Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

by Gabor Maté MD

The British psychiatrist R. D. Laing wrote somewhere that there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people and their own minds.

Such striking imbalance between intellectual awareness on the one hand and emotional and behavioral self-control on the other is characteristic of people with attention deficit disorder.

As the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel has said, “The DSM is concerned with categories, not with pain.”

Completely lacking in the ADD mind is a template for order, a mental model of how order comes about.

The law of entropy rules: order is fleeting, chaos is absolute.

What can be immobilizingly difficult is to arouse the brain’s motivational apparatus in the absence of personal interest.

The second nearly ubiquitous characteristic of ADD is impulsiveness of word or deed, with poorly controlled emotional reactivity.

The restlessness coexists with long periods of procrastination. The threat of failure or the promise of reward has to be immediate for the motivation apparatus to be turned on.

On the other hand, when there is something one wants, neither patience nor procrastination exist. One has to do it, get it, have it, experience it, immediately.

This feeling of duty toward the whole world is not limited to ADD but is typical of it. No one with ADD is without it.

couples choose each other with an unerring instinct for finding the very person who will exactly match their own level of unconscious anxieties and mirror their own dysfunctions, and who will trigger for them all their unresolved emotional pain.

People with ADD are hypersensitive. That is not a fault or a weakness of theirs, it is how they were born. It is their inborn temperament. That, primarily, is what is hereditary about ADD. Genetic inheritance by itself cannot account for the presence of ADD features in people, but heredity can make it far more likely that these features will emerge in a given individual, depending on circumstances. It is sensitivity, not a disorder, that is transmitted through heredity. In most cases, ADD is caused by the impact of the environment on particularly sensitive infants.