Have We Started Pathologizing Being Human?

Why context matters more than labels—and what it means for dissociation, ADHD, and creativity

By Lindsey Bauman, Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner and Founder of Mettā Vita Health

“Am I dissociating, or am I just overwhelmed?”

The answer is not always simple.

Somewhere along the way, we became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that human experiences exist on a spectrum. We began sorting them into boxes: normal or abnormal, healthy or disordered, diagnosis or no diagnosis.

But the human brain rarely operates in such clean categories.

Daydreaming. Hyperfocus. Emotional numbing. Losing track of time. Becoming completely absorbed in an idea. Driving home on autopilot. Staring out the window during a conversation because your mind followed a different thread.

These experiences can mean many different things.

Sometimes they reflect stress. Sometimes they are related to trauma. Sometimes they are part of ADHD, burnout, sleep deprivation, anxiety, creativity, or ordinary fluctuations in attention. Sometimes they are clinically significant. Other times, they are simply part of being human.

The goal should not be to dismiss symptoms.

It should be to understand them before we label them.

Dissociation Exists on a Spectrum

When people hear the word dissociation, they often imagine severe trauma, losing time, or having no memory of what happened.

Those experiences are real and deserve thoughtful clinical attention.

But dissociative-type experiences also exist on a broader continuum.

Have you ever:

• Driven somewhere familiar and realized you barely remembered the trip?

• Read several pages of a book without absorbing a word?

• Become so immersed in a movie that you briefly forgot where you were?

• Lost track of time while writing, painting, designing, researching, or building something?

• Felt mentally absent during a period of exhaustion or overwhelm?

  
  

These experiences are not automatically evidence of a dissociative disorder.

They may reflect absorption, autopilot, mind-wandering, attentional shifting, emotional overload, or the brain temporarily reducing its awareness of competing information.

What matters is not simply whether someone “checked out.”

What matters is the nature, frequency, function, and impact of the experience.

Sometimes Disconnection Is Protective

The nervous system is designed to adapt.

When life becomes overwhelming, the brain has several possible responses. It may mobilize us to fight or escape. It may freeze. It may shut down. It may create distance from emotions, sensations, memories, or the immediate environment.

That distance can be protective.

For someone living through trauma, disconnection may help the mind tolerate an experience that feels impossible to process in the moment.

For someone experiencing burnout, emotional numbing may be the nervous system’s way of conserving depleted resources.

For someone who is chronically overstimulated, mentally drifting away may provide temporary relief from an environment that feels relentless.

This does not mean every form of dissociation is healthy or harmless. Protective responses can become rigid, automatic, or impairing over time.

But understanding the original function matters.

Instead of asking only, “How do we stop this symptom?” we should also ask:

“What is this person’s brain trying to protect them from, process, or regulate?”

That question creates room for treatment without shame.

ADHD and “Checking Out”

ADHD is often reduced to distractibility, restlessness, or difficulty sitting still.

In reality, many people with ADHD describe a much more complex relationship with attention.

They may:

• Drift deeply into thought

• Miss parts of conversations

• Become absorbed in ideas or internal worlds

• Lose track of time

• Shift rapidly between external stimuli and internal associations

• Hyperfocus on something interesting while becoming less aware of everything else

• Mentally disengage when bored, overstimulated, emotionally flooded, or cognitively exhausted

From the outside, this can look like “checking out.”

But checking out is not one single clinical phenomenon.

In one person, it may reflect ordinary mind-wandering. In another, it may be ADHD-related attentional dysregulation. In another, it may be anxiety, trauma, sleep deprivation, depression, sensory overload, medication effects, or clinically significant dissociation.

Some people have both ADHD and trauma-related dissociative symptoms. Others have ADHD without a dissociative disorder at all.

The distinction matters because the treatment should match the function.

We should be cautious about calling every instance of lost attention “dissociation.” But we should be equally cautious about ignoring meaningful dissociative symptoms simply because someone already carries an ADHD diagnosis.

Good care requires curiosity, not diagnostic shortcuts.

Creativity, Absorption, and the Inner World

Creative people often have a strong capacity for absorption.

Writers disappear into stories. Musicians become immersed in sound. Artists lose awareness of time while working. Entrepreneurs and inventors follow chains of ideas that may be invisible to everyone around them.

Psychologists may describe some of these experiences as absorption or flow.

Flow is not the same thing as pathological dissociation. It is often purposeful, rewarding, and connected to performance. The person is deeply engaged rather than defensively disconnected.

Still, the experiences can look similar from the outside: reduced awareness of time, less attention to the surrounding environment, and intense focus on an internal or creative process.

That does not make creativity a disorder.

The capacity to step outside immediate reality—to imagine what does not yet exist—is part of how humans create art, solve problems, make meaning, and innovate.

A mind that wanders is not necessarily a broken mind.

Sometimes it is a mind making connections.

The clinical question is not whether someone has a rich internal world. It is whether they can move in and out of that internal world with enough flexibility to function, connect, and remain safe.

Context Matters More Than the Label

Nearly every psychological trait exists on a continuum.

Anxiety can warn us about danger.

Perfectionism can support high performance.

Sensitivity can deepen empathy.

Emotional distance can help us survive a crisis.

Hyperfocus can fuel achievement.

Imagination can become a source of creativity, escape, or both.

The presence of a trait alone does not determine whether it is a disorder.

What matters is:

• Does it cause significant distress?

• Does it interfere with work, school, relationships, caregiving, or daily functioning?

• Is it flexible, or does it happen automatically regardless of context?

• Can the person remain oriented and safe?

• Are there significant memory gaps or periods of lost time?

• Does the experience feel grounding and productive, or frightening and uncontrollable?

• Is it serving the person, or has it begun controlling them?

  
  

These questions are often more clinically useful than the label itself.

“Not every moment of checking out is pathology. Sometimes the brain is protecting, processing, imagining, or simply asking for rest. Our job is to understand what the experience is doing for the person before we decide what to call it.”— Lindsey Bauman, Founder and Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, Mettā Vita Health

The Cost of Overpathologizing

Modern mental healthcare has given us important language for understanding suffering.

For many people, receiving an accurate diagnosis is validating. It can provide clarity, access to treatment, community, and relief from years of self-blame.

Diagnoses matter.

But every useful framework can become harmful when applied without context.

When we pathologize every variation in attention, mood, personality, or nervous-system functioning, people may begin to see themselves as fundamentally defective.

Normal grief becomes a disorder before it has had time to unfold.

Burnout becomes a personal failure.

Sensitivity becomes dysfunction.

Daydreaming becomes dissociation.

Deep concentration becomes avoidance.

A temporary response to an overwhelming environment becomes a permanent identity.

The risk is not simply “too many diagnoses.” The deeper risk is that we may stop asking what happened to someone, what environment they are living in, what their body needs, and what their symptoms are trying to communicate.

Sometimes the answer is a psychiatric disorder that deserves treatment.

Sometimes the answer is trauma.

Sometimes it is ADHD.

Sometimes it is chronic sleep deprivation, hormonal change, medication effects, nutritional depletion, sensory overload, relational stress, grief, or an unsustainable life.

Sometimes people need therapy, medication, neurofeedback, medical evaluation, or structured support.

And sometimes they need rest, safety, connection, purpose, and room to be human.

When “Checking Out” May Need More Support

Occasional daydreaming, absorption, autopilot, or losing track of time can occur in everyday life.

It may be time to speak with a qualified mental health professional when these experiences involve:

• Significant or unexplained memory gaps

• Losing time or being unable to account for parts of the day

• Feeling persistently detached from yourself

• Feeling as though the world around you is unreal or dreamlike

• Difficulty remaining present during work, school, relationships, or caregiving

• Frequent episodes that feel frightening, uncontrollable, or disorienting

• Symptoms connected to trauma, panic, substance use, or safety concerns

• Distress or impairment that is becoming difficult to manage

  
  

Seeking evaluation does not mean accepting a label without question.

A thoughtful assessment should help clarify whether the experience is related to ADHD, trauma, anxiety, depression, burnout, sleep, medication, physical health, dissociation, or a combination of factors.

The goal is not to turn every human experience into a diagnosis.

The goal is to recognize when the nervous system needs support.

We Need More Curiosity and Less Fear

As clinicians, we should be careful not to minimize suffering.

We should also resist the urge to pathologize every variation in the human experience.

Both can be true.

Mental illness is real.

Trauma is real.

Dissociative disorders are real.

And human beings also daydream, disconnect, imagine, adapt, lose focus, become overwhelmed, and temporarily retreat inward.

The difference is not determined by one symptom or one social-media checklist.

It is found in the full story.

What was happening before the symptom began?

What triggers it?

What relieves it?

How does it affect the person’s life?

Is it chosen or automatic?

Is it protective, impairing, creative, avoidant—or several of those things at once?

The most responsible mental healthcare does not rush to label or dismiss.

It gets curious.

The Mettā Vita Health Perspective

At Mettā Vita Health, we believe effective mental healthcare begins with curiosity.

Symptoms matter, but so do context, nervous-system patterns, life experiences, physical health, environment, relationships, and individual strengths.

A diagnosis can provide clarity and access to care. It should not flatten a person into a label.

We look beyond the symptom to understand the whole person—and to distinguish between what needs treatment, what needs support, and what may simply be part of being human.

Because beneath every diagnosis is a human nervous system doing its best to adapt.

Call to Action

Are you feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, mentally absent, or unsure whether your symptoms reflect ADHD, trauma, burnout, anxiety, dissociation, or something else?

A thoughtful psychiatric evaluation can help clarify what is happening without automatically pathologizing your experience.

Learn more about care at Mettā Vita Health or request an appointment.