Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

by Gabor Maté

Only one person has the right to decide whether a medication is taken: the one about to be treated

For adults, this is self-evident, but in the treatment of children, this principle is often not recognized. It is essential that the child not perceive that she is sick, that something is wrong with her. She does not have a disease and does not have to be cured. The medication may improve functioning, if that is her own chosen goal, but no one should impose on her the demands of the adult world. When you take a chemical substance, it alters how you feel internally and how you relate to the world. Even if these changes are positive, it is a major boundary violation for parents or schools to insist that an unwilling child subject herself to fluctuations in her internal chemical states.

In most cases, he is not trained or equipped to teach such children.

What is outrageous is that cash-deprived educational systems should have to think in terms of chemical straitjackets.

Children are being altered to fit the schools, rather than schools being organized to meet the needs of the children who, due to their life experience in this society, have needs and personality traits that call for greater flexibility and creativity than most institutions of learning are currently able to offer them.

Far better for the parents to work on the attachment relationship with their child and on their own parenting approaches than to worry about his passing a grade. Children who feel good about themselves and secure in their bonding with their parents are unlikely to refuse the help of medications, if such help is truly needed.

The prescriber should be knowledgeable

The medications employed in attention deficit disorder cannot be prescribed according to the fixed recipes appropriate for most medical drugs. Doctors are familiar with the cookbook approach, which is how most medications are prescribed. The dosage of penicillin given for a bacterial throat infection, for example, does not vary between an eight-year-old and an eighty-year-old. Some other medications are dosed ...

The aim of medication is not to control behavior but to help children focus

The end point should be the child’s experience of himself, not only observed behaviors.

Adults should have clear and limited expectations for what medication can do for them

In no case do they resolve the basic problems of low self-esteem, fear of intimacy, driven lifestyles and lack of self-knowledge. The medications, if taken, should be used with the specific purpose of reducing distractibility and improving concentration and focusing, not of changing people’s lives.

The adult should be aware of her emotional state when setting out to take medications for ADD

Not infrequently, the ADD adult may be suffering from chronic low-grade depression or anxiety. If this is the case, the psychostimulants may not help, or in some cases may make matters worse. If depression or anxiety is present, ...

Medications should never be the only treatment, or even t...

vast majority of cases—they are the only form of intervention consistently pursued. Yet in themselves they do not promote long-term positive changes.

Consider the long-term implications of medication use, not just its short-term benefits

Medications impose an artificial state, affecting the child’s moods and thoughts. Even if such changes are positive, they still may introduce further confusion into a process already teeming with changes and internal conflicts.

undermine the adolescent’s long-term goal of forming a united sense of self.”

When they are making a free choice, they are not simply electing to take a medication, but indicating that their sense of self is ready to accommodate an awareness that they may have problems in some areas of functioning, and that they will accept help. In supporting the young person’s freedom of choice, parents express their faith in his own processes and do not convey a belief that there is something wrong with him. They also do not reinforce the child’s anxiety that he is not accepted by his parents just the way he is.

Do not read more into the effects of medication than they merit

The fact is, researchers and doctors find it much easier to raise funds for drug evaluation studies than for treatments that do not hold out the promise of huge profits for anyone. Pharmaceutical companies, the major source of research dollars, have no incentive to support alternative approaches that will do nothing for the size of their coffers.

Those who do not consciously experience themselves as different may also shrink from any temptation to be themselves, but they are not compelled to live every day aware of the mask they are wearing, tense for fear it will slip.

solution for the adult is not to “fit in,” but to accept his inability to conform.

What is important is to engage in the process, difficult as that is. Healing is not an event, not a single act. It occurs by a process; it is in the process itself.

The Road Less Traveled Scott Peck brilliantly defines love as action, as the willingness to extend oneself in order to nurture another person’s spiritual and psychological growth, or one’s own. Extending oneself means to do precisely what we find difficult to do. Most parents do not need to be taught how to love their children in the feeling sense, but we can all use practice

Adults with ADD face the most difficult task of all: learning how to be loving toward themselves. This is the greatest struggle because it requires that we gradually shed the defenses we have come to identify as the self and venture into new territory.