“But who am I really?” - is such a common question after a diagnosis or self-identification with a neurodivergent label. Am I that? What about my trauma? What part of me is that? What part of me is my personality? What part of me is who I’ve made myself? And what part is whoever society and my environment and parents made me? When I was trying to put the jigsaw puzzle pieces of “Why I was like this” together, nothing fit until autism and later, ADHD- I kept finding pieces of the puzzle in parts of other labels. But those were labels applied to the writers and musicians and other creatives past and present I read so much about. And those labels are imposed, resisted, contested, changing…
I enjoyed an interview with The Libertines former bandmates Pete Doherty and Carl Barat recently- and bookmarked the exchange where Carl said; “I did an (ADHD) screening recently that said it’s likely. My wife keeps leaving books out with titles like How to Deal with ADHD in a Marriage” and Pete replied: “They used to just call it personality”. Two former drug addicts, two musicians, two difficult men, two rock stars - there are lots of other labels either of them might collect or own before taking on neurodivergence- and yet, there is Carl’s wife evoked as someone who is hoping to encourage him in viewing himself through a particular lens in order to improve their relationship or their communication. He could have chosen not to share that particular detail and the fact that he did makes me think of people in that exploratory phase of a neurodivergent label. We’ll test it out on ourselves and other people. How do they respond? “Of course you are!” or “No way!” - that’s a whole other sort of spectrum.
In the interview, Pete Doherty has just been recalling how he was looking for a guitarist and fell for him as soon as they met but also found him to be “a man on a mission. You couldn’t pin him down” and not “your average sort of lad. An impenetrable fortress. I thought he was a cross between Raskolnikov and Johnny Marr”.
The fictional (anti)hero of Dostoyevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” and legendary Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. There is some mythifying here. How does that work with ND labels? “Depression” still feels more likely to be evoked as a label that can run alongside the myths of the tortured artist and the troubled genius. The interviewer says that when he first met Carl Barat in 2006 he was “profoundly depressed”. Now, he asks him why he was so angry at the time and Carl says “Stuff I don’t want to talk about, but I had a lot of unhappiness in my childhood. Maybe I was born angry. But my battle has been with that and depression in the wake of the anger”. It’s when the interviewer points out that his speech hasn’t slowed down over the years that he says “There’s a lot going on there. I think they call it ADHD these days”.
It sounds like for him, he thinks there are multiple reasons for some of the issues he’s struggled with - and in the process of therapy, is separating them out. Later the interviewer says that Doherty and Barat come from very different backgrounds- Barat grew up on a council estate while Doherty’s father was a Major in the Royal Signals. But issues arising from any struggles that come from class inequality are not mentioned as “reasons” for his way of being in the world. More as separate facts. Being working class and angry and depressed are not connected here.
I am not, by the way, diagnosing or undiagnosing Carl Barat with anything. Just watching the way that people talk about mental health and neurodivergence. I think we’re at an interesting moment in which neurodivergence is coming into conversations but in the tentative way that Carl raises it. And often the response will be like that of his bandmate. One seeming to reject the diagnostic terminology of “these days” in favour of something less historically situated, more solid and unchanging. A personality. Perhaps- an artistic temperament. (But neither of these are historic or unchanging either- they’re ideas that are partly formed by talking about the elements that are presumed to make them up).
If you Google the character Raskolnikov, you’ll get lots of diagnoses mooted in the first page: Psychopathy, Dissocial Personality Disorder, Sociopathy, Schizophrenia, Narcissism, Bipolar, Depression, Mania, Anxiety, Multiple Personality Disorder…
Again, I’m not saying all or none of these are not useful lenses- but it’s interesting that there’s no neurodivergence discourse. I sat through an entire Sylvia Plath festival in 2022 (which was brilliant- Plathfest blogger) but in which all manner of mental health and personality labels were mentioned- and nothing of neurodivergence- not once. Spending my time immersed in the words of neurodivergent writers and activists I sometimes forget that society is quite far behind where it could be around this as an alternative perspective. There are stronger more compelling labels and myths and discourses that will be put forward to explain “Why I am like this” - and even when more sophisticated intersectional approaches add in ethnicity and gender and class, neurodivergence is still often resisted or left out (it used to be called personality).
If we’re diagnosing- I’d quite like to diagnose contemporary Western society as being in the Tentative and Resistant phase of neurodiversity acceptance- and am looking forward to being liberated from this phase, and moving on libertine- style to the future.
very much living this right now; thank you for putting such thoughtful and illuminating words around it!
Loved ,this. It was really interesting.