Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood QUOTES

21 " Tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about, alternating with inattention to or disregard for actual dangers. Worry becomes what attention turns into when it isn’t focused on some task. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

22 " They may have fast-track hyperkinetic personalities, be impatient, restless, impulsive, often intuitive and creative but unable to follow through, frequently unable to linger long enough to develop a stable intimate relationship. Usually, they have self-esteem problems that began in childhood. The "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

23 " life is a process not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

24 " When someone is alcoholic, is abusing cocaine, or is dependent upon marijuana, we often become so preoccupied with the problems the drug use creates that we fail to consider what purpose the drug must be serving for the user. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

25 " I guess I always thought that’s just what life was—one long series of disappointments interrupted by moments of hope. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

26 " The therapist must become active and directive in helping the patient reorganize his life. Contrary to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapists, the ADD therapist must offer concrete suggestions concerning ways of getting organized, staying focused, making "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

27 " I always feel as if describing how I feel and think about myself is too complicated—it’s as if I can hear the whole conversation in advance, and I know all of the twists and turns it will take before they happen, so why bother? The effort just isn’t worth it. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

28 " The tension of constructing an explanation, from A to B to C to D, apparently so simple a task, irritates many people with ADD. While they can hold the information in mind, they do not have the patience to sequentially put it out. That is too tedious. They would like to dump the information in a heap on the floor all at once and have it be comprehended instantly. Otherwise, as Douglas says, it’s just not worth the effort. It’s too boring. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

29 " Structure is the vessel needed to contain the mercury of the ADD mind, to keep it from being here and there and everywhere all at once. Structure allows the ADD mind to be put to best use, rather than dissipating itself like so many tiny beads of mercury on the floor. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

30 " Remember that what you have is a neurological condition. It is genetically transmitted. It is caused by biology, by how your brain is wired. It is not a disease of the will, nor a moral failing, nor some kind of neurosis. It is not caused by a weakness in character, nor by a failure to mature. Its cure is not to be found in the power of the will, nor in punishment, nor in sacrifice, nor in pain. Always remember this. Try as they might, many people with ADD have great trouble accepting the syndrome as being rooted in biology rather than weakness of character. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

31 " One large study (127 sets of identical twins and 111 sets of fraternal twins) recently found that in 51 percent of the identical sets both twins had ADD, while only 33 percent of those in the fraternal group shared the ADD diagnosis. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

32 " The sense of growing panic, the feeling that gibberish is being passed off as coherent conversation, the fear that the world is engaged in meaningless discourse masquerading as meaningful exchange—these are the blurry states individuals with ADD negotiate each day. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

33 " Although environmental factors do influence the course of ADD over a lifetime, most practitioners in the field now agree that the characteristic problems of people with ADD stem from neurobiological malfunctioning "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

34 " With every step forward we become more sure what the disorder is not: it is not willful misbehaving, it is not a moral failing, it is not a lack of trying nor an inability to take an interest in the world. Neurobiological data now show that the syndrome is rooted in the central nervous system. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

35 " As is known by clinicians who work with the ADD population, and by parents of ADD children, and by adults who have ADD, one of the most frustrating aspects of ADD is the inability to profit from one’s experience, the inability to focus on consequences, the inability to navigate through tasks or social situations or the world at large by using what has been learned previously. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

36 " The old moral model dies hard. It still lives on in the minds of certain groups and individuals. At the heart of the moral model beats the conviction that willpower controls all human emotion, learning, and behavior. Under this model, the cure for depression is to cheer up. The cure for anxiety is to suck it up. And the cure for ADD is to try harder. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

37 " Worry becomes what attention turns into when it isn’t focused on some task. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

38 " In Silver’s model this injured filter system, which is regulated by the catecholamines, doesn’t screen out irrelevant information and sensory stimuli as efficiently as it should, thereby letting everything that registers at the desk of the reticular activating system arrive in the rooms of the frontal regions of the brain. The individual is bombarded, taking care of ten thousand guests in a hotel built for one thousand, on overload all the time, receiving messages about every minute aspect of his or her experience. It is no wonder, then, that the individual would be distractible or, as Silver would argue, inclined to withdraw from it all and shut the damned hotel down. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

39 " If you think of ADD as a basic problem with inhibition, it helps explain how ADD people get angry quicker. They don’t inhibit their impulses as well as other people. They lack the little pause between impulse and action that allows most people to be able to stop and think. Treatment helps with that but it doesn’t cure it completely. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

40 " Throughout childhood, at home and at school they are told they are defective. They are called dumb, stupid, lazy, stubborn, willful, or obnoxious. They hear terms like “spaceshot” or “daydreamer” or “out in left field” all the time. They are blamed for the chaos of family mealtimes or the disaster of family vacations. They are reprimanded for classroom disturbances of all sorts and they are easily scapegoated at school. They are the subject of numerous parent-teacher conferences. Time and again, an exasperated teacher meets a frustrated parent in a meeting that later explodes all over the child who isn’t there. He feels the shock waves afterward. “Do you know what your teacher said? Do you know how embarrassed your mother and I were?” Or, from the teacher, “I understand you have no greater control of yourself at home than you do in school. We must work on this, mustn’t we?” Month after month, year after year, the tapes of negativity play over and over again until they become the voice the child knows best. “You’re bad,” they say in many different ways. “You’re dumb. You just don’t get it. You’re so out of it. You really are pathetic.” This voice pulls the child’s self-esteem down and down, out of the reach of the helping hands that might be extended, into the private world of adolescent self-reproach. Liking yourself in adolescence is hard enough work for any child. But for the child with ADD it is especially difficult. "

― Edward M. Hallowell , Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood