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For those who may not know, Dave Ramsey is an evangelical Christian media mogul based in Brentwood, Tennessee (Nashville), who does a national syndicated radio show on money management. His big talking point is cutting up all your credit cards—all borrowing (except a mortgage) is evil. He also makes money by selling books, a home-study course, and (through a friend) mutual funds.

Being an evangelical, he seems to think money management is a simple matter of math: once one understands the calculus of debt, one can exercise a modicum of self control and start to build personal wealth. What I suspect he would have a hard time understanding or conceding—along with a few million other people—is the irresistible “demon” of an impulsive disposition.

So, what does an ADDer do? I believe there are some videos on the site about this subject, but I haven’t seen them. They may offer some good advice. But my advice is to find somebody to look over your shoulder: a trusted accountant, friend, family member, coach—somebody who can rap your knuckles when you feel the urge to go to Vegas… or the mall. If money is sitting in your bank account, or if you’ve got available credit on your plastic, there’s a white flame burning a hole in your pocket. Knowing what you OUGHT to do is not enough. You need somebody to keep your hands off (most of) it. You get a weekly allowance and money for emergency expenses. The rest somehow should be managed on your behalf. It’s humiliating, but…

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I’m not sure a caste system is an appropriate metaphor. As some people have already noted, everybody has certain talents and certain challenges, “neurotypicals” included. If you’re not good at science, there’s little chance you’ll make it as an astronaut or doctor. If you’re not athletic or tall, it’s probably a waste of your time to try to make it as a professional basketball player. We are all limited in one way or another in that each of us—ADD or not—inevitably will lack some talents and attributes others have.

Forum members have sharp differences of opinion over the “gifts” of being ADD. But that’s not really the issue here. If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us have some notion of where our own strengths and weaknesses lie. It makes sense that we should try to leverage the former and avoid or mitigate the latter. That’s not relegating ourselves to a caste system, it’s simply employing a strategy to stack the deck in our favor. After all, it’s competitive out there. If others try to pigeonhole us, well, there’s nothing we can do about that—just know that ADDers aren’t alone in that regard. The tendency to pigeonhole is part of human nature. One day you’ll probably be discriminated against because of your age. Trust me, I know.

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I think it’s very hard to put ourselves completely in others’ shoes. We can watch travel program[me]s about Paris, but it’s not the same as actually going there and experiencing it for ourselves. We can listen to wartime tales from our parents or read about pitched battles in books, but it’s not the same as being under fire in a combat zone. The virtual can only approximate reality—and sometimes very inadequately. My experience with ADD is that it’s practically impossible to convey to “neurotypicals” [that’s the word people often use around here] what we experience in day-to-day life. It’s just so completely outside their range of experience. Try explaining the fragrance of, say, a rose to someone who can’t smell. How can you? I suspect that’s one reason so many people are skeptical; they just can’t imagine why people who otherwise seem so “normal” have such a hard time performing seemingly straightforward tasks, or sitting still, or paying attention. It’s inconceivable. Even we can’t explain it. We just know what we have to contend with. Somebody once asked Ringo Starr what it was like being a Beatle. He replied by saying he couldn’t imagine what it would be like not being one.
There it is.

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FYI—Just came across this piece on Business Insider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-adderall-on-the-human-body-2013-6#

So what are ADDers supposed to do? Spend our lives wandering from room to room looking for keys? I can’t tolerate stimulants, but I know others who depend on them.

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I can’t offer an expert opinion, but…
When you do a search of Q96, you get pages of sites promoting it. That’s almost always a bad sign. It means reliable unbiased opinions are pushed wa-a-ay back in the search results. And that’s the point. When you don’t see a review from WebMD or the NIH or some other site you recognize on the first few pages, your antennae should go up.

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Oddduck— You say, “We can’t talk about ADHD, unless it’s about how it makes him a genius.” Where have we heard that before? And what to do when ADDers are convinced they possess “superhuman” mental agility but then curiously are completely unable to see the (glaring) chaos and wreckage they leave in their wakes—or don’t care. In one of his videos, Russell Barkley says he frequently sees this disconnect in interviews with ADDers, their spouses and parents during longitudinal studies. Your experience is just one more example. I don’t know how you sort out serious ADD issues when ADDers simply refuse to believe they’ve got a problem and need help. Maybe somebody who’s had some success can offer some advice…

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Sdwa, AMEN!
For what it’s worth, over the last few years there have been at least two notable books written that have taken a contrarian view of the modern penchant for positive thinking—one by Barbara Ehrenreich and another by Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman argues in “The Antidote” that it is vastly more “powerful” to try to get more comfortable with feeling extremely uncomfortable than trying to stay positive about it. Now, I know it’s not at all fashionable to badmouth positivity. And I don’t doubt people when they say there are real benefits to be had from taking lemons and trying to make lemonade, but… I think it is always useful to try to arrive at accurate assessments. For example, if you’ve got $50,000 dollars in credit card debt and you only make $30,000 a year, there ain’t no lemonade in your financial fridge.

My experience is that ADHD is bad business. And it’s not just personal experience—although ADD has certainly bulldozed my entire life. I don’t know where you are. I don’t know what your circumstances are—apart from what you’ve chosen to share. But I think getting to the point where you understand what you’re up against is something. I call ADD a cancer of the soul, in part because it seems somehow able to switch off the brain’s ability to grasp the true seriousness of the disorder (just as cancer disables the immune system). Russell Barkley talks about the discrepancy between what ADDers say about themselves and what their friends and family say about them. Total disconnect. I certainly was in denial for years. But if many ADDers don’t perceive the disorder for what it really is, you do. Knowing who the enemy is and where it lurks helps me. Maybe it can help you, too. Know that the problems you have that are related to ADD are not your fault. You still have a sacred geometry that ADD cannot assail. Embrace it. Fight the battle one day at a time and look for opportunities that might present themselves to give you a leg up—a (new) medication, an unexpected gesture from a friend, an idea. I know it’s hard. I know how it weighs on your spirit. I know how frustrating it is that the world simply cannot understand your pain, your difficulties. I know. I wish somebody had a magic bullet. Maybe one day. As people say, “They’re working on it.”

In the mean time, the very best of luck—and know that you have staunch allies you’ve never even met.

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Oh TBT, you’ve hit on one of my favorite ADD themes. In fact I think it was the topic of my very first post on this forum several yeas ago: ADD and love. (Caution: you’ve lit the fuse on a spectacular online fireworks display.)

There are of course two types of love: Eros/Dionysian love (emotional passion; often being more in love with love itself, or the relationship and how it makes us feel, than the beloved) and Agape (an act of the will; the ability to continue to “love” somebody when the passion fades——when you wake up in the morning and wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into.) People have written about this since people started writing. Sometimes other words have been used to describe it, but the distinction remains. Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougement examined it via the legend of Tristan and Iseult in his Love in the Western World. Rougement said that, certainly in the minds of our ancestors, “the Tristan myth operates whenever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared as a malignant fever, whenever its fatal character is welcomed, invoked, or imagined as a magnificent and desirable disaster instead of simply a disaster.[…] It swoops upon powerless and ravished men and women to consume them in a pure flame. … [People] think it is stronger and more real than happiness, society, or morality.”

Well, suffice it to say, most people don’t buy that anymore. Eros is celebrated; passion reigns. We are told to be passionate about our work. Passionate about love. Passionate about our hobbies. Passionate about everything. Still, people who have lived life know that whatever passion is, it is not something we can control. We can’t help whom we fall in love with nor deny the indisputable fact that we often fall out of (erotic) love. We just know it happens. So what about agape?

This is where ADD poses the challenge. ADDers, because of their impulsive, Dionysian spirits, find our wills disabled to the extent that is almost impossible to undertake consistently the hard moral labor that love (agape) requires after the Beatrician moment evaporates. We simply cannot be steadfast in following the long road that committed relationship requires. The overwhelming power of impulses and charged emotions cast such a spell on us that our ability to fulfill love’s duties—including to love somebody for who they are, not for how they make us feel—is often compromised.

So, there it is. Is this universally true? Of course not. There are almost always exceptions to rules of the heart. But ADD poses an enormous danger for those who aspire to lifelong relationships. And I think it should be said that ADD impacts our ability to love ourselves as much as it impacts our ability to love others.

Frankly, I think anybody who knows—or suspects—his/her moral will is damaged should think twice about making promises to another that s/he most likely will not be able to keep. I think anybody who knows—or suspects—s/he has “issues” that will likely sabotage a healthy relationship should think seriously about inflicting those issues on another. At the very least, proceed cautiously. We should all take our ADD seriously. We should see if it can GENUINELY be gotten under control. We need to understand that a relationship is not just about “our passion.” It’s about “the other,” as well——our partners and potentially our children. We owe it to our spouses/partners to be the best partners we can be. We owe it to our children to be the best parents we can be. Ultimately, it’s a choice each of us has to make for him/herself. But it’s a choice that really needs to be made with agape.

I know the pat response is, “Nobody’s perfect, so get off your soapbox.” And that’s true. Nobody’s perfect. But the all-important questions still remain: Can I keep a lifelong commitment? Can I even hope to uphold my end of the bargain? Am I capable of taking on important responsibilities? Would I be more of a burden than a partner? If the answer to those questions is generally or probably “no,” then what to do? Say, “Screw it, I don’t care”? Too, let’s be careful not to exploit somebody else’s passion for us. Just because they may be willing to overlook our serious shortcomings now, what about seven tumultuous years from now?

That’s my one line and seven paragraphs’ worth.

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Oh boy. Now there’s a topic. I wouldn’t know where to point you, but I’m sure if you did some online digging, you could find several good resources. Right off the bat, I think social media jobs could pose several challenges for ADDers. First, it can be addictive, and ADDers are easy prey for distractions. It’s like being asked to throw out old magazines: the job is to get rid of ’em; but we end up stopping every 30 seconds to read ’em. An hour after we start, there are maybe ten old magazines in the recycling bin. But I think a great danger lurks in social media’s very ethos—it tempts people to interact by responding quickly to (potentially) a landslide of posts. For anybody with a foot-in-mouth disorder, this can be lethal. I can see where an ADDer responsible for managing a company’s FB page could, let’s say, stray off message. Still, I don’t know. Social media management might be a great job for an ADDer—it’s repetitive but not tedious, it’s generally executed in short bursts of activity, and it requires creativity. So…
Tell us what you find.

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So, what’s a top guy? It seems everybody’s an expert on ADHD. It’s like religion—you can shop around until you find one that suits your own temperament. That’s the problem: If you’re looking for a definitive pathology, you’ve come to the wrong disorder.

People who’ve been diagnosed with it have different views (just read this forum), and so do clinicians. Russell Barkley wrote a consensus paper a few years back (you can find it on his website and on this forum), but it’s several years old now. He claims ADHD is the most debilitating outpatient psychiatric disorder there is. On the other hand, Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist and best-selling author from Boston, seems to have a more upbeat attitude. From his website: “[Hallowell] has long argued that ADD is too often misunderstood, mistreated, and mislabeled as a ‘disability.’” And then there are those with impressive credentials who don’t believe ADHD even exists. So there it is. Take your pick.

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Well, while we’re on the topic of ADHD and Europe, here’s a piece that appeared in Psychology Today, a consumer magazine for “inquiring minds” in the U.S.:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201203/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd

The long and short of it is that ADHD (for the most part) is a neurological reaction to bad nutrition and, in some cases, a psychological reaction to bad parenting. The French experience proves this.

This, of course, is not news. People have been making these claims for years. I happened to see this particular article today on my FB news feed. It was shocking to see how many people were commenting, saying in effect, AMEN!

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Hey, speaking of misconceptions, does anybody have access to the new DSM, the diagnostic handbook for mental-health professionals? Anything new in regard to ADHD?

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Robbo, for what it’s worth, Charles Williams, a fairly obscure member of the Inklings——the literary group that included Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers——once described the disorientation of falling in love as “the infinitely alien arrangement of infinitely familiar things.” I always liked that. But then he described the end of the romantic moment as “outrage!… It is that in which every nerve of the body, every consciousness of the mind, shrieks that something cannot be. Only it is.” Tillich called it “the abyss.” I’m so sorry. Hang in there.

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Look at the last line of the article—
“Let us return to the basic matter of personal psychology and education: The child is to acquire personal responsibility and emphatic behavior under expert guidance – and that takes the family and the school: In these fields, the child should be able to lead off mentally. This constitutes the core of the human person.” (emphasis mine; and boy, they need a better translator——this has the hallmarks of having originally been written in a foreign language.)

There we have it. ADHD is an assault on “personal responsibility… the core of the human being.” And of course that simply will not do. Because it is an assault on deeply held beliefs/theology——the doctrine of free choice——it must be a fraud, a conspiracy among money-grubbing doctors and researchers. This problem isn’t going away. And come to think of it, I can’t think of any “disorder” that stands to be more disorienting to so many people. We assert that a neurological phenomenon impairs our ability to act consistently in “responsible” ways. We have to understand how outrageous that sounds to many people. And we should expect that people will try to impeach that assertion for years to come. It doesn’t help that so many kids apparently go prescription shopping by claiming to have ADHD when, in fact, they really don’t.

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Yo—Robbo,
I’m sorry you’re having a rough patch. If there were ever the perfect job out there for ADDers, it might be designing roller coasters!

It’s very hard, I think, for many of us to admit that we——or our kids——are in any way defective. We’re just unwilling to go there (just as many “neurotypical” people are unwilling to concede that any neurological “disorder” could impair somebody’s moral will). We want desperately to find an upside, or at least some way to smooth over the downside. And indeed one can make the argument that ALL human personality is a palimpsest, much of it buried beneath different imperfections of nature and nurture. Everybody’s different. Nobody’s perfect.

Many people who study Attention Deficit every day claim there is no real upside to ADD at all. In fact, Russell Barkley claims it’s the most serious out-patient psychiatric disorder there is and that all the “gift” stuff is dangerous bunk. He then proceeds to back it up with one study after another. But, of course, that doesn’t mean that life itself is not a great gift. Or that our families aren’t great gifts. Or that other talents we may have aren’t great gifts. It just means that ADD is a constant pain in the ass.

I find that Barkley generally speaks to my condition. He rings true. But as a postscript, I would offer one caveat. Barkley et al. claim there is no connection between ADD and creativity. My hunch is that they may be wrong about that. Whereas they may be able to demonstrate that there is no direct neurological link, I suspect there are strong indirect links——the imperative to find various coping mechanisms and suffering. While coping and suffering may not necessarily be a prerequisite for the creative impulse, they certainly act as fuel. Creativity seems to be the psyche’s reaction to stress, alienation, or emotional trauma——analogous to the body’s secretion of adrenalin to help us scale a fence or tree if there is a bull charging at us. Marginalized and emotionally injured people historically have shown tremendous talents for creativity. Too, it only makes sense that people whose minds constantly race would have more than their fair share of interesting ideas. It’s just math.

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