Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It
by Gabor Mate M.D.
If we choose not to see ADD as a medical disorder or illness, the question of causation is turned around and examined from the opposite angle. Recognizing that time-sense, self-regulation, and self-motivation are nature driven and necessary developmental tasks, we ask the following: What conditions are needed for human physiological and psychological maturation? What conditions would inhibit or interfere with that growth process? Instead of asking why a disorder or illness develops, we ask why a fully self-motivated and self-regulated human personality does not.
The answer to underdevelopment is development, and for development the appropriate conditions must exist. No matter how efficiently they are able to arouse the higher brain centers, medications offer only a partial solution to the problems posed by ADD. We may not be able to prescribe development directly, but we can promote an environment that makes development possible. Fortunately, as we will see when we come to the chapters on the healing process in ADD, neurological and psychological maturation can take place at any time during the life-cycle, even in late adulthood.
