Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder

by Edward M. Hallowell

In my work with adults with ADD I hear many stories of school days gone wrong. People tell these stories much in the same manner as victims of trauma. There is a numb period when I hear all the facts. Not much emotion, just a long narrative of what it was like to be in school. Gradually, as I empathize with what it must have been like for them, the emotion begins to emerge: the hurt, the anger, the disappointment, the fear. “You just don’t know how much I hated going to school,” Franny, a woman in her thirties, said to me. “It was all a blur. My main idea was just to get through the day without getting hurt. I always said ‘I don’t know’ rather than risk giving a wrong answer. I actually loved to read and to make up stories, but all the teachers saw was the slow reader, the late papers, the messy handwriting, the bad spelling. One teacher actually said to me, ‘Your handwriting looks like a moron’s.’ She wasn’t even a mean teacher. She just thought she was motivating me to try harder. But a ten-year-old doesn’t hear things that way. I began to think I was a kind of moron: one that liked to read and make up stories, but could never do anything with them because she couldn’t write or spell. I really thought I was defective. My whole self-image became one of being different. I became afraid of making friends. Each year I’d have one or two sort-of friends. The other most marginal kids in the class. We became friends by default. One year we actually called ourselves the rejects, ...