Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

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I especially enjoyed how explored the link between shame and ADD, his exploration of the phenomenology of childhood ("children swim the unconscious of their parents"), and his exploration of attention itself- he gets downright Wattsian at certain points. This is high praise. Dr. Gabor Maté offers hope that the symptoms of ADD/ADHD are not inalterable. He explores the idea that the child’s environment and genetics are equally essential contributors in determining if an individual will develop ADD/ADHD.

As I told a friend, I believe ADHD will one day be banished and we'll learn, we all have different brains - which is a good thing. We won't work so hard to force everyone to conform - that's my hope for the future. Living with ADHD is what I describe to people as "beautifully abstract and creative." I grew up in a home with two solid parents who supported my creative brain and encouraged me to explore the world, through my eyes -not the eyes of society or that of the school system. I have learned over the years how to organize and adhere to a time schedule; I still lose my keys on a regular basis, but seriously, who doesn't. I have strong childhood memories and my family didn't move every year. As I said, I wasn't nor were my parents written into this book. Nor were many others who I know, who lived and grew up similar to me and have ADHD. PDF / EPUB File Name: Scattered_Minds__The_Origins_and_Healing_o_-_Gabor_Mate.pdf, Scattered_Minds__The_Origins_and_Healing_o_-_Gabor_Mate.epub He also gives readers a lot of hope that people with ADD can find peace and live wonderful lives. I've appreciated a slew of evidence-based recommendations for managing and healing my own ADD, and I had a breakthrough as a result of reading them; that's worth the price of admission alone. I haven't yet read the recommendations about children, but my guess is that there's equally helpful information about supporting a child with ADD. My husband and I have three kids, our oldest is fifteen and our youngest is seven. I am originally from the USA but now live in Sweden. We live on a farm from the 1700s. Unfortunately, we have no animals yet, but we enjoy skiing, snowboarding, swimming, and board games together with our kids.The symptoms are real, but they don't have to be permanent, and what is permanent can be helped and harnessed. Then he shifts over to speak about epigenetics and how past history affects the genes, which in turn creates changes in the brain of a developing fetus and a child is born with ADD. At this point, we can return to ADD. Focus, attention, and impulse control are also part of a complex neurological circuit located in the prefrontal cortex. No one is born with, say, fully developed impulse control, so this circuit must develop after birth. But can we identify environmental inputs which affect its development, too?

Never at rest the mind of the ADHD adult flits about like some deranged bird that can light here or there for a while but is perched no-where long enough to make a home.” In America, our multi-decade project of making life harder for poor, working class, and middle class people appears to be correlated with increasing ADD diagnoses. While we are not sure if this increase results from more children having ADD or simply more diagnoses, what we do know is that the overall impact of this condition on our society is waxing. Maté’s book made me think that perhaps this trend is at least partially fueled by parents needing to work more days and hours just to get by, which pits their economic survival in a zero-sum game with the time and energy required to establish secure attachments with children thereby decreasing the likelihood that ADD will manifest. And since upper class and wealthy Americans also tend to work too much, this may explain why ADD also shows up in plenty of kids from well-off, supportive families. The world is much more ready to accept someone who is different and comfortable with it than someone desperately seeking to conform by denying himself. It’s the self-rejection others react against, much more than the differentness. So the solution for the adult is not to fit in, but to accept his inability to conform. The child’s uniqueness has to first find a welcome in the heart of the parent. At my next therapy session, my therapist asked if I had read the book and I said yes, and that it had resonated with me. She asked what resonated, and I said, "Well, if I do have ADD, it would explain my entire life. It would fill in all the blanks and areas that my history with depression and anxiety don't account for, that I always tried to make them fit into to explain something that didn't make sense." Something that didn't make sense because, without the missing piece of ADD, it quite literally couldn't make sense. Then we discussed why, etc, blah blah. At the end of the appointment I promised her I would talk to my physician about a diagnosis.A comment from my husband after we got married saying that, having grown up at the beginning of the YouTube age, he had "given himself mild ADHD." If environment and attachment relationships play a significant role in the development of ADD/ADHD, then they should be key in the healing/treating of ADD/ADHD. Dr. Gabor Maté believes that if we alter the environment positively and allow for healthy attachment relationships, we can lessen the symptoms of ADHD.

While parenting styles can certainly exacerbate or ameliorate certain expressions of ADHD in children to a degree, ADHD does not occur or manifest because of attachment issues. There is (in the U.S., at least) an epidemic of parent blame as well as moralizing about difficulties people experience as a result of ADHD symptoms. Rather than a blaming or moralizing attitude, education about what executive function is and ways to support and scaffold executive function development would be a much more useful and more compassionate approach. Although Maté doesn’t explicitly go this far, I believe his work has consequential implications for politics, economics, and social justice. When it comes to harm reduction and symptom control, much of Maté’s advice boils down to something like: “First, parents need to be loving, respectful, mutually supportive, and emotionally mature with each other and other adults. Second, they’ve got to spend time with their kids and devote a lot of conscious attention to them, striving always to model compassionate curiosity and patience.” Adults with ADD, of course, also benefit from these behaviors. A friend who has rampant ADHD texted me once while she was crying, saying that all she wanted was a hug. I wasn't able to do anything, but suggested she ask her parents. "That's not something they do. I'd be embarrassed." she replied. Her parents weren't abusive. They just didn't speak her love language.

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Shows how “tuning out” and distractibility are the psychological products of life experience, from in utero onwards The book was published in 1999 and it feels dated. Mate calls it ADD whereas today it has been classified into a number of different types but most generally talked about as ADHD. I’ve changed it in this review so it makes more sense in 2022. I also found the science behind the genetic and biological elements of the impairment more compelling than the evidence he gave on it having such a strong environment aspect. The environmental aspect (basically that difficult family dynamics will trigger a predisposed ADHD likelihood) felt far more anecdotal. None of this is achieved by an act of will, and it is possible one will not succeed completely. That is not important. 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. (320) A friend of mine who is a parent asked me about this book, and this is what I told her. About me: I am not a parent, and I have ADD.