The Dish

A reader writes:

Every time I read an article about over-diagnosis of ADHD, I do a quick scan to see if it mentions girls or women. The Esquire piece mentions the word “girls” exactly twice, but only in the context of little boys, and it has a quote, from a man, about how the “girlification” of the classroom has pathologized boyhood.

I think girls and women, whose symptoms are generally less obvious and less disruptive, are under-diagnosed. I was in gifted-and-talented programs, so no one thought to screen me. I didn’t know until I was 25 that there was actually a reason for my chronic disorganization and not just needing to “try harder.” My sixth grade teacher wrote in my yearbook, “I’ve never met anyone who was so disorganized yet so together.”

Sure, I could go into a three-hour standardized test and score in the 99th percentile. The bigger challenge was not losing my registration forms or photo ID. Once I graduated from college and had full-time jobs, the administrative tasks overwhelmed me to the point that I feared for my employment – until, hallelujah, I was diagnosed and treated for ADHD. On a related subject, I also learned that women are expected to be able to perform administrative tasks even if it’s not their role, while no one expects it to come naturally for men.

Adderall, and much more importantly, the diagnosis of ADHD, changed my life. The excessive focus on the over-diagnosis of ADHD in boys trivializes a problem that can really stunt the life prospects of both girls and adults, and it deepens a harmful stigma that we’ve done nothing to earn.

Indeed, the CDC has found that boys are nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Psychiatrist David Muzina calls this a classic pattern:

It’s been known for a long, long time that if girls have ADHD they are more likely to have the inattention form, not the hyperactive, aggressive, disruptive form. Perhaps that difference in how ADHD can look is why the diagnosis is missed in girls. They may be quietly suffering and having trouble in school, but they’re not disruptive. They move on into life, where those inattentive symptoms may reveal themselves as academic and social pressures compound. Now it’s becoming more of an issue.

And lastly, we know that women in the United States are increasingly juggling more and more and more. Women still tend to have the majority of the responsibilities at home, particularly when families start up. That elevation of pressure and stress can either produce symptoms like ADHD, or that additional stress can express the underlying ADHD that previously had not been diagnosed.

One female reader’s experience:

I have found ADHD is a misnomer. When I decide to focus, I focus like a laser, be it whatever work I am doing, or subject that intrigues me. But then I cannot focus on much of anything else, just the one thing at hand. For years prior to my diagnosis, my work involved doing a lot of things, all at the same time, with a deadline – media work. I excelled, but burned out more often than my co workers. I was quite good at multitasking, but always felt fractured.

ICYMI: Florida GOP candidate moonlights as vampire role-player “Chazz Darling” http://t.co/Md2SUUH27T pic.twitter.com/J2ZZ1NZO7d

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) April 2, 2014

As the newly revealed LARPER Jake Rush pushes ahead with his primary challenge, Joseph Laycock points out that fantasy role-playing isn’t the political liability it used to be:

Fears of Satanic role-playing games were once so politically expedient that in 1985 Winston Matthews ran for attorney general of Virginia and made a proposed law banning Dungeons and Dragons from public schools the core of his platform. But today appeals to panic over games are less effective – mostly because gamers are no longer defenseless teenagers who are too young to vote. …

In 2012, Republicans attempted to smear Colleen Lachowicz, a social worker from Maine running for state senate as a Democrat, by informing voters that she played the online computer game “World of Warcraft.” The website colleensworld.com declared, “Maine needs a state senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.” As in this latest instance, statements made “in character” were presented out of context. In any case, the strategy backfired. Not only did Lachowicz win the election, but outraged gamers around the country donated $6,300 to political action committees that supported her campaign.

Previous Dish on Lachowicz here. Rush has responded to the mockery with a three-page press release and this bitchin’ photo:

Alyssa sides with the conservative Republican “in the interest of geeky solidarity”:

As my colleague Alexandra Petri has pointed out, political consultant Peter Schorsch, who went digging for details on the Mind’s Eye Society, is stretching as far as he possibly can to suggest that Rush is palling around with dog-menacers and book burners. Never mind that no evidence exists that Rush’s activities were anything other than fantasy. And as fantasy, there is not actually much contradiction between Rush’s stated policy positions and the games he’s playing. Dave Weigel suggested that there is tension between Rush’s work in drug enforcement during his tenure in the sheriff’s department, which he touts as proof of his law-and-order credentials, and his fantasies of snorting cocaine. But if Rush is role-playing parts that are deliberately transgressive, it makes perfect sense that he would gravitate towards the very things he finds off-limits in his professional capacity. …

I would probably never vote for Jake Rush, but that is because I’m not terribly fond of stand-your-ground laws, and, so far, Obamacare is working out just fine for me. But I absolutely support the idea of more nerds in Congress. Imagination, moral and otherwise, is something we could use more of in Washington.

Marc Champion discusses the possibility that fraud was a factor in last weekend’s Turkish municipal elections:

The suspicions of many Turks were raised on election day, by a series of statistically improbable electricity blackouts that according to local news reports occurred in 40 cities across more than 20 Turkish provinces during Sunday’s vote count, in some cases forcing hand counts by candlelight.

Energy Minister Taner Yildiz has blamed a cat, which got into a substation and shorted out the electricity in Ankara. Other outages were caused by storms and snow, he said. Still, the image of a “lobby” of stray feline kamikazes fanning out across a country that stretches from Bulgaria to Iran to short electricity substations has gripped the imagination of Turkey’s social media users. Conspiracy theories are rampant.

Since then, the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has produced bags of discarded opposition ballots that it says were found in one constituency, as well as numerous discrepancies between written ballots and their digital entries elsewhere.

Dan Berman, however, doubts that a clean vote would have produced a significantly different outcome:

[I]f the AKP played dirty, and probably stole some of the key close races, the overall picture is neither as implausible as that in Iran, nor as easily explained by the irregularities that appear to take place. Despite the failure of the official website, results were released to the media in real-time, and despite high opposition expectations, at a national level fell at about the middle point of the expected range of results, with the AKP managing between 43% and 44% at about the median of its performance in the last local polls in 2009, and the National Assembly elections of 2011. As a consequence, while I have doubts that the elections were fair, and even less confidence in the Ankara and Antalya results, I have almost no doubt that a plurality of Turks who went to the polls on Sunday cast their ballots for the AKP, and I strongly suspect the same was true in Istanbul, where the final margin, over 700,0000 votes out of 7 million cast, seems large enough to render redundant the tactics used to achieve it.

But Lisel Hintz views the manipulation as part of a bigger problem:

From foreign spies to terrorists to necrophiliacs, being in the opposition camp in Turkey doesn’t look pretty. This delegitimizing rhetoric appeared again during the elections, with Erdogan deeming opposition forces “worse than Assassins,” referring to medieval groups that would murder their rivals to produce instability. It is this factor – the absolute unwillingness by Erdogan and his government to attribute legitimacy to any form of opposition – that best explains the electoral manipulation Turkey is experiencing. For a prime minister who declared to those objecting to his style of rule during Gezi: “We will see at the ballot box,” there was no room for allowing an opposition he can’t comprehend or respect to take the seats of power in key cities such as Ankara and Istanbul. His victory speech, vowing that those who opposed him will “pay the price,” was positively chilling in this respect.

On a larger scale than the electoral irregularities and their ongoing contestation, it is this larger issue of legitimacy of opposition, and the knee-jerk reaction of demonizing anyone that defies or disagrees with the AKP’s will that poses the greatest obstacle to democratization in Turkey.

Earlier Dish on Turkey’s elections here.

Francisco Toro debunks Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s NYT op-ed, focusing on his specious claim that Hugo Chávez and his movement “created flagship universal health care and education programs, free to our citizens nationwide”:

Yes, both the school system and the hospital network were overstretched, underperforming, and in need of reform by the time Chávez came to power in 1998, and yes, chavismo‘s reforms of both systems have been broadly popular. There’s an interesting conversation to be had about the successes and failures of those reforms.

But that conversation can’t happen when the government insists on a wholesale falsification of history, simply erasing the long, rich history of health and education reforms that in 1999 bequeathed Chávez the large and ambitious, albeit flawed, health and education systems that Maduro oversees today.

Maduro’s op-ed is strewn with similar whoppers, like his commitment to labor organizing rights, U.S. involvement in the 2002 coup, the vitality of Venezuelan democracy, and a call for “peace and dialogue.” None of these lines are new, either. Time and again, chavismo doesn’t so much bend the historical record as simply ignore it, and government propaganda employs words to mean the diametrical opposite of what the dictionary says they mean.

José Cárdenas calls Maduro’s professed desire for “dialogue” with protesters pointless:

Maduro doesn’t need a staged dialogue to resolve the crisis; the grievances are known to anyone who has read an article about Venezuela in the past year. Even he can figure that one out. First, he should demobilize and disarm the paramilitary groups and cease with the incendiary rhetoric against his fellow citizens. Then he could unilaterally quell the tensions by committing to credible and irreversible reforms that would restore to those who disagree with the government the institutional channels to express dissent. This would mean reforming the subservient Supreme Court, the electoral authority, the legislature, and the media, while at the same time reducing the state’s stranglehold on the private sector so it can start to replenish empty consumer shelves.

The problem is that such reforms are anathema to Maduro’s Cuban minders, who exert inordinate influence over his decisions — a dynamic that remains one of the protestors’ primary grievances. The Cubans know that they, along with the $6 billion a year in Venezuelan giveaways to the mendicant Castro brothers, are hugely unpopular and rightly see an end to such benefits, including two-thirds of the island’s oil needs, as an existential threat. To cede any ground to the opposition directly threatens the survival of the Castro regime. The violence will continue in Venezuela because the Cubans cannot have it any other way.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has turned on the government:

On Wednesday, the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, the council of the nation’s bishops that speaks for the Catholic Church, condemned the Maduro government’s implementation of an “authoritarian” agenda and questioned its “democratic profile.” In a communiqué, the bishops declared that the government “applies brutal repression on political dissidents” and seeks to attain peace by using “threats, physical or verbal violence, and repression.”

Church leaders also rejected the abusive judicial repression and persecution of opposition politicians. And, they criticized the lack of adequate public policies to address impunity, insecurity, and “attacks on domestic production,” which has led to a serious deterioration of economic conditions.