Just finished the first chapter of Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté, a doctor and author who specialises in trauma, addiction, stress and ADHD (he was diagnosed with ADHD in his 50's).
Here's what I highlighted:
Never at rest, the mind of the ADD adult flits about like some deranged bird that can light here or there for a while but is perched nowhere long enough to make a home.
The shock of self-recognition many adults experience on learning about ADD is both exhilarating and painful. It gives coherence, for the first time, to humiliations and failures, to plans unfulfilled and promises unkept, to gusts of manic enthusiasm that consume themselves in their own mad dance, leaving emotional debris in their wake, to the seemingly limitless disorganization of activities, of brain, car, desk, room.
the ADD adult’s awareness that he has talents or insights or some undefinable positive quality he could perhaps connect with if the wires weren’t crossed.
My life, like that of many an adult with ADD, resembled a juggling act from the old Ed Sullivan show: a man spins plates, each balanced on a stick. He keeps adding more and more sticks and plates, running back and forth frantically between them as each stick, increasingly unsteady, threatens to topple over. He could keep this up only for so long before the sticks tottered and the plates began to shatter, or he himself collapsed. Something has to give, but the ADD personality has trouble letting go of anything. Unlike the juggler, he cannot stop the performance.
A sense of urgency typifies attention deficit disorder, a desperation to have immediately whatever it is that one may desire at the moment, be it an object, an activity or a relationship.
I now think that physicians and prescriptions for drugs have come to play a lopsidedly exaggerated role in the treatment of ADD. What begins as a problem of society and human development has become almost exclusively defined as a medical ailment. Even if in many cases medications do help, the healing ADD calls for is not a process of recovery from some illness. It is a process of becoming whole—which, it so happens, is the original sense of the word healing.
A patient and compassionate inquiry is needed if we are to identify the deeper meanings manifested in the crossed neural signals, troubled behaviors and psychological tumult that together have been named ADD.
The first step is to discard the illness model, along with any notion that medications can offer more than a partial, stopgap response.
The names given to it and its exact descriptions have gone through several mutations. Its current definition is given in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, scripture and encyclopedia of the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM IV defines attention deficit disorder by its external features, not by its emotional meaning in the lives of individual human beings. It commits the faux pas of calling these external observations symptoms, whereas that word in medical language denotes a patient’s own felt experience. External observations, no matter how acute, are signs. A headache is a symptom. A chest sound registered by the doctor’s stethoscope is a sign. A cough is both a symptom and a sign. The DSM speaks the language of signs because the worldview of conventional medicine is unfamiliar with the language of the heart. As the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel has said, “The DSM is concerned with categories, not with pain.”
ADD has much to do with pain, present in every one of the adults and children who have come to me for assessment. The deep emotional hurt they carry is telegraphed by the downcast, averted eyes, the rapid, discontinuous flow of speech, the tense body postures, the tapping feet and fidgety hands and by the nervous, self-deprecating humor. “Every aspect of my life hurts,” a thirty-seven-year-old man told me during his second visit to my office. People express surprise when after a brief exchange I seem to be able to sense their pain and grasp their confused and conflicted history of emotions. “I’m speaking about myself,” I tell them.
At times I have wished that the “experts” and media pundits who deny the existence of attention deficit disorder could meet only a few of the severely affected adults who have sought my help. These men and women, in their thirties, forties and fifties, have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Some have never been able to read a book from cover to cover, some cannot even sit through a movie. Their moods fly back and forth from lethargy and dejection to agitation. The creative talents they have been blessed with have not been pursued. They are intensely frustrated at what they perceive as their failures. Their self-esteem is lost in some deep well. Most often they are firm in the conviction that their problems are the result of a basic, incorrigible flaw in their personalities.
Patients are graphic about their feeling states, often almost lyrical. “Ah,” a forty-seven-year-old man said with a discouraged wave of the hand and a smile that was resigned and mischievous at the same time, “my life is just so much soup and garbage can.” What those words mean exactly, I could not say. Like poetry, they convey their meaning through the feelings and word associations they evoke. “Landed in the soup.” “Fog as thick as soup.” “Soup kitchen.” “Treated like a piece of garbage.” “I feel like garbage.” Images of distress, loneliness and confusion, presented with a tinge of humor. The strangely dissonant imagery tells also of a troubled soul who found reality harsh—so harsh that the mind had to be fragmented in order to fragment the pain.
Ed
Here's what I highlighted:
Never at rest, the mind of the ADD adult flits about like some deranged bird that can light here or there for a while but is perched nowhere long enough to make a home.
The shock of self-recognition many adults experience on learning about ADD is both exhilarating and painful. It gives coherence, for the first time, to humiliations and failures, to plans unfulfilled and promises unkept, to gusts of manic enthusiasm that consume themselves in their own mad dance, leaving emotional debris in their wake, to the seemingly limitless disorganization of activities, of brain, car, desk, room.
the ADD adult’s awareness that he has talents or insights or some undefinable positive quality he could perhaps connect with if the wires weren’t crossed.
My life, like that of many an adult with ADD, resembled a juggling act from the old Ed Sullivan show: a man spins plates, each balanced on a stick. He keeps adding more and more sticks and plates, running back and forth frantically between them as each stick, increasingly unsteady, threatens to topple over. He could keep this up only for so long before the sticks tottered and the plates began to shatter, or he himself collapsed. Something has to give, but the ADD personality has trouble letting go of anything. Unlike the juggler, he cannot stop the performance.
A sense of urgency typifies attention deficit disorder, a desperation to have immediately whatever it is that one may desire at the moment, be it an object, an activity or a relationship.
I now think that physicians and prescriptions for drugs have come to play a lopsidedly exaggerated role in the treatment of ADD. What begins as a problem of society and human development has become almost exclusively defined as a medical ailment. Even if in many cases medications do help, the healing ADD calls for is not a process of recovery from some illness. It is a process of becoming whole—which, it so happens, is the original sense of the word healing.
A patient and compassionate inquiry is needed if we are to identify the deeper meanings manifested in the crossed neural signals, troubled behaviors and psychological tumult that together have been named ADD.
The first step is to discard the illness model, along with any notion that medications can offer more than a partial, stopgap response.
The names given to it and its exact descriptions have gone through several mutations. Its current definition is given in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, scripture and encyclopedia of the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM IV defines attention deficit disorder by its external features, not by its emotional meaning in the lives of individual human beings. It commits the faux pas of calling these external observations symptoms, whereas that word in medical language denotes a patient’s own felt experience. External observations, no matter how acute, are signs. A headache is a symptom. A chest sound registered by the doctor’s stethoscope is a sign. A cough is both a symptom and a sign. The DSM speaks the language of signs because the worldview of conventional medicine is unfamiliar with the language of the heart. As the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel has said, “The DSM is concerned with categories, not with pain.”
ADD has much to do with pain, present in every one of the adults and children who have come to me for assessment. The deep emotional hurt they carry is telegraphed by the downcast, averted eyes, the rapid, discontinuous flow of speech, the tense body postures, the tapping feet and fidgety hands and by the nervous, self-deprecating humor. “Every aspect of my life hurts,” a thirty-seven-year-old man told me during his second visit to my office. People express surprise when after a brief exchange I seem to be able to sense their pain and grasp their confused and conflicted history of emotions. “I’m speaking about myself,” I tell them.
At times I have wished that the “experts” and media pundits who deny the existence of attention deficit disorder could meet only a few of the severely affected adults who have sought my help. These men and women, in their thirties, forties and fifties, have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Some have never been able to read a book from cover to cover, some cannot even sit through a movie. Their moods fly back and forth from lethargy and dejection to agitation. The creative talents they have been blessed with have not been pursued. They are intensely frustrated at what they perceive as their failures. Their self-esteem is lost in some deep well. Most often they are firm in the conviction that their problems are the result of a basic, incorrigible flaw in their personalities.
Patients are graphic about their feeling states, often almost lyrical. “Ah,” a forty-seven-year-old man said with a discouraged wave of the hand and a smile that was resigned and mischievous at the same time, “my life is just so much soup and garbage can.” What those words mean exactly, I could not say. Like poetry, they convey their meaning through the feelings and word associations they evoke. “Landed in the soup.” “Fog as thick as soup.” “Soup kitchen.” “Treated like a piece of garbage.” “I feel like garbage.” Images of distress, loneliness and confusion, presented with a tinge of humor. The strangely dissonant imagery tells also of a troubled soul who found reality harsh—so harsh that the mind had to be fragmented in order to fragment the pain.
Ed
