If the man is “distant” (that seems to be a buzzword), she’s got to bridge the gap. If she wants him to marry her, she’s the one responsible for playing the game right, to somehow lure him into marriage. If he doesn’t marry her, then she’s done something wrong.
  
  I guess this responsibility becomes even more evident when a woman or her partner has a cognitive issue like ADHD.
  - Steve Nixon 6:47 am on November 24, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    It’s not that women are “being held responsible” for the direction of a relationship rather they tend to want to take responsibility for it. Each person is responsible for the result they achieve out of any given situation so by taking responsibility they increase the chance that they will succeed. If women take more responsibility for their relationships then they have more chance of achieving the relationship they want. Conversely if a man doesn’t take responsibility for his relationships he is going to get less out of it. If you are driving the bus there is more chance you will get to where you want to go. Just a thought!
    - KD 10:04 am on November 24, 2009 | # | Reply
      
      Steve, women tend to want to take responsibility for relationships because society is pushing them to do so. Women are told that they are the sensitive, nurturing gender that are experts in relationships. Men are told that they have trouble with emotions (indeed, real men aren’t supposed to have them at all) and “just don’t get it” when it comes to making their women happy. They don’t understand, according to our cultural myths, what gifts to give a woman, which occasions are worth remembering, or what women like to talk about. Most relationship advice books are targeted toward women. Those that are supposedly targeted toward both sexes, like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, still place most of the burden of fixing the relationship on women. And while women are being pushed to be the ever-pleasing problem-solvers of relationships, men are increasingly told by our pornified society to be selfish. Advertising, music videos, and television create a fictional world where men, no matter how unattractive or overweight, have flocks of beautiful women running to their side. The result is far too many men that have been led to believe that they have no responsibility when it comes to relationships: the ideal relationship is one where a woman unconditionally accepts him for who he is and he always gets his way.
      
      The truth, of course, is that men and women are both responsible for understanding one another and learning to be in a relationship, but unfortunately, both men and women have been led to believe otherwise.
KD 4:15 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

The gendering in this article is COMPLETELY unnecessary. My husband has ADHD and every single piece of advice in that article can be applied to him. I mean, I thought these were just features of ADD in general? Why go out of the way to make it appear as if only women with ADD have these problems, or have them in particular? How pointlessly sexist.
- KD 4:32 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Sorry, had to add, it’s also neurotypical:
  
  “The problem is, ADHD women often think that they’re communicating when they’re just talking.”
  
  This is taking the side of the person that does not have ADHD. “You’re just talking,” “What’s your point?” and “You’re rambling again,” are all complaints I’ve had with my husband. But if you listen to his side of it, he considers “just talking” without a point as worthwhile communication. To him, the act of speaking and the act of listening is more important than having a specific message. While it’s not the easiest thing to live with, I can’t say his point of view is invalid.
  
  My experience tells me that living with someone with ADHD is a matter of compromise, not molding him to act “normal,” which this article is trying to do. Point by point, I’d say:
  
  1. “Just talking” is a form of communication.
  2. “Talking too much,” is a matter of perspective.
  3. Losing focus isn’t a sin.
  4. Squirming out of responsibility when you panic is the opposite of confrontation!
  5. Can’t disagree here.
  6. “Make your point clear and concise.” I would add: and make sure you, as a partner, are forgiving when the person with ADHD can’t do that because they have ADHD!
  - Ben 7:42 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    KD, that was very well put, it’s a little worrying that your quick response to a blog post grasped the issue far more accurately than a presentation on an ADD website!
lauredhel 10:47 pm on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply

“ADD women”? “ADD Relationships”? “ADD Children”? That entire site needs a good hard dose of people-first language.

Let me guess – it’s written by “experts”.

*checks About page* Indeed it is. And people with disabilities are relegated to the Inspirational stereotype role: “Inspiring first-person life stories”.

On gendering, don’t miss this from the Founder’s message in the About section:

If your child’s teacher or your wife’s boss has a question about ADHD or LD and its treatment, we want you to send them to our website for material that’s concise, responsible, and helpful.

Looks like their desired audience is a nuclear family with a neurotypical male head, paternalistically running around offering information to his wife’s contacts just as he does their children’s. Bleagh.
- Quijotesca 12:30 am on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Actually, not all disabled people like person first language. The short explanation is that it implies that the disability isn’t actually a part of them or their personalities. I don’t really have a strong opinion on it one way or another. I’ve had plenty of people who get hyper focused on my disability and what they think it means, so I don’t personally mind person first language because I’m a pathology to some people when I disclose my disability. I’m just saying it’s not a simple issue.
  
  That said, statements like “ADD relationships” are always dumb.
  - Quijotesca 12:31 am on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    Ug, it’s late, so one of my sentences didn’t come out quite as clear as I would’ve hoped “so I don’t personally mind person first language because I’m a pathology to some people when I disclose my disability” meaning that they honestly could use a reminder that I’m a person.
  - OuyangDan 1:05 am on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    I think the point is that it should be either/or, and the website dehumanizes PWDs overall. It ignores the concept of any type of person first language or choice of identifying (or being a person at all). I understand that some countries like the UK have strong feelings on this (yes, I’ve seen the papers), but I do think that people should have a choice as to how they label themselves, instead of having “experts” tell us how we should identify.
    
    FTR, I use both, PWD just has the advantage of being a nice neat three letter acronym.
  - amadeupfakename 10:12 am on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    I agree with your statement about people getting weird when you admit you are a PWD. I have ADD and in the process of getting this all sorted out with the university was told by a Professor that she understood and would work with me because she “got sick once while in school and had trouble getting her work done.” Some people might get offended by this by I understood she was just trying to be sympathetic. Albeit, it came out in a poor form.
    
    If I did not have ADD I would think this article was about whiny annoying women or that people with this disability are mentally slow. The level of writing does not help matters out much either. The article seems both condescending and sexist.
April 5:36 pm on November 11, 2009 | # | Reply

I have ADHD, as do several other members of my family, and this article is flat-out sexist.

In addition, supposedly Kathleen Nadeau has written books about ADHD–so why is her advice to people with ADHD come off as, “Don’t act like you have ADHD”?!

What about advice to my partner, asking him/her to be understanding? Or telling them how to gently remind me to stay on topic?
- Bagelsan 2:31 am on November 12, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Or telling them how to gently remind me to stay on topic?
  
  That seems decent. Or just asking for clarification. My friend is somewhat ADD and occasionally she’ll finish saying something rather long and I’ll just be like: “well, that sounded like a fascinating line of reasoning but I think you skipped a step or 5 in describing your thought process there? The link between walruses and public transportation still escapes me” often shortened to: “wait, what? Say the middle bit again.”
Shana 9:13 am on November 12, 2009 | # | Reply

As a grown woman with ADD, I annoy the shit out of myself sometimes. I take my Adderall every day, but sometimes even medication cannot overcome my incessant talking, fidgeting, and inattentiveness. I have been married for 12 years and I am sure that I have annoyed my husband to no end at times, however; to paint it as though we are perpetually and insufferably annoying is unfair and damaging in general. I know I have issues. I struggle with them daily. I am also well educated, respected among my colleagues, and successful in my field. The treatment of this topic hearkens back to that lovely ditty from the 1950′s about how a woman should act to please her husband. Reprinted from a Home Ec textbook here : http://plurkfiends.com/?p=503
j.field 7:48 pm on November 14, 2009 | # | Reply

This bugs me in a bunch of different ways. For one thing, there are variable types of ADHD and within each type, there are differing levels of severity. In our society, the most frequently diagnosed and the most widely recognized is ADHD hyperactive type, the kind most common in males, it’s also usually obvious earlier in life, which is partly why there’s long-been a connotation of ADHD to young boys (attention deficit disorder has been recognized much longer than most people realize, I believe it’s been diagnosed in some form or another since the late 1800s [sorry, I took my Adderall today, so I'm not distractable enough to look that up right now]).

Women with ADHD face different challenges than men and boys do for a couple of different reasons:
1) They’re often diagnosed later than men, meaning that it has different impacts on indentity formation and their support networks are different. If you’re diagnosed when you’re 10, you’re a child, hopefully with a network of support from family and school. Conversely, if you’re diagnosed at 27, you’ll hopefully still have a support system, but more likely than not, it’s more diffuse and you’re expected to be part of others’ support systems.
2) The types of symptoms of the versions of ADHD women/girls have are less obvious than the types that men/boys have. I have a guy-friend with ADHD who was permitted to wander around the classroom in the 4th grade because it was evident that he had ADHD. In the meantime, in the fourth grade, I (a woman with ADHD), constantly was ahead of the reading in my classes, my teacher encouraged me because she thought I was advanced. I was, but in large part, my behavior was driven by my inability to pay attention in class.
This article stated its arguments (or whatever you want to call them) in some pretty callous ways, but remember, one branch of feminism is devoted to recognizing the differences between women and men’s symptoms. How many women have died from heart attacks because the widely published warning signs of heart attacks are the symptoms more frequent in men?
3) The expectations for women’s behavior is different. For example,as a previous poster stated, women are usually given a lot of responsibility in society for making relationships work. We’re also supposed to be planners and multitaskers (personally, I do multitask, but 90% of the time it’s by accident, usually because I forgot what I was doing, start something else, find what I was doing before, go back to it, etc. etc.)

As a woman with ADHD, I think that there is a lot of dialogue that should happen. For one, the popular culture version of ADHD as a “Blah,blah, blah, ohh, look, something shiny!” thing has got to go (and cannot go soon enough, ADHD is not cute). In that way, the article was actually a step in the right direction, it recognizes that ADHD actually causes some pretty painful issues, something that the popular paradigm completely neglects. It’s not something that just goes away when you’re out of school and you don’t have to sit behind a desk and raise your hand. For most of us, it’s their when you’re out on dates, it’s there when you have your own kids, and it’s there when you’re cooking (yeah… raise your hand if you’ve set off the fire alarm multiple times). And there’s not many resources out there to help you figure out how to handle those parts.
- Sandy 3:46 am on November 24, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Yes, absolutely agree with everything you said. The article was incredibly calloused but women do have very definite issues due to societal expectations as well as how ADHD presents. I was diagnosed at 41, after living that long with the disorder and not realizing it, being treated for addictions, depression, etc . . .
  
  I belong to a couple of women specific ADHD support sites (As well as general) because it’s impossible to escape and untangle social pressures and ADHD for women. And I come from a pretty non-traditional background. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for many women who don’t.