Got ADD?
This may turn into one of those "tomes" a certain nephew gripes about, so bewarned. I started this about a week ago. It was triggered by a random impulse to explore how ADD may be an adaptive mechanism for coping with an increasingly complex and stimuli rich world. But I got distracted into researching more about ADD, couldn't get organized enough to finish it, put it off, then forgot about it for a while.
Incidently, in Oklahoma City, the survey form they give family, friends and teachers to fill out to try to identify ADD looks for 5 indicators:
First a disclaimer: I ain't a professional psychologist. Even though at work it seems sometimes that's all I do. And I do have the 45 hours of all the requirements of undergraduate and graduate coursework for a masters in clinical psych, I just couldn't get the other 160 hours organized enough to come out with an actual degree :-) So bleh.
Anyway, for my research I listened to a training session by Dr. Don Blackerby who is a former math teacher and college dean and runs a business out of Oklahoma City that focuses on helping students perform better in school. A friend had given me the tapes to this a few years ago.
From his reviews, Don has some very effective strategies. He uses a branch of psychology known as NLP which stemmed from studies in general semantics, the family therapy of Virginia Satir, Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls and the hypnosis of Milton Erikson. NLP takes a very different approach from typical psychology. It doesn't believe that people are "broken" or stupid, but that they do what they do for reasons they believe are in their best interests; they just may not be getting the results they desire. NLP is a way of uncovering unconscious experience in ourselves and others, a way to look inside their subjective experience and ask "how did they do this?"
Take spelling, for example. What's the difference between someone who is a good speller and a poor one? And more importantly, how can a poor one become a good one? NLP looks at the differences between the two in how they internally go about the task. A poor speller they found represents the word internally as auditory and may try to remember rules about how our whacked phonetic system works. A good speller will picture the word visually. When they teach poor speller to use/access visual images of the words instead of auditory representations, they improve their skills dramatically. Often we're not even aware of our internal strategies like this, because they aren't really about the content of our experience, but how it is framed.
So what Don found, when using this approach to ADD, was that the symptoms of ADD listed above could be caused by a number of other factors. Everyone experiences these at one time or another. They can be caused by emotional trauma, food allergies, stress, Candida, etc. But what typifies true ADD can be teased out with a simple test that reveals how people with ADD structure things differently internally. And the cool thing is, we actually have more control over how we use our internal structures, once we are aware of them, than we may initially think.
As a brief aside, it seems to be in vogue today to frame many of our internal states as the result of "chemical imbalances." But this is really a chicken and egg type thing. What we think ---and the way we think--- changes our neurochemistry. Flash pictures in your head about worst case scenarios, replay negative memory over and over, and you can spike all sorts of chemical changes in your system. Do this long enough and these "imbalances" can make persistent changes in neutrotransmitter levels and synaptic receptors. And while this may be alleviated somewhat chemically, for a time, unless the patterns of thought change the body tends to acclimate to the chemicals and we have the circus circuits of zoloft to prosac to xanax as each in turn begins to slip against the onslaught of our basic strategies of thinking, which go largely untouched.
Back to the tome. And I'll wrap this up. Don discovered that people with ADD are:
1. Highly visual. Although they may not be aware of this. In which case he shows them how to access their visual imagery first.
2. Cannot stablize their images for more than a few seconds.
He tests this by having them spell a word that's appropriate for their age/capabilities. Picture the word in their mind and then spell it backwards. With ADD he notes the image will flick in and out and they will have a lot of difficulty holding it constant enough to spell backwards.
This echos their subjective experience, which comes in streams of images, almost too fast to process. ADDers use two common (but ineffective) coping strategies for this:
1. They talk to themselves about what they are going to do. "OK, first I'll write this down, then I'll do x and then y and don't forget to z." Processing the tasks auditorily slows things down, but any interruption, like a helpful teacher or parent trying to help them get organized, especially by talking to them, throws this process completely off. The external dialog mixes in with their internal one and they lose track.
2. They try to stucture their environment and use this external organization to help. Although if something is moved or changed it also throws them completely off and their reaction may seem inappropriately extreme to the outside (of their head) observer.
Note that ritalin, which is a type of amphetamine, and caffeine, which both help with ADD, speed up mental processes so the flood of images stay relatively more constant allowing them to get a grip, temporarily, on this flood.
Don takes a different approach; he teaches them that they can actually take charge of their mind, and they can learn with a new way of thinking, a new strategy, how to slow these images down and make them stable.
What a concept. We can control the way we think and this control lets us use our minds in ways that actually help us. What if we actually learned this in, say, school? Imagine that!
Incidently, in Oklahoma City, the survey form they give family, friends and teachers to fill out to try to identify ADD looks for 5 indicators:
- Impulsive
- Distracted easily
- Lack of organization
- Procrastination
- Forgetfulness
First a disclaimer: I ain't a professional psychologist. Even though at work it seems sometimes that's all I do. And I do have the 45 hours of all the requirements of undergraduate and graduate coursework for a masters in clinical psych, I just couldn't get the other 160 hours organized enough to come out with an actual degree :-) So bleh.
Anyway, for my research I listened to a training session by Dr. Don Blackerby who is a former math teacher and college dean and runs a business out of Oklahoma City that focuses on helping students perform better in school. A friend had given me the
From his reviews, Don has some very effective strategies. He uses a branch of psychology known as NLP which stemmed from studies in general semantics, the family therapy of Virginia Satir, Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls and the hypnosis of Milton Erikson. NLP takes a very different approach from typical psychology. It doesn't believe that people are "broken" or stupid, but that they do what they do for reasons they believe are in their best interests; they just may not be getting the results they desire. NLP is a way of uncovering unconscious experience in ourselves and others, a way to look inside their subjective experience and ask "how did they do this?"
Take spelling, for example. What's the difference between someone who is a good speller and a poor one? And more importantly, how can a poor one become a good one? NLP looks at the differences between the two in how they internally go about the task. A poor speller they found represents the word internally as auditory and may try to remember rules about how our whacked phonetic system works. A good speller will picture the word visually. When they teach poor speller to use/access visual images of the words instead of auditory representations, they improve their skills dramatically. Often we're not even aware of our internal strategies like this, because they aren't really about the content of our experience, but how it is framed.
So what Don found, when using this approach to ADD, was that the symptoms of ADD listed above could be caused by a number of other factors. Everyone experiences these at one time or another. They can be caused by emotional trauma, food allergies, stress, Candida, etc. But what typifies true ADD can be teased out with a simple test that reveals how people with ADD structure things differently internally. And the cool thing is, we actually have more control over how we use our internal structures, once we are aware of them, than we may initially think.
As a brief aside, it seems to be in vogue today to frame many of our internal states as the result of "chemical imbalances." But this is really a chicken and egg type thing. What we think ---and the way we think--- changes our neurochemistry. Flash pictures in your head about worst case scenarios, replay negative memory over and over, and you can spike all sorts of chemical changes in your system. Do this long enough and these "imbalances" can make persistent changes in neutrotransmitter levels and synaptic receptors. And while this may be alleviated somewhat chemically, for a time, unless the patterns of thought change the body tends to acclimate to the chemicals and we have the circus circuits of zoloft to prosac to xanax as each in turn begins to slip against the onslaught of our basic strategies of thinking, which go largely untouched.
Back to the tome. And I'll wrap this up. Don discovered that people with ADD are:
1. Highly visual. Although they may not be aware of this. In which case he shows them how to access their visual imagery first.
2. Cannot stablize their images for more than a few seconds.
He tests this by having them spell a word that's appropriate for their age/capabilities. Picture the word in their mind and then spell it backwards. With ADD he notes the image will flick in and out and they will have a lot of difficulty holding it constant enough to spell backwards.
This echos their subjective experience, which comes in streams of images, almost too fast to process. ADDers use two common (but ineffective) coping strategies for this:
1. They talk to themselves about what they are going to do. "OK, first I'll write this down, then I'll do x and then y and don't forget to z." Processing the tasks auditorily slows things down, but any interruption, like a helpful teacher or parent trying to help them get organized, especially by talking to them, throws this process completely off. The external dialog mixes in with their internal one and they lose track.
2. They try to stucture their environment and use this external organization to help. Although if something is moved or changed it also throws them completely off and their reaction may seem inappropriately extreme to the outside (of their head) observer.
Note that ritalin, which is a type of amphetamine, and caffeine, which both help with ADD, speed up mental processes so the flood of images stay relatively more constant allowing them to get a grip, temporarily, on this flood.
Don takes a different approach; he teaches them that they can actually take charge of their mind, and they can learn with a new way of thinking, a new strategy, how to slow these images down and make them stable.
What a concept. We can control the way we think and this control lets us use our minds in ways that actually help us. What if we actually learned this in, say, school? Imagine that!
Gosh
ReplyDeleteYer a man of few words gem, probably wish I were too, lol.
ReplyDeleteInteresting exploration, but I don't know that I'm completely ready to attribute the cause of every "chemical imbalance" to a pattern of thoughts. While I believe an imbalance may be overcome by a pattern of thoughts, I'm just not convinced that the imbalance was caused by that.
ReplyDeleteIn the event that a serious imbalance exists in the chemistry, regardless of the cause, a more holistic approach to resolution I would think would involve BOTH, a medication that would return the normal working chemistry...AND the retraining of the mind to either....1. stop the pattern of thoughts that could be causing the problem to exist....or 2. learn a work-around for the specific areas in which the imbalance is screwing up your normal functioning in life.
Interesting.
It's an exciting area for sure. Some books I mentioned in a previous entry, The Molecules of Emotion and the Biology of Belief have more solid clinical data about this, but we've really done a disservice to ourselves in underestimating the capabilities of what the mind can affect in the body. We still think of them as two different things instead of one system.
ReplyDeleteI think holistic is a step in the right direction, and what's cool is seeing how far it can swing the other way (and at the same time on the other pole, they keep trying to drill it even further into a type of physical determinism, where our dna supposedly predicts everything. But Molecules of Emotion has some eye opening stuff about the malleability at that level to the mind, written by a research scientist at NIH) I think we're on the threshold of something as radical as the discovery that time was relative to the science of newton's era.
From my limited collection of knowledge, I have to say that I partially agree with both concepts. I believe there can actually be physical imbalances but also feel that they can be dealt with. Some require training and structure and some need the help of medication. Having said that, I also think that we have only tapped a minute part of our brain and there are means to exercise it for better results. I have heard the old cliche that it is a muscle and to make it better you have to exercise it. I guess it is like any other work out, you get out in proportion to what you put in.
ReplyDeleteI watched a program on Autism a while back and there was an 8 year old that could not even speak. With proper training (of the parents) and also a moderate dose of medication he was functioning and even doing well in school. Now, for which effort did the trick, who knows just be thankful it did.
I think the trick is trying every avenue available without any preconceived ideas as to whether they will work. Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees.