As a sufferer, I agree wholeheartedly with that label. It's an absolute nightmare to deal with and negatively affects every facet of my life.
And it doesn't allow me to 'think freely and creatively' as the article asserts, it prevents me from continuing to think about what I want to think about. That's very much like saying 'nixing the brakes on your car removes the need for wasting time at stop signs and red lights.' I can't be creative with it because I can't think about something for long enough to nail down a useful idea. I GM pen-and-paper RPGs--but never again unmedicated, I learned my lesson there. Being unable to organize my thoughts enough to run a game or even think of a premise FOR a game is leagues away from 'thinking freely and creatively'.
Personally have it, and my "creativity" in my mind is off the charts. When I occasionally have hyperfocus I can make something from it, but I have the similar issues to you in that I lose focus or am unable to organize myself.
I think the mental illness side of things is very grey. Clearly you have a very severe case, but I don't consider my personal variant severe enough to label as an extremely debilitating mental illness,but I benefit greatly from treatment. I can still function-I get most of what I need to done, but I struggle a lot with it. But at the same time, I understand the problem of not always labeling it as such, because then people dismiss it in its more severe forms.
Really liked this comment.
On the one hand, studies have suggested that ADHDers are generally more creative than their intelligence matched peers. This is true with respect to laboratory tests of creativity [2] and creative achievements in the real world [3].
On the other hand, @viewer5 brings up a couple deep points about how we should qualify our interpretations of this research. First, ADHD comes on a spectrum, and is going to affect different people in different ways. So conclusions about the "average" individual with ADHD aren't going to generalize to everyone.
For example, I have the inattentive sub-type of ADHD, but am low on the spectrum. So my ADHD creates all sorts of problems (I'm late to appointments and deadlines, distractible, find it hard to sleep, lose expensive stuff, etc.), but I feel those are outweighed in my case by advantages (e.g. creativity).
Others who are further along on the spectrum might experience way more of the disadvantages, and in any case, it's deeply personal.
Second, @viewer5 brings up a super-deep point about creativity (though I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind). Being creative isn't just about generating novel ideas (which ADHD probably helps with, on balance). Creativity also requires the ability to focus long enough to assess and develop those original ideas.
There's an old idea that different psychological capacities support the generation and evaluation of creative ideas (see [4]). Psychometric (e.g. [5]) and neuroscientific (e.g. [6]) research has supported this idea. So ADHD might help idea generation, while hindering idea evaluation and development, which seems consistent with @viewer5's experiences (disclaimer: I'm spitballing with this last hypothesis).
[2] White and Shah (2006) "Uninhibited Imaginations: Creativity in Adults with ADHD" http://totallyadd.com/wp-content/uploads/White_Shah_ADHDCrea...
[3] White and Shah (2011) "Creative style and achievement in adults with ADHD" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886910...
[5] Campbell (1960) "Blind Variation and Selective Retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245588360_Blind_var...
[5] DeYoung et al. (2008) "Cognitive Abilities Involved in Insight Problem Solving: An Individual Differences Model" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234819098_Cognitive...
[6] Beaty et al. (2016) "Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26553223
I highly recommend you watch John Cleese's lecture on Creativity. He essentially makes that same claim, but terms it as being in 'open' and 'closed' mode. You need to be in the open mode to generate ideas and be creative, then you need to switch to the closed mode in order to get a good chunk of work done, then go back to the open mode to get and work with feedback, then go back to the closed mode to get a chunk of work done, etc. It fits what you said very nicely.
I've suspected for awhile that I have some level of ADHD (probably inattentive subtype), but after seeing what my brother went through with ADHD meds, I decided to just live with it. It's mostly worked out okay, and I can usually focus well enough when I'm working on something I like or a deadline is looming at work.
Watch it here: https://vimeo.com/89936101
> ADHD is labeled a "mental illness" in the opening paragraph
@skywopper is right that our article suggests the value of neurodiversity, and thus it's weird to think of ADHD as an "illness". But @Yanwar is right that because so many people think of ADHD this way, it's important to acknowledge this POV, and think about how our research puts pressure on it.
I'd add that negative perceptions of mind-wandering (and by extension, ADHD) go WAY BACK in the history of Western thought. Back in the 1200s, Aquinas classified mind-wandering as a "daughter sin" of sloth (!) [1].
So we wanted to engage, head on, with this intellectual tradition that casts mind-wandering as a "sin" and ADHD as an "illness".
[1] Thomas Aquinas (1273) Summa Theologica, IIa IIae q.35a.4