Scattered Minds a New Look At the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
Gabor Maté
Language: English
Pages: 250
ISBN: 0676972594
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Description
Written from the inside by a person who himself has ADD, with the wisdom gained through years of medical practice and research, Scattered Minds explodes the myth of ADD as a genetically based illness, offering real hope and advice for children and adults who live with this disorder.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reviews
Canadian Medical Association Journal...
"Maté... has done us a great service.... He tells those of us who do not have ADD... what it is like to have [it]. Those with ADD, their loved ones and physicians will profit from reading this book. People who do not yet know they have it will have their lives transformed."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)...
"One of the most comprehensive and accessible books about ADD. [A] well-documented but sure to be controversial book."
The Globe and Mail...
"[A] rare and...richly textured explanation of the complex and subtle interactions of nature and nurture in the developing personality. You won't find a drug chart or Seven Easy Steps to the Road Less Scattered here. You will find family stories, an accessible description of brain development and sound information. You will also find hope."
Georgia Straight...
"Caring, sympathetic, supportive, and helpful. It [is] also an extremely well-written and engaging read."
The Vancouver Sun...
"An utterly sensible and deeply moving book written for a general audience.... Dr. Maté offers an original and helpful theory about a condition whose diagnosis has spread like wildfire in North America."
About the Author
Gabor Maté is a family physician with a special interest in counselling adults, parents, and children. He was a long-time medical columnist for The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. He lives in Vancouver.
sadness, like all other mind states, is evanescent. It will pass. Throughout this book, I have insisted on the connection between human relationship and attention. Love, it turns out, is intimately related to attention. In The Road Less Traveled Scott Peck brilliantly defines love as action, as the willingness to extend oneself in order to nurture another person’s spiritual and psychological growth, or one’s own. Extending oneself means to do precisely what we find difficult to do. Most parents
centers where the deepest emotions of fear or rage are generated simply overwhelm the higher centers meant to govern them—as they normally would in a small child. “So-and-so is behaving like a baby” is quite an accurate description of the individual’s neurophysiological state at such moments. That the infant/toddler mode is so often dominant in attention deficit disorder reflects incomplete development of pathways in the cerebral cortex, and between the cortex and lower areas of the brain.
children will have transforming experiences that nourish growth. In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers described a warm, caring attitude, for which he adopted the phrase unconditional positive regard because, he said, “It has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so.”8 So the first thing is to
child’s self-esteem on how pretty they are, how popular they are, how smart they are, how good they are in baseball, how well they do in school,” he says. “There is a much, much truer, more solid type of self-esteem we can provide for our children than something that just follows cultural trends and approximates cultural norms. We should avoid making children believe that these things influence how we feel about them.” The parent acknowledges warmly when the child does something well or achieves
unable to take charge of themselves, impelled as they are to act by emotions they cannot identify. Without learning to symbolize emotions they are also likely to experience everything in terms of simple and opposing categories: people are alternately mean or nice, good or bad. It’s either “I love you, Mommy” or “I hate you.” The child has greater autonomy, a greater choice of possible responses, when she can say, “I didn’t like what Mrs. So-and-so said to me in class today,” than when she is