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March 15 - March 17, 2018
Often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat (in adolescents [or adults] may be limited to subjective feelings of restlessness).
Is easily distracted by extraneous stimuli. 4. Has difficulty awaiting turn in games or group situations.
6. Has difficulty following through on instructions from others. 7. Has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities.
10. Often talks excessively.
12. Often does not seem to listen to what is being said to him or her. 13. Often loses things necessary for tasks or activities at school or at home.
1. A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals (regardless of how much one has actually accomplished). 2. Difficulty getting organized. 3. Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started.
4. Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow-through. 5. A tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark.
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. 9. Often creative, intuitive,
11. Impatient; low tolerance of frustration.
impulsive spending of money,
13. A tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; a tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about, alternating with inattention to or disregard for actual dangers. 14. A sense of insecurity. 15. Mood swings, mood lability, especially when disengaged from a person or a project. 16. Physical or cognitive restlessness. 17. A tendency toward addictive behavior. 18. Chronic problems with self-esteem. 19. Inaccurate self-observation. 20. Family history of ADD or manic-depressive illness or depression or substance abuse or other disorders of impulse control or mood.
Anxiety disorder
Depression
Personality disorders,
borderline,
More difficult to distinguish are those conditions that develop out of ADD, organically, like a limb. These are the personality styles that people with ADD may evolve. They can look like what psychiatry calls personality disorders. For example, consider the passive-aggressive personality. This is the person who cannot express aggression directly. Instead, he expresses it passively, through nonaction or nonresponse.
impulsivity. No test pattern, however, can definitively rule in or rule out the diagnosis of ADD. It can only support or detract from the clinical evidence for the diagnosis.
Often people rely too heavily on psychological testing to make the diagnosis of ADD. This is a grave error, however, because psychological testing is often falsely negative. That is to say, many people who do in fact have ADD appear not to have it when given psychological tests.
This is because the testing procedure may temporarily treat the ADD, obliterating the symptoms during the time of the testing.
The procedure of psychological testing involves all three of these “treatments” for ADD. It is done one-on-one, with the psychologist guiding the individual orally through the tests, making it difficult for him to tune out. The subject is typically highly motivated, trying to “do well” on the test. And the testing situation is highly stimulating due to its novelty.
2. Do you have a family history of drug or alcohol abuse, depression, or manic-depressive illness? 3. Are you moody? 4. Were you considered an underachiever in school? Now? 5. Do you have trouble getting started on things? 6. Do you drum your fingers a lot, tap your feet, fidget, or pace? 7. When you read, do you find that you often have to reread a paragraph or an entire page because you are daydreaming? 8. Do you tune out or space out a lot? 9. Do you have a hard time relaxing? 10. Are you excessively impatient?
13. Are you easily distracted? 14. Even if you are easily distracted, do you find that there are times when your power of concentration is laser-beam intense? 15. Do you procrastinate chronically? 16. Do you often get excited by projects and then not follow through? 17. More than most people, do you feel that it is hard for you to make yourself understood? 18. Is your memory so porous that if you go from one room to the next to get something, by the time you get to the next room you’ve sometimes forgotten what you were looking for? 19. Do you smoke cigarettes?
25. As a kid, were you called words like, “a daydreamer,” “lazy,” “a spaceshot,” “impulsive,” “disruptive,” “lazy,” or just plain “bad”? 26. In intimate relationships is your inability to linger over conversations an impediment?
28. More than most people, do you hate waiting in line? 29. Are you constitutionally incapable of reading the directions first?
33. Do you feel like exploding inside when someone has trouble getting to the point?
40. Do you chronically resolve to organize your life better only to find that you’re always on the brink of chaos? 41. Do you often find that you have an itch you cannot scratch, an appetite for something “more” and you’re not sure what it is?
48. Do you often counter depressive moods by some sort of potentially harmful compulsive behavior such as overworking, overspending, overdrinking, or overeating?
50. Do you have a family history of ADD or hyperactivity? 51. Do you have a really hard time tolerating frustration? 52. Are you restless without “action” in your life?
55. Are you beset by irrational worries? 56. Do you frequently make letter or number reversals?
58. Do you handle money erratically?
62. Do you struggle to maintain self-esteem? 63. Do you have poor hand-eye coordination? 64. As a kid, were you a bit of a klutz at sports?
70. Given an unexpected chunk of free time, do you often find that you don’t use it well or get depressed during it? 71. Are you more creative or imaginative than most people?
72. Is paying attention or staying tuned in a chronic problem for you? 73. Do you work best in short spurts? 74. Do you let the bank balance your checkbook?
76. Do you find you often get depressed
78. Do you feel you fail to live up to your potential? 79. Are you particularly restless? 80. Were you a daydreamer in class?
82. Have you ever been described as “needy” or even “insatiable”? 83. Do you have trouble accurately assessing the impact you have on others? 84. Do you tend to approach problems intuitively? 85. When you get lost, do you tend to “feel” your way along rather than refer to a map? 86. Do you often get distracted during sex, even though you like it?
92. Are you particularly insecure? 93. Do you have trouble keeping secrets? 94. Do you often forget what you’re going to say just as you’re about to say it?
97. Have you ever wondered if you’re crazy? 98. Do you get the gist of things very quickly? 99. Do you laugh a lot? 100. Did you have trouble paying attention long enough to read this entire questionnaire?
By the time the diagnosis is made, many people with ADD have lost confidence in themselves. Many have been misunderstood repeatedly.
Individuals with ADD may have forgotten what is good about themselves. They may have lost any sense of the possibility of things working out. They are often locked into a kind of tenacious holding pattern, needing all their considerable resiliency and ingenuity just to keep their heads above water.
Usually, by the time an individual seeks help, this collapse has happened often enough to leave them wary of hoping again.
More than with most disorders, often just the making of the diagnosis of ADD exerts a powerful therapeutic effect. The walls of years of misunderstanding come crashing down under the force of a lucid explanation of the cause of the individual’s problems.
Once the diagnosis has been made, the next step is to learn as much as possible about the condition.
Effective treatment often requires a radical rethinking of your view of yourself. Understanding the many forms ADD takes will help you not only to recognize how it affects you, but also to explain the syndrome to those around you—family, friends, colleagues, teachers.
The new understanding of oneself that the diagnosis and education provide leads naturally to a rearranging or restructuring of one’s life, both internally and externally.
Many adults with ADD have not fulfilled their considerable creative potential because they have been unable to shape and direct their creative energies.
We particularly recommend a scheme of reorganizing one’s life that we call pattern planning. This system of time management operates on the same principle as automatic withdrawals from your bank account: by making the withdrawals (of money or time) from your account automatic, you don’t have to plan them every time; they just happen. You plug certain regular appointments or obligations into the pattern of your week so you attend to them automatically. This frees up your limited planning time to focus on other activities. Simple in its conception, pattern planning can reduce the stresses of
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People with ADD can spend a lifetime dodging the necessity of organizing themselves. They avoid getting organized the way some people avoid going to the dentist: repeatedly postponing it as the problem gets worse and worse.
The task of getting organized, one that bedevils us all, particularly vexes the ADD mind.
We must underline this point with a thick red pencil: the treatment of ADD should never overlook that the patient is a person first, and a person with ADD second.
