Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder

by Edward M. Hallowell

At last I found an explanation for the different ways I thought and behaved. I’d always excelled in school and college, so no one, including me, thought I had a learning disability. I knew I was a slow reader—and I have since pieced together that in addition to ADD I also have dyslexia—but I never had understood why I came up with different ways of solving problems, why I had an intuitive approach to so much, why I tended to think outside the box, why I could be so impatient so often, why I was so quick to draw conclusions, why I had an oddball sense of humor, and on and on. Although I am not what I now understand to be the classic version of a person who has ADD, I do have the condition for sure.

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.

Put differently, love works.

In fact, many people who have ADD are very smart. It’s just that their smartness gets tangled up inside. Undoing the tangle to get a smooth run on the line can take more patience and perseverance than they can consistently bring to bear.

Too often, it was simply recommended that these children be beaten, or in some cases, killed. There is something in the most inhumane part of human nature that enjoys hurting smaller and weaker beings, particularly if they annoy us or make demands on us.