Dr. Ned Hallowell
Appearances
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
I mean, now, you know, rare that I'm greeted with pushback. It used to be routines. People would say, isn't this just an excuse for being lazy? And now people are very curious. And it's great because now they can use it. Their first reaction isn't skeptical. Their first reaction is, tell me more. And that's wonderful. I mean, it's just wonderful. And it's so liberating.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
This diagnosis, if you have it, you find out you have it. you're laying claim to a whole new way of being in the world. And sometimes that's dramatically better, and sometimes it's marginally better, but without any doubt, it's better. Just how you look at yourself is better.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
It's a description. This is what it tends to look like. We tend to be a dreamer, tend to be a visionary, tend to be an entrepreneur, tend to think outside the box, tend to be impatient, tend to be an inventor, intuitive, amazingly forgiving, credulous, ready to believe anything. And then the downside, yeah, we often have trouble doing things that are boring. You know, it's just that.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
I mean, we have no patience for boring stuff. And we bounce off of it. That takes in quite a few people. And I'm not forcing a diagnosis on anybody. I'm just saying, here's a description. If you think it fits you, let's talk about what you can do to make it better or take advantage of the upside. Then you're not saying, do I have it or not? You're saying, is this a good description of me?
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
And what can I do about it? Is there something here that the stuff in that book might help me with or not? There's no controversy in that.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
It's so much more prevalent than we think. You know, the official numbers are 5 to 10 percent, and But that's just because they're measuring people who meet the diagnostic criteria. The rest of us, you know, who are doing great and we don't meet the diagnostic criteria, but we have definitely the trait. I think we're talking 30, 40%.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
I mean, that's up for grabs. But I think it's that we've expanded our definition enough that what we're seeing now is pseudo-ADD, environmentally induced ADD. We live in a very ADD-ogenic culture now.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
And, you know, the two big causes are saturated with electronic medias, and deprived of what we're doing, human connection. And you take those two, too much electronics and not enough human connection, that's ADD-ogenic. It makes you short attention, impulsive, impatient, hard to connect with.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
And you come back in a couple of weeks. And if they're sitting on the porch reading a book, then it was not true ADD. And if they've turned the farm into an amusement park, then it was true ADD.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
It's an important point because, you know, people try to trivialize ADD by saying, oh, everyone's like that. Well, no, everyone is not like that. And, uh, it's important to make that distinction.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
Yeah. Ned, what did you order? I got two, we got two fishes and one chicken.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
You notice that. Most people don't notice it. Oh, yeah.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
You know, I've written 23 books. By the way, the reason I write so many books, it's not that I'm ambitious to write books. If I don't have a book going, I get depressed.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
When I was in medical school, I'd never heard of it. And then I went through my residency in adult psychiatry. Didn't hear of it. It wasn't until I started my fellowship in child psychiatry in 1981.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
The minute I heard that lecture, I saw it in myself. And then the more I kept my eyes and ears open. And the more I heard what people were telling me, the larger it became.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
Because I knew the standard books got it wrong. I knew the truth was in the patients, in the people who have it, and in me, because I had it. And so it was a combination of looking at myself and looking at the people that I saw. I majored in English at Harvard and graduated with high honors as a dyslexic with ADD and doing pre-med.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
And I'm small potatoes compared to the Nobel Prize winner who has it. And I really do believe, and this is not propaganda, I really believe this is a marker of talent.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
The three main symptoms of ADD distractibility, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Turn each one of those on its head and you get an incredible positive. The flip side of distractibility is curiosity. And that's what drives us. We're driven by curiosity. What's that? What's that? What's that? So if you hear a noise out there, the dull person wouldn't care, but the ADD person, what's that?
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
What's that? And that's how, you know, discoveries get made. The second one is my favorite, impulsivity. That's what gets us all into trouble. Well... What is creativity but impulsivity going right? You know, you don't plan to have a creative idea. They pop impulsively, disinhibition. And then the third one, hyperactivity, you get to be my age, I'm 74.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
It's called energy, you know, and I'm real glad I've got this little power pack on my back.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
John Rady and I thought we'd be lucky if it sold 10,000 copies. The next thing you know, that book, I mean, not to toot my own horn, but that book changed everything.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
At first, people ridiculed it. Russ Barkley said to me, will you please stop writing positive things about this because we won't get any research money because they don't want to fund strengths.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
It's not a deficit disorder. I mean, I have an abundance of attention. The challenge is to control it. So to call it a deficit disorder makes it sound like a form of dementia, which it's not at all. And I think of it as a way of being in the world, not a disorder, but a way of being in the world, like being an extrovert. It's a way of being.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
And when you begin to realize that, then it's so liberating because then you see yourself
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
People tend to be afraid of this diagnosis. I don't want to be fucked up like that. I don't want to be weird because it's classified as a mental illness in the DSM. And people naturally push back on that, which is so ironic because they should embrace it.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
There's no diagnosis in all of medicine that can jack up your life better than this diagnosis or can hurt your life more than a diagnosis not made. The prison population is full of people with undiagnosed AIDS, the halls of the unemployed, the addicted. ADD is a very common treatable cause of addiction. So all these at-risk populations, a lot of them, a big segment have ADD.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
If we treated the ADD, they cut down on the recidivism rate, cut down on the addiction, save relationships. And they're talented folks. They really are. Things can only get better once you have the diagnosis. So I come along and say, no. You know, my line is, I don't treat disabilities. I help people unwrap their gifts. And that's the truth.
Climbing the Walls
ADHD: From stigma to superpower | 4
But that shift in emphasis makes all the difference in the world. Oh, okay, I'll work with you to unwrap my gift. I just don't want to work on becoming less crazy or less defective or, you know.