Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

by Gabor Maté

The classroom behavior of ADD children, to give a common example, is frequently said to be disruptive. They seem to have more interest in interacting with their peers than in the material the teacher would have them study—which may simply mean that they are obsessed with trying to get their relationship needs met. If they tend not to do this very successfully, they do it all the more desperately. Their brain’s attentional system cannot switch into “schoolwork mode” when it is consumed by anxieties about the child’s emotional connection with the world. For people deeply hurt, the internal world may offer more meaning than the real one. A woman in her thirties whose ADD was never noticed because she was not hyperactive, only a day-dreamer, told me that she spent entire school days staring out the window, lost in fanciful adventures with imaginary friends. From the outside, one might have described her as “distracted.” The Latin root of distract is “draw away”—drawing her away from the inside was her hiddenmost emotional longing. Her brain unconsciously assigned greater value to a self-created internal universe than to anything or anyone in the classroom. The nagging hunger for emotional contact explains the oft-observed “paradox” that many children with ADD are capable of focused work in the presence of an adult who is keeping them company and paying attention to them. This is no paradox at all, if we see the opposing roles of anxiety and attachment in influencing attention:...