Dear Reader:

I was given a book as a gift, “Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder From Childhood Through Adulthood“, by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D, first copyright 1994. I haven’t read a book of any kind for about 5 years, I am guessing, so this is a first in quite some time. And because I spend so much time in these forums, I thought I’ll share about this book right here while reading it.

From the introduction: “The old moral code dies hard… At the heart of the moral model beats the conviction that willpower controls all human emotion, learning, and behavior. Under this model, the cure for depression is to cheer up. The cure for anxiety is to suck it up. And the cure for ADD is to try harder”

I agree with the above, but following it I read something (still in the introduction) that looks like the author’s agenda (the reason I don’t read books is because of such agendas). The agenda, seems to me, is to motivate parents to buy this book by telling them right at the start, that in no way can their parenting cause ADD symptoms in their children. But this cannot possibly be true. I see this claim as a marketing strategy. It’s a common strategy, I now remember: can’t motivate parents to buy a book if you make them feel guilty!  This is a turn off for me but I will continue to read because this book was given to me by a thoughtful kind woman after I expressed to her my ADD-like cognitive difficulties, and I want to report to her that something about this book was useful to me.

Ooops, as I continue to read, another turn-off: like other professionals who consider themselves experts on this or that mental/ neurological disorder, they tend to conclude that… almost everyone suffers from it. They expand the disorder’s parameters to include millions and millions of people (a marketing strategy, more buyers for the book?). My motivation to continue reading is further eroded.

Here is a part I can very much relate to, page 22: “An important, and overlooked part of both learning disabilities and ADD is the social consequences of having them. ADD can interfere with one’s interpersonal life just as dramatically as it does with one’s academic or job performance. To make friends, you have to be able to pay attention. To get along in a group, you have to be able to follow what is being said in the group“- very true to me.

I am skipping a lot, not because of attention deficit on my part (?) as much as my impatience with an author’s need to fill in a book with lots of print when he/ she can state things clearly in less than a 1/10 of all that print.

Page 91: “8. Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to hyperfocus at times. The hallmark symptom of ADD. The ‘tuning out’ is quite involuntary… The often extraordinary ability to hyperfocus is also usually present, emphasizing the fact that this is a syndrome not of attention deficit but of attention inconsistency” – I very much relate. I don’t remember reading or hearing that ADD is a disorder of inconsistency of attention. I like this new (to me) wording.

As I go through the pages about case studies, different people, their life circumstances, what they said, how their ADD manifests (I skip almost all), I wonder why does the author provide ALL THESE DETAILS to people who suffer from ADD symptoms: why not write LESS, provide way FEWER details and names and… oh, because the author needs to FILL IN a whole book. Yes, I am frustrated. Did I mention that I did not read a single book for … I think it is more like 7 years?

More case studies, more people’s names, more details, skip, skip, ADD-in-marriage.. the impact of ADD on sexuality… interesting, but not interesting enough for me to read (much) about it… ADD-and-parenting- I am not going to bother with the latter because of the agenda I mentioned above.

Page 170 already, all within an hour… I am definitely driven to distraction as I skip through Driven to Distraction. Here is something on page 172 about negotiating methods: “separate people from the problem. The idea here is to get people’s ego and pride disengaged from whatever the problem is so that the problem can be attacked” without the person feeling attacked. I like this, it is parallel to the principle behind not judging our own thoughts and feelings as good or bad, right or wrong, so to be able to deal with our issues and heal, best we can. If a person does not feel judged and attacked (by his/ her own self or by another person)- healing is possible and effective communication is possible.

Page 176: “Make it clear that ADD is nobody’s fault. It is not Mom’s or Dad’s fault” – here is the agenda. If a child’s mother or father screams a lot, judges a lot.. hits their child… it’s not their fault that their child suffers from ADD symptoms? A child will suffer in some way because of an aggressive parent: some are inclined or predisposed (genetically perhaps) to develop tics (Tourette’s), some are so inclined to develop schizophrenia, many are inclined to develop ADD symptoms, but every child gets damaged by a parent’s repeated aggression. Also, there is no such thing as human damage that is not physical: all our experiences are physical. The word “mental”, when referring to damage or harm, means a physical damage that is not clearly visible or  detectable by medical tests. Regardless of visibility and medical detectability, all mental damage is  physical damage.

Page 197 about learning disorders: “The pain of learning disorders resides…is in the disconnections one can suffer, a disconnection from language and from thoughts” – bingo, “disconnection” is the word I use in regard to my own cognitive difficulties/ learning disabilities: sometimes, not infrequently, I read a member’s post and I have to google a word: not a word I am not familiar with, but a word that I am familiar with… because it so happens that I lose the connection to what the word means. Also, as I try to understand a member’s post, to connect the details provided,  most often I have to reorganize the member’s post, to re-type it, so to make the connections needed to understand what’s in front of me.

I will continue to read this part tomorrow. Seems like what I need to read about is about learning disabilities and how I can possibly improve this part in my life.

anita