Did Dickinson have ADHD?

Hey Guys! So, not gonna lie,  I was pretty excited to learn about Dickinson when I initially heard about this class, especially since I didn’t know anything about her going into it. When we started learning about her by reading her letters, I feel like it gave us a chance to see her as “Emily Dickinson, the person” instead of how most people know her today as “Emily Dickinson, the poet”, which was really intriguing to me.

Now, as a creative writing and psych double major, naturally, I really like to psychoanalyze a lot of the stuff I have to read for my classes. To me, it’s a lot of fun to figure out theories for why people wrote what they did, even if it’s more of an absurd conspiracy than anything else. I should also add that I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, and ever since then (ironically), I’ve loved learning all about it. So as we read more and more of Dickinson’s writing, I started to notice a lot of similarities between her thought processes in her letters and poems and how I interact with the world around me as someone with ADD, leading me to suspect she might have had it too. Besides having obsessive ruminations about topics that resurface in a lot of her work, she also seemed take it especially hard when she was faced with rejection of any kind in her letters, which relates to something found in a lot of people with ADHD called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. A similar aspect of inattentive ADHD is called Emotional Hyperarousal, where these people experience thoughts, feelings, and reactions more intensely than the average person. Sounds a bit like Dickinson to me…

There are a lot of other smaller instances that just make so much sense for her to have written if she had ADHD, and after looking it up to see if other people thought Dickinson might’ve had it, I found out that a lot of people think she did! One of the web results that came up was a podcast called Distraction with Dr. Ned Hallowell that mentioned her in an episode about inattentive ADHD/ADD in women, where he says:

As I say, the largest undiagnosed group are adult women and girls with ADHD because they’re not disruptive usually. They’re the daydreamer, the serene lost in their thoughts, Emily Dickinson kind of ADHD. She had the great line, “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” That’s so typical of ADD that she would put those two together, “Because I could not stop for death, death kindly stopped for me.” These lines that are eternal, thanks to Ms. Dickinson, are spun out of the ADD mind that we really owe it to women and girls to identify, diagnose, and provide the help that will allow them to develop their full potential (Hallowell).

Reading this in the podcast’s transcript put a whole different meaning on those lines of her poetry to me, especially since we analyzed them in class! Anyway, I just thought I’d share my thoughts on the idea! Did/Does anyone else think this could’ve been the case for Dickinson?

 If anyone’s interested in the podcast I mentioned, here’s the link: ADHD in Women and Girls Is Often Overlooked