Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

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I especially enjoyed how explored the link between shame and ADD, his exploration of the phenomenology of childhood ("children swim the unconscious of their parents"), and his exploration of attention itself- he gets downright Wattsian at certain points. This is high praise.

He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1957. After graduating with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a few years as a high school English and literature teacher, he returned to school to pursue his childhood dream of being a physician. I am not giving medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am am merely sharing what we have experienced in hopes that it will give you a short cut. In America, our multi-decade project of making life harder for poor, working class, and middle class people appears to be correlated with increasing ADD diagnoses. While we are not sure if this increase results from more children having ADD or simply more diagnoses, what we do know is that the overall impact of this condition on our society is waxing. Maté’s book made me think that perhaps this trend is at least partially fueled by parents needing to work more days and hours just to get by, which pits their economic survival in a zero-sum game with the time and energy required to establish secure attachments with children thereby decreasing the likelihood that ADD will manifest. And since upper class and wealthy Americans also tend to work too much, this may explain why ADD also shows up in plenty of kids from well-off, supportive families. ADHD children often do not believe their parents want to spend time with them because there is an interruption in the parent-child attachment.A friend who has rampant ADHD texted me once while she was crying, saying that all she wanted was a hug. I wasn't able to do anything, but suggested she ask her parents. "That's not something they do. I'd be embarrassed." she replied. Her parents weren't abusive. They just didn't speak her love language. It seemed to me that I had found the passage of those dark recesses of my mind from which chaos issues without warning, hurling thoughts, plans, emotions and intentions in all directions. I felt I had discovered what it was that had always kept me from attaining psychological integrity: wholeness, the reconciliation and joining together of the disharmonious fragments of my mind… At my next therapy session, my therapist asked if I had read the book and I said yes, and that it had resonated with me. She asked what resonated, and I said, "Well, if I do have ADD, it would explain my entire life. It would fill in all the blanks and areas that my history with depression and anxiety don't account for, that I always tried to make them fit into to explain something that didn't make sense." Something that didn't make sense because, without the missing piece of ADD, it quite literally couldn't make sense. Then we discussed why, etc, blah blah. At the end of the appointment I promised her I would talk to my physician about a diagnosis. Two parents that I know of, one extremely abusive, but neither with any sign of ADHD, who have 3 children with horrible ADHD and the other with major depression issues. Not trying to protect them from sadness or failure – emotional distress is required to thrive as an adult. It takes a lot of loving to help a child except sadness to know that it can be endured and that sadness like all other states will pass.

Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown Medicine,” the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich wrote, “tells us as much about the meaningful performance of healing, suffering, and dying as chemical analysis tells us about the aesthetic value of pottery.” This book was an eye-opener for me as I realized that my children needed my husband and me to invite them into a relationship with us by inviting them to spend time with us. When children (especially kids with ADHD) beg and plead with their parents to spend time with them, it does not count in their eyes.From there he speaks about how there is no place for blame - which I agree with 100% - and all he is stating, is what he has noticed in his practice and research. Let’s start with horses, though. An infant horse can run on the first day of its life. Like other young mammals, it is capable of extraordinary feats of neuro-physiological coordination at birth. The brain of a human infant, by contrast, has to develop for two years before the child can walk. Evolution selected for larger brains in humans compared to other mammals. We can’t get into why here, so let’s just note that human brains quadrupled in size since our species last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees a million years ago. The upshot: our brains are premature at birth. They have to be. If they weren’t, our heads would be too large to pass through the birth canal. If we weren’t born at nine months, we wouldn’t be born at all. Working as a psychologist with high performers I regularly see clients with ADHD. Sometimes diagnosed but also, as wait times for adult diagnosis can be very long or very expensive, suspected. I find even if someone just suspects they may have it then it can be helpful to work as if they do – helping to put in place external scaffolding, support or strategies that make life feel smoother and easier to navigate. When my son showed me decluttering helped his ADHD. I figured if it helped in his room what would happen if we got our whole house under control?

A friend of mine who is a parent asked me about this book, and this is what I told her. About me: I am not a parent, and I have ADD.The parent taking responsibility for the relationship; demonstrating daily that they want the child’s company. They do not wait to be invited in – they ask to join in. “The hunger in a child is eased by the parents seizing every possible opportunity to devote positive attention to the child precisely when the child has not demanded it.” I have ADHD. No one was surprised when I was diagnosed, as it was evident from the 'get go' as my mother says. Yet I could not and still cannot find myself in this book. Explains that in ADD, circuits in the brain whose job is emotional self-regulation and attention control fail to develop in infancy – and why Hypersensitivity is the heritable condition that explains how environmental and genetic factors interact in ADD. Put simply, ADD is caused by the impact of the environment on particularly sensitive infants. At this point, we can start connecting the dots. I don't have ADD, as far as anyone can tell, but share enough of the challenges related to it that this book helped a lot.

This book is amazing and really changed my thinking about ADD/ADHD. Maté describes in detail how ADHD is not genetic, but how a genetically sensitive brain protects itself with ADD behaviors. I've become a bit of an evangelist about this book, since I see things so differently now. Things to learn in this book: Unconditional Positive Regard, Counterwill, Wooing the Child, Unfinished Business.

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pg. 320 says it all: "The world is much more ready to accept someone who is different and comfortable with it than someone desperately seeking to conform by denying himself. It's the self-rejection others react against, much more than differentness. So the solution for the (ADD) adult is not to 'fit in', but to accept his inability to conform." Something that’s good to point out up front is that Maté himself has ADD, so he writes about it from an intimate, internal perspective. This confessional style doesn’t always hit the mark in nonfiction, but in this case I think he pulled it off beautifully. Describing his initial “ADD epiphany,” he writes: Book Genre: Adhd, Health, Mental Health, Neurodiversity, Nonfiction, Parenting, Personal Development, Psychology, Science, Self Help Then he shifts over to speak about epigenetics and how past history affects the genes, which in turn creates changes in the brain of a developing fetus and a child is born with ADD. Because a baby’s brain is not fully developed at birth, the first few years are critical as the child attaches to their parents and copes with whatever home environment they were born into.