The ADHD-Depression paradigm
Or how I'm never going to shut up about the first season of Russian Doll
Lately I’ve been thinking that if my friend Claire became obsessed with the knowledge and wisdom of Moonstruck, I’ve been similarly obsessed with the first season of Russian Doll. The show has so many words of wisdom that pop up in my mind when I need them most. One thing I’ve been returning to, over and over again, is when Alan tells his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Beatrice:
“Our bodies can’t lie the way that our minds can.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I observe myself and others. I finally have a body that works, and I wonder if you do too.
A body that works because instead of my mind telling me what I should feel, my body releases insights, bit by bit, to my mind, when it’s ready to hear them. Instead of a mind that forces me to push my feelings down, so they explode out of me when I least expect it, my body releases its grip on my understanding of myself, so that I focus on who I actually am instead of who I wish I was. Instead of a mind that attempts to control the body, I have a body that trusts my mind to care for it.
How did I get here? Well, I realized a major reason I’m so obsessed with Russian Doll is that it exemplifies a paradigm I’ve always had in my life, without realizing it: The ADHD-Depression paradigm.
I had a friend who was diagnosed with depression lately, and we discussed how not only am I close friend of hers that has ADHD…her best friend and her husband have ADHD too. My best friend has depression, and I’ve had many relationships, platonic and romantic, with people with depression. These connections have been the most transformative relationships of my life.
These relationships have taught me greater and deeper levels of empathy, a stronger love of myself and my own strengths, and a better sense of how people work overall. All these things have made me a much better writer – and, honestly, a better person.
This connection has been swirling in my mind for months. Because while I’ve always known how important these people were to me, what’s become wild and clear to me is that I know those people have felt similarly transformed by me.
That’s because the key to the ADHD-Depression paradigm is emotional regulation. People with ADHD have notoriously bad emotional regulation. As someone who has lashed out for the smallest things, hyperventilated from excitement, and burst into tears over my love for others, I will tell you that that’s very true. Much as I’ve tried to keep my feelings to myself, they still pop out and leak out and come out in ways that I can’t control, no matter what I do.
In contrast, I’ve noticed that depression is very much about too much emotional regulation. (From now on, I’ll use the second person to address someone with depression in this dynamic.) It’s about controlling every single emotional response to the point that you don’t express anything. Sometimes, in place of what you’re actually feeling, you attempt to express only what you know people expect of you. Unlike me, you’re very, very good at hiding your actual emotional state from most people. It can get to the point that you only express what you expect of yourself, to the point that your real, actual feelings seem totally alien to you.
The reason I say that you can hide your actual emotional state from most people is because…yeah, I can see it anyway.
In the ADHD-Depression paradigm, we can read each other very, very well. I mean, to be fair I think a lot of people can read me very well, but they don’t understand me. They often believe my emotional authenticity is some kind of trick, a manipulation.1
But I’ve realized that for you, my depressed friend, the obviousness of my feelings are so refreshing because they illustrate an authenticity that most people flinch away from. You see through my poor attempts to hide my feelings because I’ve been so punished for being honestly myself. You see how I default, every time, all the time, to being honestly myself anyway. While I’ve often disliked that about myself, frustrated that I couldn’t force myself into the shape others wanted of me, you know better. You know that kind of honesty is vanishingly rare, especially as we get older.
And I have to say, I wouldn’t have ever understood this about myself – about how this makes me so special from other people – if I hadn’t had you in my life, smiling back at me.
The flipside is trickier from my perspective. After years of people like you in my life, I can now read you alarmingly well. And for the depressed person, who uses their powers of emotional regulation in order to protect themselves from being seen…well, let’s just say I’ve seen some extreme reactions.
I wouldn’t know what to do with these reactions – which used to feel like they came out of nowhere, because of how intensely you regulate yourself otherwise. But I finally realized what the pattern of behavior comes down to.
When you, a depressed person, pretend you don’t have emotions, I get totally confused. Because instead of having the emotion, you have this strange little blank space where the emotion should go. Sometimes it’s not just a blank space, but a reversal, a bit of extreme denial. I’d see these little blackouts and wonder: ooh, what is that? What’s going on there?
There used to be this special exhibit in the Liberty Science Center, where you’d crawl through a completely dark space, with the walls and interior covered in black furry fabric, an exemplification of touch as one of the five senses. The first time around I went through it, as a child, I was afraid. But every time after that, I loved seeing what I could find of myself, as I moved forward through the dark.
That’s what it feels like when I see you repress your emotions — when I just plain see a repressed emotion, in anyone, honestly. I immediately want to feel around in the black furry darkness for the emotion you’re hiding, because I don’t understand why that blank space exists. My natural curiosity becomes magnified by my love for you, to want to understand you.
In the past, I’d ask and prod and poke until I got some kind of response, and you would reveal way more than you wanted to. I’d be shocked by what I found, because I would have no idea I was doing what I was doing. Oops. Sorry!
And this is where the biggest lesson for me has come from in this paradigm: the balance between empathy and intuition. Because this poking and prodding isn’t a great thing to do. I don’t think it’s a bad thing either, but those points are sore for a reason.
So I’ve learned to temper this impulse, if only because playing the long game can be so rewarding. And that’s one of the greatest gifts you’ve given me, a quality I’ve longed to have, my whole life: the ability to intuit what people need. Not what they want, which has been a people-pleasing problem for me. Not what they expect, which I always fail at anyway. But what they actually need. And what their needs are versus mine, so that I can balance that with appropriate sympathy for their situation while trusting them to figure it out themselves.
I know that’s not what everyone is looking to build in themselves, but for me it’s always felt like my destiny to learn. As a writer, it’s honestly been the biggest barrier for me in my writing. My aforementioned depressed best friend has known me since I was 13. She once told me in our early 20’s (honestly, kindly, but firmly and tiredly) that I can be pretty self-absorbed. And I knew what she meant: I was seeing the world through a blurry lens, a lens warped by my own insecurities and anxieties. That I would never be able to see others, let alone myself, clearly, if I didn’t remove that lens.
But just knowing that lens exists doesn’t mean you can remove it. The only way I’ve been able to do that is with my friends with depression, because I realized that you can see the world accurately. You can see that people don’t measure up to the images they project, you can see that societies operate on sludgy ideas of success rather than true kindness and connection, and you know that’s just the way things are
Oh wait. You’re wrong about that last one. That’s the biggest factor in this paradigm for me: that I am as much a part of it, that I am an equal member of this little partnership. Because not only can I push back on your depressive, melancholic misconceptions, I exemplify how rickety they are. That’s why you listen to me, that’s why you care what I think – because aren’t I a wrench in the works? If I destroy your perceptions of me, if I operate from kindness and connection, doesn’t it suggest that your worldview is actually just as inaccurate as mine can be?
This is the part of the paradigm that keeps me coming back to it over and over again: it helps me understand my own power. It’s been those depressed friends, people like you, that really help me understand how unique and important my own world view is. How important it is to share with the world, for myself and for others. I wouldn’t have understood it without you.
Maybe this is the gift I can give you – to those loved ones that are in this paradigm, perhaps, but also to the readers of this newsletter. Something that applies to me, you, and everyone else we know: You know more than you give yourself credit for, if you can understand that you don’t know everything.
My best friend sent me this too. Of course, it’s the perfect end note, a little TL;DR for you. What I wrote above, in two minutes of lovely animation and conversation.
I often wonder what the endgame for that kind of manipulation would be…all I can think of is one episode of a children’s show where a character said he wanted a specific holiday where everyone gave him – just him – candy. And yet I live my life mostly candy-less.
i think this is all true about your relationships with depressed people you know, but not necessarily broadly applicable in the way you suggest. some people have both ADHD and depressive disorder diagnoses, and many of the symptoms are similar.
beyond that, i think you don’t quite understand the cognitive distortions that depression typically produces for people; they are common enough that most psychological inventories of depression include questions about them. depression can very much be thinking disorder, related to but distinct from emotion regulation.
i’m also not sure i think emotional repression is as common as you imagine. not having access to some kinds of feelings is not the same as repressing them, and certainly certain kinds of emotions—sadness, irritability, anger—are not only not suppressed but dominant. they aren’t pleasant emotions, but they certainly aren’t repressed.
to be clear, i think your observations are accurate in your relationships. i’d just be careful about generalizing.