I think Sherlock Holmes had ADHD 🔎
...In as much as a fictional character can be diagnosed by someone with no medical education.
One million years ago, I was watching “Fire Walk With Me,” the even more inscrutable, even more disturbing David Lynch movie that serves as a prequel to Twin Peaks. And while there are a lot of odd moments in that movie that can’t be unseen, one specific instance stayed with me for years.
In her bedroom, Laura Palmer is just absolutely Hoovering up straw after straw of cocaine. Like, really a substantial amount of cocaine.
My then-boyfriend turned to me and was like “why would you ever do cocaine at night? Like, wouldn’t it the last drug you want to do at night?”
Of course, the entire film is a case study in a teenagers doing dumb shit set against the magical realism of the damp Pacific Northwest wood, so “why” is not really a question with an answer. But also, as I informed him at the time, cocaine (and other stimulants) don’t hit everyone the same way. If your brain is already operating on its own time, i.e. if you have any number of conditions an all-night coke binge has a very different vibe.
Maybe, inadvertently, we were watching a character who, if she were real (and alive), was self-medicating for ADHD. Because whether she was written that way on purpose or not (I suspect not), writers tend to try to draw characters with a great deal of nuance, often accidentally including pathologies that they’re seen in real life.
So ever since then, I’ve been looking for fictional characters who have an unusual relationship with drugs, who struggle with interesting cognitive and behavioral behavior. Sure, it’s reading between the lines, but don’t we do that all time?
This is how I arrived at my theory that Sherlock Holmes is a study in ADHD.
As a diagnosis, ADHD is relatively new. This novelty, coupled with the facts that a.) researchers haven’t really been given a ton of space to explore it and b.) it’s been woefully mischaracterized and politicized in the last few decades, have meant that there’s not as much investigation into the ways in which people have coped historically. Whereas it’s more clear to see the ways that depression, borderline, or even schizophrenia have manifested, both in reality and in the world of fiction, the specific behaviors and coping mechanisms of ADHD have long been brushed off as any number of other issues or personality quirks.
Like when a main character can’t hack it as a nun and in fact has become “a problem” (Maria in the “Sound of Music”). Or when a girl of 21 is clearly keen but unable to apply herself in any meaningful way (Emma Woodhouse in Emma). Or when an exceptionally brilliant detective self-injects with cocaine as a means to focus.
In The Sign of Four, Sherlock Holmes, a regular user of cocaine, proclaims:
“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
In that same story, Holmes calls cocaine “so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”
Clarifying! Cocaine! Who feels clarified by cocaine? Why, people with ADHD.
Fun fact: This is how I got diagnosed with ADHD.
It’s true! I was diagnosed with ADHD very late in life, but my extremely smart psychologist caught something I said, which was that I would use cocaine during the day at work to help me focus and actually meet deadlines. And he asked me if I ever used it recreationally and I told him that I’d tried many times but it wasn’t really that fun, it just made me feel normal. Like I couldn’t get the same high as everyone else.
Apparently, this is very common, both in life and in fiction.
According to Ark Behavioral Health:
“…If an individual with ADHD uses cocaine, it can cause a sudden reduction in their ADHD symptoms for a short period of time as the drug boosts dopamine levels, often causing symptoms of central nervous system (CNS) sedation rather than CNS stimulation.
These effects may prompt an individual to use cocaine or other drugs more often and in higher doses as the effects wear off, accelerating the dangerous development of cocaine dependence and addiction.”
Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a known spiritualist and would likely have been more ready to accept that Sherlock’s brain was haunted by the spirit of a child who had died tragically than that he had faulty wiring underneath his woolen deerstalker hat. But, as my high school lit teacher taught me, once an author has published something and made it available to the world, it becomes the belonging of the reader, not the writer. Which is why we have all reclaimed the world of Harry Potter from that horrible TERFy woman who wrote it, yes?
Anyway, I think it’s an interesting subject because, throughout time, many fictional characters and real people alike have been cast in terms of their traits — but, reading or reflecting through a current lens, those traits seem a lot more like symptoms.
Flightiness! Obsession with some subjects but an inability to concentrate on others! And yes, weird use of stimulants that normal people see as a party drug.
Of course, people with ADHD have long received treatment for other disorders, even they didn’t know it. Folks with ADHD are more likely to develop substance use disorder, eating disorders, and other long-established mental health issues. That means that, even when folks weren't being diagnosed with ADHD, they may have been thrown in the ‘bin or otherwise treated in a professional setting. This makes it extra-hard to look for historical instances of ADHD within treatment notes or research because there’s no isolation of symptoms.
But we can see how cocaine was used to treat mental illnesses and other ailments for centuries in nations like Bolivia and Peru, and then more recently in western medicine. Many patent medicines — which sought to help calm people, not pep them up — were just liquid cocaine with a little bit of alcohol and sugar and flavoring thrown in.
Which makes me ask: Has there really been an ADHD ~boom~ or is it just that people with ADHD have been self-medicating all over the dang place for years and years? And have writers been accidentally writing these traits into characters that reflect it?
Unless you’re a doctor — which I am not — it’s impossible to armchair diagnose people, even if they’re a fictional character, the symptoms are so very, very temping, both, or neither. But I do know that once you see the way that ADHD manifests, it’s harder to ignore it when you see the signs.