Please stop calling ADHD a "superpower"

Scroll through social media for five minutes and you will be told that ADHD is a superpower. That it is the secret behind every entrepreneur, every creative genius, every person who built an empire from a bedroom. The message is relentless, and it is everywhere.

I understand why it took hold. For years the conversation about ADHD was nothing but deficit, disorder and what was wrong with you. The strengths-based shift was a necessary correction, and I am genuinely glad we no longer only talk about ADHD as a list of failings.

But we have swung too far, and it is starting to do harm.

A recent thread from Dr Tom Nicholson on LinkedIn put words to something I had been sitting with for a while: the superpower narrative is survivorship bias. It is told by the people who came through it well, and it quietly erases everyone else. I had a conversation with a parent this weeks and they literally

The voices we never hear

Here is what the superpower story quietly leaves out. We hear from the people who made it. The founder on the podcast, the author with the bestseller, the speaker on the stage. We almost never hear from the people for whom ADHD has been, frankly, a disaster.

We do not hear from the teenager so crushed by shame that they have stopped trying. The adult self-medicating to get through the day. The person who lost the job, the relationship, the home. The family quietly drowning while everyone around them celebrates ADHD as a gift.

When we only listen to the people who came through it well, we get a wildly distorted picture of what ADHD actually is for most people living with it.

Successful in spite of, not because of

Yes, there are hugely successful people with ADHD. I would gently argue that much of that success is in spite of their ADHD, not because of it. It came with the right support, the right timing, enough luck, and often a great deal of hidden cost that never makes the highlight reel.

The traits we love to brand as superpowers are real. Hyperfocus can be extraordinary. Some people with ADHD can read a room in a fraction of a second, or pick up on the smallest shift in someone's mood before anyone else has noticed.

But every one of those traits has a shadow. Hyperfocus on the wrong thing means missed deadlines, forgotten meals and a life that falls out of balance. Reading every emotion in the room can be exhausting and overwhelming, and it is often the same wiring behind rejection sensitivity that makes a throwaway comment feel like a body blow. The gift and the struggle are not two different things. They are the same thing, on different days.

Why this matters

Here is the real cost. When we tell someone they have a superpower, and their lived experience is that they are struggling to get out of bed, hand work in or hold a friendship together, we do not make them feel better. We make them feel broken.

Because if ADHD is a superpower, and you are drowning, the only conclusion left is that the problem must be you. You are the one not using your gift properly. That is a devastating message to hand a young person who is already carrying more shame than they can name.

It also makes people reluctant to ask for help. It is hard to say you are struggling when the whole world is telling you that you have been handed something enviable.

And if you are a parent, the superpower line stings in a different way. You live the reality every day. You see the meltdowns, the school battles, the exhaustion, the worry that keeps you awake at night. Being told your child has been handed a superpower, while you are the one holding it all together, does not feel uplifting. It feels glib, and it quietly dismisses how hard both of you are working just to get through the week.

The reframe has to be done with them

There is something real in the strengths idea, but the slogan skips the actual work. A young person cannot reframe their own struggles as strengths on their own, especially when they are deep in shame. Telling a teenager that their distractibility is really creativity, or their intensity is really passion, means nothing if they cannot yet feel it.

That shift has to be done with them. Slowly, concretely, with someone alongside them who can help them look at a trait from a different angle and notice the evidence in their own life. Where the thing they have been told off for at school turns out to be the same thing that makes them fierce, funny, loyal or original. Done well, that is one of the most powerful things that can happen for a young person. Reduced to a slogan on a graphic, it is just noise.

Holding both at once

I am not asking anyone to go back to the deficit model. ADHD strengths are real and worth celebrating. But not at the expense of the people who are suffering, and not as a slogan that flattens a complicated, often painful reality into something tidy and marketable.

What young people actually need is not to be told they are superheroes. They need to understand how their brain works, to be met with support before the shame sets in, and to be helped to see their own strengths rather than simply told they exist.

ADHD is not a superpower. It is not a tragedy either. It is a different way of being wired, with real strengths and real challenges, and the people living it deserve the whole truth, not just the bits that sell.