ADD: 'NOT A REAL CONDITION'
Email book summary from: Marilyn N.

The best and most educational book on ADD and ADHD I have read is Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder by someone whose name escapes me.
Amazon.com has it. She also made a workbook that can be used to help people
with this difference. In the first part of the book she makes it clear that
ADD and ADHD are NOT (yelling from her, not me) disorders, just very different brain patterns.

The author shows clearly that what many people consider a disadvantage has
its advantages, its strenghts, its very high abilities. She also shows that
it is a permanent thing--your are or you are not a person with this kind of
brain. Her book helps non-ADD brained people learn to cope with the ADD
people, and in the families that I have recomended this book to it has helped
the ADD person understand their non ADD partner, and both to understand and
help their children. She says nothing about drugs being good in the book.
What she does do is use real life examples and show how these situations can
be helped.

The best things I have found for the ADD brained people in my family, and we
are all enabled with at least a good portion of this type of brain, are good
food, good sleep, and herbs when needed. I need coffee from time to time, my
son needs it all the time. My husband prefers strong tea. I need chocolate
from time to time. My husband suffers from deep depression, chronic since
childhood, because his ADD type thinking was handled cruelly. So he uses
SAM-e for that. Makes him much more tolerable. We have also found that he
absolutely needs time everyday all by himself, and then he is ready to share
time with the rest of us. Too many people at one time upset him, so we allow
for that and it works better. Some of these problems won't stop, but since
we recognize it as something that he is having problems with we make room for
it and vent our frustration where he can neither see nor hear us. When he
has to deal with crowds we all take extra Stress-J or Stress packs and our
calm "contaminates" his frustration and helps a lot!
My son, recently married to another ADD person, has learned tolerance and
patience as a child. When he was small his inability to stand still was not
made a big deal of. What we did do for him was watch his frustration rate
and send him outside to run it off. He learned early on, at less than 2
years old, that to run in his safe running area got him hugs. If he came
back in with out having run hard enough or long enough to get his frustration
undercontrol we handed him a glass of water, commended him and sent him back
out to finish the job. He had a hard time in school when teachers made him
sit, but usually it worked out by the end of the year because his very
active, intelligent mind was recognized. He cannot spell. We never made him
try to spell once he showed his complete inability to spell. Instead, we
taught him how to find the right way to spell. His spelling is so bad that
going to the dictionary is no help. However, we taught him to love
dictionaries by helping him find his word with patience. How else can you
help someone who feels that candle should be spelled kandl? We helped him
learn where words come from and that helps alot. So if he knows it is Greek
he automaticaly puts the right form for "sigh" sounds of "new" sounds [psy or
pneu] and so forth. His bride can spell and she can write. But she has a
hard time visualizing anything but hair. She is an excellent hairdresser and
coordinates colors in interesting and beautiful ways. But if she has never
seen what she wants she cannot put it into words that anyone else can
comprehend. My son is very good with words and uses all kinds of questions
to help her say what she sees. He never jumps to conclusions about what it
is, but starts with color, texture and placement. He thinks a while and then
asks if it could possible be this or that, and they go from there. Finally
he has enough clues to make a sketch. She modifies it and they know what she
means and it works. When she is not under stress this does not happen.
Dyslexia can affect almost any aspect of thinking and with her it is what she
visualizes to words other people understand.

This is not a disorder, but another kind of order, another way of seeing and
reacting to the world around us. It has real advantages, you just have to
find them, accentuate them and then enjoy the differences. And sometimes you
have to home school for a while until the ADD brained person learns to cope
with a straight-line thinking world. The smartest people who ever lived, the
intuitive thinkers, had and have this kind of brain. They need support
people around them to make sure they eat, have an orderly or somewhat orderly
home, and some even need to be reminded in very non threatning ways to take
baths and comb their hair. In turn they give us marvelous paintings, are
mathematicians, design buildings and become master carpenters that can make
someone's dream a reality.