Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder

by Edward M. Hallowell

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.

What Mrs. Eldredge has just said gives a pretty good short description of ADD: You don’t mean to do the things you do do, and you don’t do the things you mean to do.

While with other medical conditions the diagnosis directs the treatment, with ADD, to a large extent, the diagnosis is the treatment. The diagnosis brings great relief in and of itself. For example, if you were nearsighted and had never heard of nearsightedness, and for years you had thought your blurry vision and subsequent learning problems were due to lack of effort or moral turpitude, imagine your relief in discovering that there was this condition called nearsightedness, and it had nothing to do with effort or morality, but rather was a neurological condition. So it is with ADD. The diagnosis is liberating.

Expect depression after success. People with ADD commonly complain of feeling depressed, paradoxically, after a big success.

As is usually the case in psychiatry, the intensity of the debate was inversely proportional to the availability of factual information.