An Open Letter Regarding Behavior Vets, ADHD, and Neurodivergence
"there is no normal" - Liza Rader
letterpress print, 2012
Just this past week, Behavior Vets shared a post about an upcoming event. “Sparkles & Spice?” the post reads. “Helping People and their ADHD-like Dogs Keep it Together.”
I am a certified dog trainer, I have ADHD, I identify as neurodivergent and Mad, and I have an educational background in disability justice. And I was, to be blunt, floored.
After receiving pushback on the framing, the post in question has now been amended.
(note: at time of posting, there has not been an apology for the edited language, and a second, more neutral post has been shared.)
Still, it leans into ableist tropes, both generally about disability and about ADHD specifically. This is the second time this has been an issue. From a disability justice standpoint, both the framing of Behavior Vets’ past work on ADHD and Neurodivergence and this specific post are deeply problematic. In this letter, I am offering an invitation to learn. This is a call-in, not a call-out.
(as an aside, there is a bullet point summary at the bottom for accessibility, as well as a list of links and some continued reading.)
The issues that are present in Behavior Vets' framing of neurodivergence are starting to show up more frequently in the dog training world. Issues of medicalisation, the limited scope of understanding outside the science of behaviour, and the use of ableist tropes. They seem to be showing up most often around ADHD, possibly because of the explosion of diagnosis in adults in recent years.
The term “ADHD-like” is commonly used in the literature to categorise hyperactive, compulsive, and inattentive behaviours in dogs. Generally speaking, it is best practice in dog training and behaviour to avoid the use of descriptive labels such as this. While this label may be useful for researchers, and could provide a touchstone for dog guardians, it can also trivialise what is a very real chronic illness.
ADHD is considered, both legally and medically, a disability. Under the medical model (put a pin in that), it is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder, and can cause serious limitations and long-term negative health outcomes.
On top of that, and more relevant here, people with ADHD are marginalised in our society. It is a significant, complex issue that intersects with race, class, and gender. Health outcomes for adults with ADHD are significantly worse than those without. We are more likely to misuse substances, be incarcerated, and struggle with employment. ADHD is often seen as just hyperactive kids, but it is something that can be life-limiting, and life-shortening.
Behavior Vets commented on their Instagram post that they want “average” guardians to feel empowered about their dog’s behaviour, and that was what informed their language choices. This centres a perceived abled audience’s feelings.
As a disabled person, I would also like to feel empowered. Posts that lean on the minimization of my disability do not help me achieve that. ADHD people are not a spectacle, we are not “spicy”.
Along that point, one of the ways this most recent post is problematic is the use of twee language. The use of sparkles (both the word and emoji), “zoomies”, these choices minimise the gravity of the topic at hand. They come across as infantilizing, leaning on stereotypes of ADHD people just being a bit hyper, a bit kooky.
(I would also like to note that my clients with hyperactive dogs come to me with broken hands, pulled muscles, bruises, and bite wounds. They are embarrassed and exhausted by their dog’s behaviour, and deeply worried for their welfare. This framing trivialises them, too.)
One of the ways that neurodivergent and disabled people are marginalised is in the belief that our neurotypes are only present in children (especially common with Autism), and that our limitations can be boiled down to “just being disorganised”. Most of us with lived experience have stories of doctors not believing us because we’re not school-aged boys, being verbally and physically abused for being “lazy” or forgetful, and for struggling to find any support that actually takes our lived experience seriously. Neurodivergent people with higher support needs and more stigmatised medical diagnosis experience this much more acutely.
The ableist trope of disabilities as superpowers makes a notable appearance here. The superpowered disabled person is a common trope, and a tired one. Disabled people (and dogs with behaviour problems) do not need superpowers to make up for our support needs.
One way this shows up is the minimization of our symptoms and limitations in favour of a hyperfocus on the ways in which we can perform under capitalism. We might not be able to sleep, but boy we sure can multitask! This trope assuages abled people’s discomfort with disabled bodies and limitations, and absolves an ableist society of the responsibility of dismantling structures of oppression. If we have superpowers, what needs to change?
For many of us, our neurodivergences are not superpowers, and to suggest so is strongly reminiscent of the ways in which we have been told to just try harder. Buck up. Just buy a planner.
Invoking this is very clearly not Behavior Vets’ intention. But this is such a common trope that recreating it reveals a fundamental lack of consideration for disability issues.
In her essay ADHD is not my superpower, Laura Wallis writes “The toxic positivity ‘ADHD is my superpower’ culture that exists as a sub-culture of the ADHD community that’s potentially steeped in ableism, stemming from the ‘inspirational disabled person’ narrative makes addressing the daily challenges of living with ADHD very difficult.”
The inspirational disabled person narrative is probably most notably described by late disabilities activist Stella Young in her TedX talk I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” she says. “I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional.”
Behavior Vets pointed out that some of their speakers identify with this language. It needs to be clarified that individuals self identifying with certain tropes or language is not comparable to a corporate entity using them for marketing.
But let’s zoom out.
As a trainer, I specialise in hyperactivity and reactivity in sporting dogs. You might think that discussions about ADHD in dogs would be something I would welcome. But I have seen a number of them recently, and every one has made me deeply uncomfortable.
To explain why I am so reticent to describe dogs as ADHD, we have to first explore medicalization.
Medicalization is the process of reconceptualizing non-medical parts of life as a medical problem. Think of the way that homosexuality became seen as a disease in the 19th century, transitioning from criminality to pathology (and then, due to the decades of work by queer rights activists, it was demedicalized and removed from the DSM in 1975).
Medicalization can be helpful, those of us with medical treatments for our life limiting disabilities will be the first to attest to that. But it also is a system of power that can problematize normal human variance, and individualise cultural and societal problems.
As a culture, we place a significant amount of value in the medical lens and the opinions/ language of doctors. Things that operate under that framework are legitimised. But medicalization is not the only way to solve problems, and looking at something as complicated as the human brain only through a medical lens limits our understanding. It can uphold and enforce racism, transphobia, misogyny, and can dehumanise patients. One of the downsides of our cultural focus on a medical model is how we miss out on learning. There is valuable knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. In oral traditions and generational knowledge.
I understand why pet guardians can feel the pull of medicalisation. To be able to say “yes, there really IS something wrong with the dog!” can be incredibly validating. But question that. Why do we need our struggles, and our dogs’ struggles, to be legitimised by a medical and scientific institution? When did we learn that that was so necessary?
We can understand biological differences, and the science behind something, without also buying into the need to categorise and problematise. And we can appreciate the expertise of researchers and practitioners while still understanding the inequalities in those systems that actively discourage participation from disabled people and members of other marginalised groups.
My concern is that broadening the ways we medicalise dogs will in turn limit our perspective and further entrench imbalances of power. Especially in psychiatry, medicalisation can act to flatten the complexities of human experiences and reduce our scope of understanding. Surely, this would only be increased in a species that is so much more varied than our own.
The question that keeps coming up for me here is what is the purpose of expanding ADHD to dogs? What does the expansion of medicalisation allow us to do? What does it cost us?
To imagine how we might look beyond medicalisation, we have to understand the different models of disability. There are several, but three are most widely used and most relevant here. The medical model looks at disability as a medical issue. A patient has a neurodevelopmental disorder, and that can and should be treated so that their brain can function as close to the accepted standard as possible. It frames disability as an individual problem that needs to be fixed, and assumes that there is a standard of what is normal that we should try to achieve. It should be noted that historically, the medical model is intrinsically linked with the eugenics model.
The social model of disability frames the question around what we accommodate. None of us can jump four stories, so we have elevators and stairs. What a society chooses to accommodate reveals who’s lives, bodies, and brains are valued. This marks a separation between disability and impairments. While the medical model cites the subject’s medical condition as the disability, here it is the lack of accommodations for that condition and the discrimination that person is on the receiving end of, that is disabling. The social model was an incredible step forward in disability justice. It gave us the ADA, and countless other protections, and the work we do now is because of it.
The radical model of disability looks beyond both the medical model and the social model. As AJ Withers writes in their book Disability Politics and Theory, “a foundational component of the radical model is the idea of intersectionality: addressing multiple oppressions together and in conjunction with each other ... A conceptualization of disability that did not include, at its base, the acknowledgment of and engagement with the interlocutory nature of oppressions could not be a radical model”.
The radical model asks who is that accepted norm the medical model holds up? Why are certain bodies privileged over others? How do factors such as poverty, racism, and colonialism produce illnesses and limitations in individual subjects, but also the ways our ideas around things like productivity and appropriate behaviour produce the ideas of what is deviant in the first place.
And it asks how we can balance a critique of structural oppression with the reality that many of us need treatments and accommodations to live. As we know, we are always learning and being shaped by the environment. We cannot separate the society we live in, and our lived experiences, from our bodies and brains.
Embracing a radical model of disability, with all of its nuances and complications, is, in my opinion, the best path forward.
In the most recent post, Behavior Vets edited out the use of the word “neurodivergence” after receiving pushback. Previously, they ran a long program on neurodiversity in dogs, but focused on platforming scientists and certified science based trainers. (Neurodivergence is the more current term, and the two are often used interchangeably) This was confusing, because framing neurodiversity in a medical and scientific lens while excluding the expertise of disabled sociologists, writers, and theorists, is to misrepresent the term.
Let's examine what those labels mean. Neurodiversity is a sociological concept. It is not a collection of symptoms, and it is not a description of behaviours. The term originates outside of a medical framework, and centres the idea that diversity in our brains is not something to be pathologized or problematized. It “is less an example of academic jargon than a political naming. It suggests that the discourse of individual rights, and the celebration of diversity that accrues to the categories of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, ought to apply to individuals whose neurological predispositions are not typical.” (mcgee, micki. “Neurodiversity”). In short, the science does not define what is and is not neurodivergent, but simply describes that which we have culturally deemed abnormal.
Often taken to mean Autism and ADHD, neurodivergence actually includes everything from learning disabilities to schizophrenia, from narcolepsy to oppositional defiant disorder. It includes those of us who have been medicalized or institutionalised for behaviour but don’t identify with a specific diagnosis. It is an invitation to create community together, to see ourselves as an interconnected political class. The question of if this term could even apply to dogs is a question of sociology, philosophy, and cultural theory. It is wildly insulting to have discussions on medicalizing different types of canine brain function under that banner.
More disappointing, however, is the missed opportunity to explore how our ideas of ability and normalcy affect how we understand our dogs. What would we learn if we used a radical disability lens to explore the lives of our dogs and the relationships we have with them both culturally and personally?
There is a tendency in the dog training world to stick only to the ‘hard sciences’. We’re interested in applied behaviour analysis, neurobiology, veterinary medicine. We’re less interested in politics, psychology, sociology & philosophy. And we tend to completely dismiss anything beyond that. But dogs also live in a society, and the way we think about them and the ways our culture is structured affects them immensely. So many of the issues we get caught up on could be resolved with better understanding of the humanities.
Why do we privilege certain kinds of expertise over others? What lessons are there in the activist and academic work of disabled people for those of us whose job it is to change behaviour? What could we glean to make the lives of the people and dogs we work with better, and to wield the power we hold more mindfully?
Behavior Vets asked me to provide them resources about the social and theoretical side of the neurodivergence conversation. I chose to share this publicly because I believe this is a teachable moment for all of us.
I urge Behavior Vets to reconsider the choices they are making around the topics of neurodivergence, and to be more open to platforming a wider variety of experts. And I urge all of us to continue learning from diverse sources, and to centre justice in all our work.
TL;DR
Behavior Vets shared a post about an upcoming event. “Sparkles & Spice?” the post reads. “Helping People and their ADHD-like Dogs Keep it Together.” This has since been edited in response to criticism.
From a disability justice standpoint, both the framing of Behavior Vets’ past work on ADHD and Neurodivergence and this specific post are deeply problematic. In this letter, I am offering an invitation to learn. This is a call-in, not a call-out.
“ADHD-like” is a term commonly used in the literature to describe similarities between hyperactive, compulsive, and inattentive behaviours in dogs.
People with ADHD are marginalised in our society. It is a significant, complex issue that intersects with race, class, and gender. Health outcomes for adults with ADHD are significantly worse than those without.
Behavior Vets use of twee language, as well as their admitted aim of making “average” guardians feel empowered, center abled feelings and trivialize neurodiverse people’s lives.
The language used in this post reinforces ableist stereotypes about ADHD people, and disabled people in general. The use of the “superpowered disabled person” especially, was negligent to invoke in marketing materials.
Medicalization is the process of reconceptualizing non-medical parts of life as a medical problem. Medicalization can be helpful, but it also is a system of power that can problematize normal human variance, and individualise cultural and societal problems.
Focusing only on the medical model can be validating, but limits our scope of understanding.
What is the purpose of expanding ADHD to dogs? What does the expansion of medicalization allow us to do? What does it cost us?
There are three models of disability that are important here:
The medical model looks at disability as a medical issue that can and should be treated so that their brain can function as close to the accepted standard as possible. It assumes that there is a standard of what is normal that we should try to achieve.
The social model of disability frames the question around what we accommodate. It sees the lack of accommodations for that condition and the discrimination that person is on the receiving end of as disabling. The social model was an incredible step forward in disability justice.
The radical model of disability looks beyond both the medical model and the social model. It asks how we can balance a critique of structural oppression with the reality that many of us need treatments and accommodations to live. As we know, we are always learning and being shaped by the environment. We cannot separate the society we live in, and our lived experiences, from our bodies and brains.Behavior Vets has used the words “neurodivergence” and “neurodiversity” in the marketing of their work on ADHD-like behaviours in dogs. Despite that, they only platform scientists, vets, and science based trainers.
Neurodiversity is a sociological concept. It is not a collection of symptoms, and it is not a description of behaviours. The term originates outside of a medical framework, and centres the idea that diversity in our brains is not something to be pathologized or problematized.
The question of if this term could even apply to dogs is a question of sociology, philosophy, and cultural theory. It is wildly insulting to have discussions on medicalizing different types of canine brain function under that banner.
Only focusing on the ‘hard sciences’ is a missed opportunity for learning. Dogs also live in a society, and the way we think about them and the ways our culture is structured affects them immensely.
Why do we privilege certain kinds of expertise over others? What lessons are there in the activist and academic work of disabled people for those of us whose job it is to change behaviour? What could we glean to make the lives of the people and dogs we work with better, and to wield the power we hold more mindfully?
Behavior Vets asked me to provide them resources about the social and theoretical side of the neurodivergence conversation. I chose to share this publicly because I believe this is a teachable moment for all of us.
I urge Behavior Vets to reconsider the choices they are making around the topics of neurodivergence, and to be more open to platforming a wider variety of experts. And I urge all of us to continue learning from diverse sources, and to centre justice in all our work.
Links (in order of appearance)
The impacts associated with having ADHD: An umbrella review
The Disability SuperPower Trope!
ADHD is not my superpower - The Unwritten
Stella Young: I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much | TED Talk
Mental Distress, Disease, Diagnosis and Treatment: The Bigger Questions
Disability Politics and Theory, Revised and Expanded Edition
The Body Mass Index by Maintenance Phase | Podchaser
And some continued reading
Psychiatric Power, Madness & Civilisation, and Discipline and Punish
(Personally, I think these three texts should be required reading for dog trainers)
TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis
The Neurodiversity Paradigm and Abolition of Psychiatric Incarceration
