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Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

by Joe · 62 things on NewTwos

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 it is perched nowhere long enough to make a home.
British psychiatrist R.D. Laing writes: there are three things the human mind is afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
ADD people can feel terrified of their own minds, always dreading to spend a moment alone with it.
“It would be nice to get a break from myself at least for a little while.” One longs to escape the fatiguing, spinning, ever-churning mind.
Even if in many cases medications do help, the healing of ADD is not a recovery of some illness. It is the process of becoming whole.
Medications offer nothing more than a partial, stopgap response.
Some risk factors of those with ADD
Attention deficit disorder is defined by three major features, any two of which suffice for the diagnosis:
Poor attention skills
Deficient impulse control
Hyperactivity
The hallmark of ADD is an automatic, unwilled ‘tuning-out’ aka a frustrating non-presence of mind.
Many people with ADD are “Sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
The adult or child with ADD can barely restrain himself from interrupting others, finds it a torture waiting his turn in all manner of activities, and will often act or speak impulsively as if fore-thought did not exist.
An intense aversion to boredom, an abhorrence of it, takes hold as soon as there is no ready focus of activity, distraction or attention.
“I always think I should be doing something, but I don’t know what it is.”
The absence of mind is one cause by the distractibility and short attention spans, except around activities of high interest and motivation.
To some activities, a child may be able to devote, if anything, compulsive, hyper-concentrated attention.
Hyper focusing often involves “passive attention” as in watching tv or playing video games. Passive attention permits the mind to cruise on automatic without requiring the brain to expend effortful energy.
Active attention is a capacity the ADD brain lacks whenever organized work must be done, or when attention needs to be directed towards something of low interest.
What can be immobilizingly difficult is to arouse the brain’s motivational apparatus in the absence of personal interest.
The threat of failure or the promise of reward has to be immediate for the motivation apparatus to be turned on.
An adult with ADHD looks back on his life to see countless plans never fully realized and intentions unfulfilled.
"I am a person of permanent potential."
Surges of initial enthusiasm quickly ebb.
In early childhood, most ADD children literally climb all over adults and generally exhibit an insatiable desire for physical and emotional contact.
The emotional states of adults with ADD go through rapid and unpredictable up and down swings. Good days and bad days alternate without apparent reason.
The long-term social consequences of massive drug intake in conditions like depression, anxiety, and ADD are yet to be known - and should be concerning.
No feature of ADD is unique enough that it can not be found in any number of people among the non-ADD population.
Learning about the psychological and biological mechanisms of ADD gives a map to the self — but only a map. It is still up to the individual to plot the course.
No one is ADD, and no one should be defined or categorized in terms of it or any other particular problem
If you have many features of ADD, and if they produce a lack of order (aka disorder) in your life, then you have ADD.
Disorder, ie a lack of:
A sense of organization
A consciously planned sequence of activities
Knowing where things are
What you have done and what remains to be undone
The feeling of duty toward the world is not limited to ADD but is typical of it. No one with ADD is without it.
Young children cannot possibly understand the motives of adults. It means little to a young child that the parent feels love for him if that parent keeps disappearing.
Therefore he works hard to get his needs met: demanding contact, acting out or trying to please the parent to gain approval and attention.
The most important thing a parent can do in their child's adolescence is give them the gift of mindful, secure, and reliable parental presence.
In virtually every one of the families I have seen where one child or another has ADD, there was a tone of tension and stress.
"ADD is not a problem of knowing what to do; is is a problem of doing what you know." - Russell Barkley, PHD
Ask people with ADD how long it will take to perform a particular task, and they will notoriously underestimate.
The underdevelopment of the circuitry of time also explains the chronic incapacity to consider the future.
The short-term goal is invariably chosen over the long-term, with the exception of activities or projects capable of arousing the sluggish motivation-reward nexus in the brain.
The present impulse dominates.
The major impairments of ADD - the distractibility, the hyperactivity, and the poor impulse control - reflect a lack of self-regulation.
In general, we may also speak on an underdevelopment of emotional intelligence. Or "being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and to delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think"
Cortex means "bark," as in the bark of a tree, and refers to the thin rim of gray matter enveloping the white matter of the brain. The cortex is where the most highly evolved activities of the human brain are processed.
In the ADD group, electrical activity is the cerebral cortex, or gray matter, slows down when it is required to speed up.
ADD in the brain can be most easily understood as a policeman at a busy traffic stop.
In our model, the drivers have no capacity to regulate themselves. They rely on the order of the policeman who ensures order.
Now imagine that the policeman falls asleep on the job.
There will ensue tremendous activity as cars from all directions attempt to move through the intersection.
Despite all the commotion, there is little progress. Fewer and fewer cars are able to move purposely. There is disorder.
The pre-frontal cortex may be seen as that policeman. And in an ADD brain, that policeman is asleep.
One of its major tasks is inhibition. It evaluates a myriad of impressions, thoughts, sensations, and impulses, and must select what is essential and helpful to inhibit.

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