[Patrick]

I totally agree.   Good nutrition can at best improve a bit your condition, but never will it “cure” ADD.

I’d like to warn you about what I personally find to be a kid of mental illness:  the “I want to believe” syndrome.    would’t it be so great if we could find a natural “cure” to ADD,  making it disappear, an easy alternative to those bad stimulants full of side effects?  Someone started to believe that enzymes might cure ADD, and the idea started to spread.  It’s just like UFOs, cold fusion and so on.  This article describes well the “I want to believe” syndrome..

http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/07/i-want-to-believe/

My advice would be  1- learn to know yourself and 2-make peace with you condition, accept it.   Then you can work it out.  There are plenty of tricks to organize your life around your difference, tuns of book about it…

 

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[Patrick]

Robbo:

Wow, your words:  “ADHD is not a mental illness, it’s a mental difference. Many of us end up with mental illness due to ADHD. …” are so true…!

I spent 3 years studying psychology.  I didn’t know what were my real motivations, until recently.  I was interested in scientific reasearch about ADD,  simply because… I had ADD myself, and I was just looking for a fix.

I still haven’t seen a doctor about it  because I have not decided if I want to force chemically my brain to fit the norm or not.    Yeah, it would help my career.  But at the same time, I feel I would denaturate myself.   Just like when one of my friends took antidepressants.  He was different, like if he were someone else.  I missed him, even when I saw him…  I was so happy when he did quit that shit, I found him back, with his anxieties and fears, which is part of what makes him… him.

For me the issue is not about ADD itself.  It’s about all the shit it brought in my life.   Socially, it’s a mess.  The horror: a group of people.  I figured recently I wasn’t anti-social…  I was just unable to follow a group dynamic, so I prefered one-on-one discussions and friendships.  People sometimes think I didn’t care about them beacause I was not listening, so they judge me, got angry at me, etc.   Sometimes I looked like an idiot at work because I could not follow a complex explanation. Not to mention the  love life, which tends to be catastrophic (infidelity, endless mourning, etc.).   So yeah, ADD is not an illness itself.  It’s trying to protecting oneself against suffering, caused by social rejection or judgment, that creates metal illness…

 

distractedmomma:

[Warning: these are my just my theories, I’m not a psychologist…]

Concerning the differences of the brain, I see a lot of litterature talking about a “weak” part of the brain, the part controlling attention.  Using scanners, they found that a part of the brain was smaller in people with ADD.  And they found a genetical link.   But this sounds like bullshit to me, because of this:  as the brain learns, it modifies itself.  Unused neural path (connexion between neurons) will shrink, and the very used one will grow.   So, my understanding is that: people with ADD use less the part of their brain that controls attention – which is inhibitive, blocking focus on unappropriate toughts –   so it tends to be smaller.  It sounds like a reversed cause-effect link to me.  We don’t have a less attention control because of a smaller part of our brain (inherited structural difference)- we just use it less, so it does shrink or develop less (context-related evolution of the structure).   We could use more tought control: we are capable of it.  But it’s boring to try, so we don’t!   I feel that addiction approach is a more relevant to approach ADD.   We can’t let go of the thrill we easily have with interesting stuff.

The way I see ADD is more related to “polarization of interest”, which is my own personal ADD-scale.    A   person having quite equal interest in everithing would be a bit like a zombie, being neutral all the time to everything (score zero on my scale). A person with totally poralized interest would certainly have ADD – just unable to stand something boring, constantly rushing into interesting and stimulating stuff. (score 100 on my scale).    When I tried Ritalin once, that’s funny, I felt like a zombie.  Oh it went well, I could study soooo easily.  But I think I prefer just being… human.

Personnaly, I do exercices to train that “weak” part of my brain, that controls attention.  My tool is meditation.  I find that the biggest challenge is to learn to accept to feel bored.  The way I describe my training (meditation) is: learning to stay calm, not trying to run away, even if feel like I’m in fire.  It’s good for the non-ADD people too.

But as you can see, I’m still not very good at it.  I should be working right now, but I’m sooooo excited I found people like me I can’t work 🙂

Cheers,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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