Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It [Paperback]

On the first front, the neurobiology of ADD, Dr. Mate makes his point conclusively: this disorder arises first in the infant, in how he or she is wired-or not-and it occurs in the make-up of the hypersensitive baby, highly aware and from the very beginning suffering at the smallest slings and arrows life offers. Resilient children roll with the punches; ADD kids are flattened by them and get back up more slowly. Momma used to call this type "high-strung" and, boy, was she ever right. Dr. Mate even points out a study done on the vagus nerve of five-month old babies that turns out to be highly predictive of which of them will later, at fourteen months, prove to be "more reactive to maternal separation." In other words, ADD could as well serve as an acronym for Attachment Deficit Disorder. People who are hypersensitive have a disordered attachment to their caretakers that is pre-verbal and pervasive. One had better learn to deal with the fact that the fault is mainly synpatical, not social. My family doctor told me that my then-nine-year-old son suffered from severe separation anxiety because he hadn't been in pre-school or away from his parents enough. Fortunately, a more knowledgeable child psychiatrist said it was inborn so we could relax and quit blaming ourselves. Whew....

That doesn't mean that experiencing this hypersensitivity isn't damaging, even with a more-than-good-enough mother. Or that nurturing a hypersensitive child is easy. It is much more tiring and trying to deal with the ADD child than it is with his or her more resilient sibling.The ADD child triggers anxiety in even the most competent parent. So, it is on the second front, the practical things to do, that this book is most helpful, even hopeful. I return to it again and again (that is, when I haven't mislaid it in one of my more driven ADD moments) to remind myself what to do and what not to do to help myself and my similarly-wired son. For instance, the section on the counter-will-an idea I'd not heard before-made me understand why I am more often than not so suspicious of authority figures. I used to think it was very adolescent of me, and now Dr. Mate tells me it is, and that this is a component of ADD. It was from this notion of a counter-will that I began my search on ways to strengthen the will itself, so as to disengage this adversarial part of me, the counter-will, that aspect of us that doesn't trust. It has been an interesting and fruitful search and I am grateful to Dr. Mate for giving me new ways to think about this way of being in the world.

By the time the ADD child arrives at school, the disconnectedness is ingrained. We are attuned to every slight, intended or not. Other kids find ADDers just as trying as the grown-ups do-it takes a lot of energy to interact with a `wild child' who hogs the teacher's attention or a distracted one whose hypersensitivity presents the perfect opportunity to torture for fun and profit. I've yet to find an ADD adult who liked the social aspects of school, or didn't have horror stories about cruel peers and teachers...

The most important chapters for me have been the ones on medication and on self-parenting. The first, medication, gives the limits of pharmocological help for this disorder. It is very clear about what medicine can and cannot do and the importance of finding a knowledgeable physician. The second, self-parenting, seems like a Mobius strip until Dr. Mate takes apart the results of life-time conditioning and explains the qualities one needs-compassion for self and others, curiosity rather than blame or judgment-in order to embark on a course of change. Whether one has to structure things by herself, or has the good fortune to find competent professional help, Dr. Mate's book is of inestimable help on that journey.

In fact, every time my ADD tendencies pop up and I lose my copy of Scattered, I buy another. And now that my stepson has been diagnosed with ADD, I have an extra copy or two to give his suffering parents, though I would not be without this book.

Scattered is definitely a keeper.

It's not that the information itself is uninteresting or irrelevant, but that Dr. Mate so radically changes the focus of the discussion from addressing the needs of adults in general (Chapters 1 - 15) to exclusively addressing the needs of parents of A.D.D. children in particular (Chapters 16 - 24). The experience is not unlike someone at a party (who happens to have kids) speaking to you directly and then suddenly, without warning, turning their complete attention towards starting up a fresh conversation with someone else about mutual issues involving their children. This of course leaves you standing alone with a drink in your hand, anxiously waiting for the tray of finger sandwiches to make another round, while you wait for your former conversation partner to return and resume the discussion with you.

When the author does finally broaden his scope to once again include a general adult audience (Chapter 25), he does so not by fulfilling the promise of "What You Can Do About It" for the A.D.D. adult (as he had in the previous section for parents), but by returning yet again to descriptions regarding the origins and nature of A.D.D., thus moving the focus back onto the first portion of the title. In fact, the "What You Can Do About it" section for Adult A.D.D. that eventually appears is limited to a mere 23 pages (in a book containing a total of 323)! I find particularly significant that while part V is entitled "The ADD Child and Healing," (indicating practical solutions for parents to healing the A.D.D. child), part VI is simply entitled "The ADD Adult."

Adding to the level of frustration, these long-anticipated (though brief) 23 pages of practical solutions for the A.D.D. adult are joltingly interrupted by a very short chapter describing the relationship between the A.D.D. brain and addictions, once again describing the origins of the condition rather than offering solutions to it. Again, it is not the information itself (which is all certainly valuable), but the sometimes exclusionary way in which the information is presented, that I find to be most frustrating.

If you are looking for poignant and poetic descriptions of the A.D.D. experience, then I highly recommend "Scattered." However, if you want a more balanced presentation of a variety of theories regarding the origins of A.D.D., as well as practical solutions geared towards the A.D.D. adult in particular, then I recommend "Out of the Fog," by Kevin Murphy and Suzanne Levert as a better choice.

Dr. Mate is an extremely articulate writer, and his book is a worthy addition to any library of A.D.D. material. But from the standpoint of practical solutions, "Scattered" loses focus mid-way through, in that it attempts to address the needs of far-too-wide of an audience, thereby not only diluting the impact of its message, but also excluding a significant portion of readers in the process.