Attention Deficit Disorder Afflicts Adults as Well as Children : Medicine: Researchers say that at least 5% of the U.S. population may be suffering from the neurological and biochemical condition making it difficult to concentrate.
Mike was going through life not getting it.
He’d sit at his desk in his Hartford elementary school while the teacher’s words went by. A bird sang outside, someone shuffled in her desk, and there was so much going on that the lessons were only a small part of the big quilt of sounds, colors and smells that wrapped around and confused him.
He took IQ tests and scored high, which lent weight to his teachers’ accusations that he was lazy. He began missing school and spent his energies in summer school, barely passing to the next grade.
“I was going out of my mind trying to figure out what I was,” he said. “I ended up blocking it all out. Most of us do things that way.”
At 17, a significant learning disorder was diagnosed.
He graduated, applied to a handful of colleges and backed out at the last minute each time. His parents didn’t understand. Their six other children made good grades. What was wrong with Mike?
He passed into a series of nothing jobs, but not long ago he got his dream job. He lasted three weeks. He couldn’t concentrate.
Now, at 28, he’s been told he has Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD, a condition doctors once thought affected only hyperactive children.
Statistics from the Attention Deficit Disorder Assn. in Ohio say that 5% of Americans--both adult and child--have the disorder, a neurological and biochemical condition that makes it difficult to concentrate. People with the disorder are chronically impulsive, depressed and may have temper tantrums. They have poor self-esteem and a distorted view of the world. Yet it’s considered a hidden disorder.
“They’re the people that other people consider failures,” said Elaine Coleman, executive director of the Learning Disabilities Assn. of Connecticut. “They can’t hold a job, can’t keep their attention on anything to stay with it, and are always looking for new things. These are people who never really get it together. They kind of survive, but they’re marginal.”
The learning disability is perhaps more quickly diagnosed in children, whose symptoms would stand out more in the school structure.
“I walk in and I sit down at my typewriter and I type the letter ‘K,’ and that reminds me of King, Martin Luther King Jr., and that reminds me of the recent riots, and it goes like that, and it’s an endless string of one thought leading to another and never being able to focus,” Coleman said.
“The common lay term for ADD is ‘obnoxious,’ ” she said. “And you can quote me on that.”
Attention Deficit Disorder was first written about in 1902. Children have been treated for it for 50 years, but only in the last decade have doctors begun treating adults.
Technically, people with the disability suffer from insufficient amounts of key neurotransmitters in their brains. Boiled down: The human brain has filters to block irrelevant stimuli, which allows a person to concentrate on a problem while a colleague types nearby, or the telephone rings, or the air conditioner hums. The disorder destroys those barriers, and the world rushes in.
“My parents used to say that I can look straight ahead and see everything going on in back of me,” says Mike.
The disorder is physical, not emotional or mental. It can be inherited or caused by subtle brain damage before or during birth. There is no cure, but medication such as Ritalin or Dexadrine helps calm the symptoms in about 60% of all adult cases.
But drugs alone do not solve it.
“They still have to learn appropriate behaviors in terms of being able to persist, being able to come up with compensatory strategies,” said John H. Ryan, a clinical psychologist. “The medication makes them more able to do that.”
An adult with the disability also has difficulty picking up social cues, Ryan said. Someone may try to politely exit a conversation, but a person with the disability would not realize that and keep hanging on.
“Some people with severe ADD need social skills training,” Coleman said. “The person with ADD, when you’re talking to them, they’re changing the topic. They want to talk about their thing, and something else has come to mind. It’s often said about people with ADD (that they) don’t fail on the job; they fail at the water cooler.”
With a child, therapy for the disorder involves the parents. With an adult, therapy may also include the employer and friends or supportive individuals.
Ryan said children with the disability often grow up to be given the misdiagnoses of manic-depressive or antisocial.
“They are treated psychiatrically, and when you do an in-depth history, they in fact have ADD,” he said. Psychiatric treatment alone does not address the disorder, he said.
People with the disability are drawn to risk-taking and jobs most people would consider manic. With some alterations, they can do any job. A 29-year-old Roslyn, N.Y., woman is suing the New York State Board of Law Examiners for permission to take her bar exam in a room away from other test-takers. She also wants to hand-mark the answers instead of filling in the answer sheet grid, and she wants four days, instead of the usual two, to complete her test. Hers is the first Attention Deficit Disorder case heard under the Americans Disabilities Act.
