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| Rubbing "Weeping Yogi" statues such as this one is thought to bring comfort to the distressed. (Jessica Krinke/MEDILL) |
Republished in: Get Healthy Magazine (Northwest Indiana Times)
"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” -Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
I often recall a duck cruising along a placid lake when trying to describe living with ADHD. It appears calm, daydreaming on the surface while kicking frantically underneath.
Instead of the Tasmanian Devil of a second grader jumping around the classroom and pestering the teacher with endless why’s, the experience is more like that of absent-minded physicist – preoccupied with origins of the universe with a library book that's been overdue for a year.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the brain’s inability to maintain sustained attention. It can also cause trouble with what are called “executive tasks,” everyday things such as laundry, bills and being on time. What used to be called just ADD, minus the hyperactive part, is now officially ADHD and patients differ in severity.
I never had any behavior problems in school (unless being a chatterbox counts) and I made it through my adolescence without any external cause for concern. I always got good grades but persistently felt as if there was something I was missing; like the things I did were never complete and I was floating through life.
As I got older and more responsibilities shifted my way, life became increasingly hard to keep on track. Despite graduating on time from college, I felt like all I ever did was let people down, even once-pleasurable activities became things I couldn’t manage to “get around to.”
So at 24-years-old in the middle of graduate school (a feat that took two years for me to get myself together and apply), I was diagnosed with ADHD.
The best news was that I wasn’t alone. When I first visited the disability office at Northwestern University to figure out where I'd go from here, I was reassured that many students who are smart enough to earn good marks struggle to keep it together in school . And many of them very often don’t seek help until college or even grad school.
Completely counter to intuition, the common prescription for ADHD are stimulants. The “hyperactivity” in the disorder’s name is misleading because what’s really missing in the brain is the stimulation needed to pour one’s focus into one thing at a time. This explained the foggy, out-of-phase piece that I had always felt I was missing.
The flighty nature and jittery movements often observed are actually the mind’s attempts to wake itself up, making the disorder one of many contradictions. One phrase that is often used to describe patients with ADHD is “poor self-observation.” I can see that's valid. But more than anything from my inside perspective, there are so many things that don’t match up with how I feel and how I end up acting. The true picture takes a long time and a lot of work to see.
Iintense stimulants such as Ritalin or Adderall, Schedule II substances that would keep a normal person awake for days, are relaxing cups of morning coffee to those who need them. The reality is that they bring you up to speed with the outside world. It it feels like everything else has finally slowed down to a manageable pace. As with all mental challenges, however, medicine doesn’t fix everything.
In my case at least, indecision is the most paralyzing factor. The potential for greatness is horizonless, if only one could for once decide how to go about the journey and what to pack. Should I invite a friend or would it be more meaningful alone? I really should bring a map just in case, but… spontaneity is so much more existential.
Most of the time it’s difficult not to feel like a complete prisoner of my mind’s endlessly unfolding analysis of every choice’s possible results weighed against agonizing replays of past mishaps and failures. I often know these things are just worries, but gathering the control to ignore them is difficult.
Add to this ADHD’s love of sudden impulses and outside desires and the temptation of their instant gratification is the icing on an already hard-to-digest mental parfait when it comes to sitting still and getting work done.
A quarter century spent beholden to a mind all-its-own has taught me several tricks for coping through a world made by those to whom action and forward momentum are far more second-nature, rather than perpetual mental cloud gazing. But it’s come at the price of carrying an ever expanding archive of ideas lost in translation, shortcuts that didn’t quite work out like I had hoped and social disasters.
All of this results in a disconnect of consciousness that leaves many of us with ADHD feeling that life is running on automatic and just keeping up is all they can ever hope for – in other words, no perception of personal control. And with prolonged feelings of powerlessness as a leading cause of anxiety disorders, it’s easy to imagine the slippery emotional slope unfolding here.
Which is where I found myself – not only feeling as though I was totally incapable of getting anything done but more and more afraid to try and of what people would think when I did. Summoning the focus just to plant my feet on the floor in the morning, rather than being overtaken by a daydream or simply forgetting to stay awake, leaves little mental energy to face a day filled with tasks and responsibilities, let alone interactions with others.
Fortunately I’m not alone in this aspect either. In Driven to Distraction, Dr. Edward Hallowell’s classic on the subject, he often sees anxiety and depression tied with ADHD in women, especially those who are diagnosed later in life. Society has many ideas of what career women or super moms should be. Shockingly, scatterbrained, disorganized and punctuality-deficient are not usually included.
While developmental disorders like ADHD, along with Asperger’s and autism, are still misunderstood, new treatments continually emerge. Philosopher and psychologist Stuart Shanker has found success with a new behavioral tool that can be learned in early childhood. Shanker of York University is a proponent of teaching “self-regulation,” or the learned navigation and control of ones emotions and attention, to all kids.
Self regulation is an emerging treatment in the field of mental health for sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or severe anxiety. But at York’s Milton & Ethel Harris Research Initiative (MEHRI) Shanker teaches children with developmental disorders to self-regulate by putting them in touch with what they’re feeling in the moment and helping them express it verbally.
Shanker described the concept on a recent visit to the science talk show Ideas. “How well a child does in school or in life, how physically healthy they are or how mentally healthy they are, is a function of how well they self-regulate.”
Shanker explains that when there’s a problem in one area of the brain, another is always affected. If a child is having trouble controlling their attention, the emotional balance may suffer. Conversely, if someone has a higher level of anxiety, the energy it takes to keep the emotions in check may be robbed from the centers that control attention and impulses. The key then is to teach people to be aware of what’s happening internally.
Most importantly, children who may not display a diagnosable mental illness or developmental disorder might still have trouble keeping this balance between emotion and attention. “What we really want to help is every kid.”
Many theories exist on the ways that developmental disorders are related. Some believe there is one long scale from mild ADHD, through Asperger’s syndrome (a disorder affecting social skills and co-ordination) down to severe autism while others classify them all separately. But it’s easy for me to see how achieving more control over one’s mind can be helpful.
So here's what I’ve learned from all of this - no matter what might be bothering you, there’s never any shame in seeking help. Even if your problems seem small, talking about them is better than coping alone. And you are most definitely not alone.
