some heroes from myth I'd recommend seek an adult ADHD diagnosis

I’ve recently started reading the first Percy Jackson book to my kids in the morning before they get ready for school, and they’re loving it. It checks all my boxes: Greek myth, broad appeal to both elementary and middle-schoolers, not written by a raging transphobe. Perfect.

The first few chapters are pretty light on myth elements. Instead, they focus on Percy’s feelings of not fitting in as a so-called “troubled” kid. His dyslexia makes it hard for him to study for his classes, and he’s also been diagnosed with ADHD. That part has been unexpectedly resonant for my kids. My oldest was diagnosed five years ago, and honestly, I wouldn’t rule the younger two out either. I’m really appreciating how the book gives us an opportunity to talk about these issues. Rick Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson books, wrote them in part because he really wanted to have disability and neurodiversity representation in heroic narratives so that his son could have heroes who looked like him. And I love that.

Except that Percy Jackson doesn’t really have ADHD. Well, it’s ambiguous. As his friend and fellow demigod Annabeth explains it:

“Diagnosed with dyslexia. Probably ADHD, too.”

I tried to swallow my embarrassment. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Taken together, it’s almost a sure sign. The letters float off the page when you read, right? That’s because your mind is hardwired for ancient Greek. And the ADHD—you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal’s. Of course the teachers want you medicated. Most of them are monsters. They don’t want you seeing them for what they are.”

“You sound like…you went through the same thing?”

“Most of the kids here did. If you weren’t like us, you couldn’t have survived the Minotaur.”

So, while Percy roughly fits within the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, his symptoms are actually part of his being a superhero. And many advocates for neurodivergent people have cautioned against the “your brain is actually a superpower” kind of narrative, which often contributes to kids feeling weird and defective. In the Percy Jackson books, his difference is what helps him find a place he belongs, but things aren’t so simple IRL.

I can’t WAIT to discuss all this nuance with my kids, who I absolutely predict will be bored senseless by it and will plead with me to please get back to reading the books. But because they’re tiny pedants, I’ll also make sure that they understand that there’s no reason to think that the heroes of Greek myth would actually have been diagnosed with ADHD today.

Or IS there??

Although my particular flavor of neurodivergence is autism and not ADHD, my daughter, partner, and ex have all been diagnosed with it. So I have a pretty good idea of some of the most common features. And in my informed-yet-also-completely-facetious opinion, there are definitely a few heroes from myth who have some suggestive traits.

I’m writing this during a scary time for neurodivergent people. RFK Jr. and the Trump administration have already issued an executive order targeting SSRIs and hinting at a coming crackdown on ADHD medication. It’s just so fun to have yet another thing to worry about when it comes to getting my daughter (and others) the medical care she needs. But that also makes it more important than ever to resist the subtext of these orders, which are trying to convince the entire country that if you’re trans or neurodivergent or an immigrant, there’s something wrong with you.

Which is not to say that the heroes of Greek myth are a great model for anyone to aspire to. But they are kind of fun. And we need that fun and joy more than ever.

Theseus

I’ve argued before that Theseus is the main model for Percy Jackson:

To nobody’s surprise, he’s one of the heroes I think you can make the strongest case for here — although, interestingly, that case revolves around his inattentiveness, one of the traits that Annabeth specifically flags as not a problem for demigods (“you see too much, Percy, not too little”). There are two separate stories about how Theseus’ inattentiveness led to disaster. In one, he inadvertently led to the death of his own stepfather Aegeus, because he’d promised to switch out the black sails on his ship to white ones if he survived his encounter with the Minotaur but completely forgot to do so. When Aegeus sees the misleading black sails, he jumps off a cliff. Whoops.

The lesser-known story is about Ariadne, the woman who helped him defeat the Minotaur. After they flee from Crete, they stop on Naxos, where Theseus just… forgets about her. Seriously. Here’s how Roberto Calasso writes about it in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (one of my favorite myth books!):

Theseus has no particular reason for deserting Ariadne. There wasn’t another woman. It was just that she slipped his mind for a moment, a moment that might be any moment. And when Theseus gets distracted, someone is lost.

As anyone who has lived with somebody with ADHD knows, that “out of sight, out of mind” element is one of the most persistent challenges. And Theseus really exemplifies it.

Achilles

Achilles, on the other hand, absolutely displays the hyperfocus that Annabeth describes to Percy. Books 18 through 22 of the Iliad are basically one prolonged battle rage for him, and if you’ve ever seen a kid with ADHD work on a Lego project you know that the hyperfocus can last for hours and completely block everything else out. Achilles also has one of the features of ADHD that gets talked about less in popular culture: rejection sensitivity. I think you can absolutely read his withdrawal from battle in the first three quarters of the epic as a particularly RSD-heightened response to Agamemnon’s insults. See also: Ajax, who exhibits both extreme rejection sensitivity (basically the whole plot of Sophocles’ Ajax) and also extreme demand avoidance, which overlaps with both autism and ADHD.

Odysseus

When you first read the Odyssey, did you think to yourself, “Odysseus, you fucking idiot!! Why did you go to all that trouble to use that clever ‘Nobody’ trick on Polyphemus, only to then tell him your actual name at the last minute? All you had to do was keep it to yourself, and Poseidon would never have dedicated the next ten years to making your life hell!”

That’s definitely what I thought, and honestly, it still bugs me. But after watching my daughter, who is both a trickster and incredibly impulsive… it checks out. Honestly, many heroes are impulsive in violent, destructive ways — Heracles is the most obvious example here — but impulsivity doesn’t always present as violence. Sometimes it’s self-destructive. Also, Odysseus’ entire journey kind of looks like a man who keeps getting distracted by the next adventure.

this was SO AVOIDABLE

Bonus Round

While we’re on the topic of neurodivergent heroes, I have to shout out the most obviously autistic character in Greek myth: Hippolytus, Theseus’ son. His obsession with hunting definitely falls into the “special interest” category, and every time he interacts with another character in Euripides’ Hippolytus he exhibits both social anxiety and a total inability to follow social cues. Also, he seems like he might be asexual/aromantic, which isn’t uncommon for people on the autism spectrum.

---

Obviously, I’m just meaning this as a kind of funny thought exercise. I’m not seriously trying to put forth an argument for diagnosing any of these characters as neurodivergent. Unless it would be meaningful to you to see them that way! If so, then: go to town.

It’s easy for scholars to nitpick the anachronism of projecting contemporary concerns onto antiquity. As always, Helen Morales is wonderful on this topic in Antigone Rising (emphasis added), although her focus is on reading myths through a trans/genderqueer rather than neurodivergent lens:

The myths of Teiresias, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Iphys and Ianthe, and Caeneus all have aspects that jar with modern sexual politics and might even be thought to be queerphobic. When I read the responses to the Queer Youth survey, my first reaction was puzzlement. My inner philologist wanted to cry out, “You are misreading these myths!”

But if the myths are meaningful to genderqueer people, then that in itself is worth heeding. Interpreting myth is always a selective business. As Kathy Acker, quoted in the preface to Ali Smith’s novel Girl Meets Boy, puts it, “There is the need for narrative and the simultaneous need to escape the prison-house of the story—to misquote.” As we’ve seen repeatedly in this book, myths are read selectively, re-created, adapted, cut and pasted, and they always have been, especially in antiquity. The different versions of myths operated collectively as a kind of conversation, later versions responding to earlier, like contributions to a long-running debate. What I found when I went back to the ancient myths and looked at them afresh is that my inner philologist was wrong. Some contain more trans-affirmative elements than I had realized; looking at myths with a “queer eye” unlocks levels that would otherwise remain hidden.

So it turns out that even though the neurodivergence of the heroes in Percy Jackson is a little more problematic than it initially appears, it’s totally valid for it to open up a bigger, more complex and nuanced conversation about neurodivergence in myth and literature. I can’t wait to bore my kids to death with it.