Attention Deficit Disorder

WHAT IS ADD? DIAGNOSING ADD WHAT ADD Is NOT WHAT'S IN A NAME? HOW THE ADD MIND WORKS RESULTS OF ANALOG VS. DIGITAL THINKING TYPES OF ADD

What Is ADD?

NEW INFORMATION is surfacing daily about ADD. I find myself con¬stantly revising the way I think about it and the way I talk about it. Although Attention Deficit Disorder is still its official name, I no longer call this type of brain wiring a disorder, or even a deficit. I'm not even comfort¬able calling ADD a difference. After all, people who do not have ADD aren't required by society to describe themselves as being "different" -even though they are different from those of us who are ADD.

So, as of the day I am writing this chapter, what I am willing and able to say about ADD is this: ADD is a neurobiochemical style of brain wiring.

This is just a statement of fact, not a judgment. It has no negative connota¬tions.

It is not much different from my saying that I am a Caucasian female with blue eyes, an outgoing personality, and huge amounts of creativity. I am tall, have big feet, and am built more like an offensive lineman than a running back or receiver. I am very expressive but am also introspective and a dreamer. I come by all of these attributes via my genetic background. Both of my parents were prob¬ably ADD, and it's very likely that both of my sons are ADD, too.

These are simply statements, not judgments.
This particular style of brain wiring called ADD affects the ways in which people learn best, manage time, organize projects and materials, respond to their environment, communicate, need physical activity, relate to others, process infor¬mation, and create. People with ADD do not do these things in a wrong way. They just do them in ways that are not always compatible with the surrounding culture. They do them in ways that are natural for them.
Traditionally, scientists and clinicians thought that people outgrew their ADD at puberty. Not so! You are born with it, grow up with it, and die with it.
Traditionally, only one girl for every seven boys was thought to have ADD.

Now it appears that there is no difference in the incidence of ADD between males and females.

Traditionally, people were thought to have ADD. Now I believe people are ADD. That's just how we are wired. It affects how we see the world, how we do things, how we learn, and how we relate to other people. There are as many pos¬itive attributes to being ADD as there are negative, just as there are as many pos¬itive attributes to being non-ADD as there are negative.
But this is not to say that life is always as easy for people who are ADD as it is for those who are not. We live in a culture that is organized around non-ADD sys¬tems, and practices that favor non-ADD people. The educational system, busi¬ness structures, cultural rules, laws, job expectations, and societal measures of success all favor a non-ADD style of being. In particular, the information age and the highly technical dehumanized nature of modern life have increased the dis¬comfort level for many people who are ADD-people who are trying to live in a world full of details, paperwork, and numbers.

Once upon a time, before this age of electronic gadgetry, people learned their trades through apprenticeships, by watching and practicing the doing of their trade. And that is how people with ADD learn best, because they are kinesthetic learners. Today, lecturing, reading, and testing are the primary means of educa¬tion. Due to this lack of hands-on experience, many people who are ADD do not fulfill their potential as students or employees.

Once upon a time when the seasons and the sun and moon served as people's watches, those who were ADD did quite well with "time management." They kept track of time by paying attention to how long it took to do a job. The con¬tent of what was being done determined how long people stayed on the job or in a conversation. Artificially segmenting time into minutes and hours is a different way of keeping track of time, and one that doesn't fit ADD people very well.

Both ways of marking time allow people to keep track of time and get things done, but the modern style of being chained to a date book and inflexible sched¬ule does not favor people who are ADD. We are not less responsible or intelligent because we measure time differently than non-ADD people. We simply operate by a different clock than they do-and they operate differently than we do.

Unfortunately, people who are ADD are labeled as having time-management problems, while people who are non-ADD are not similarly labeled because they don't use nature to tell time.

Because we live in a world where most standards favor those who are non¬ADD, we appear to be the ones who are different. We have been labeled disor¬dered by those who are most like the cultural standards. Part of the problem stems from the fact that people with ADD usually don't care about labeling oth¬ers, nor are we the ones who tend to write the diagnostic and statistical manuals.

If we did write the manuals and make the rules, ADD would never have been identified, and it would never have existed. Instead, we might have created CDD, Creativity Deficit Disorder; IDD, Intuition Deficit Disorder; or GSD, Goal Surplus Disorder.