Dr. Ned Hallowell
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Ned Hallowell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Nice to meet you.
You notice that. Most people don't notice it. Oh, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It's called energy, you know, and I'm real glad I've got this little power pack on my back.
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.
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.
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.
And when you begin to realize that, then it's so liberating because then you see yourself
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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