I have started reading the book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, by Gabor Maté.
This is a wonderful and highly-recommended book on the subject of ADD/HD. Dr. Maté writes very clearly and concisely about the nature of ADD and the fact that one cannot wholly blame genetics or experience for the “disorder” (nature vs. nurture), but one can inherit the predisposition for what may become ADD – and that the “damage” occurs in early childhood.
The author discusses many other related and sometimes concomitant “disorders”, as well as the many causes of “dysfunction” in our society. He concludes Chapter 7 as follows:
“…what is being transmitted genetically is not ADD or its equally ill-mannered and discombobulating relatives, but sensitivity. The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shaman, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.
“ADD is not a natural state. It is, to adapt a famous phrase of Sigmund Freud’s, one of civilization’s discontents.”[I added the emphasis.)
Long before I found this book, I was already starting to believe that, rather than being a “disease,” or “disorder,” ADD describes people, like myself, who happen to have certain characteristics in their personality and make-up; individuals who are creative, independent, “quirky,” often very intelligent, and have that extra “spark” that is so very hard to define, but which all “ADD” people know about and understand. And yes, we are more sensitive, almost to the point of being “psychic” at times (or, indeed, sometimes “neurotic”). And I have also come to believe very firmly that it is exactly this type of person who finds it difficult and painful to try to function in a world that does not seem to make sense with its arbitrary rules, suffocating institutions, meaningless rituals, and nonsensical imperatives.
From the time I was a small child, I felt something inside me was being CRUSHED. But amazingly, I have always also looked at the world – MY WORLD anyway – as being full of Beauty and Magic and Richness. But what frustration then, when one feels prevented from being able to engage in that world – because one’s wings have been CRUSHED.
I don’t know, but it is always refreshing to read new insights that are meaningful. I still have not finished this book, but I go back to it at different times and every time, come away with a wealth of new things to think about.