Driven to Distraction PDF – Edward Hallowell, John Ratey

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Leading up to the publication of the first edition of Driven to Distraction in 1994, I recall a conversation I had with Jonathan Galassi, now the head of the New York publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Friends since high school and college, Jon and I confide in each other on just about everything.

Driven to Distraction PDF – Edward Hallowell, John Ratey

As an editor, Jon had concerns about this new book I was about to send out into the world. “No one’s heard of attention deficit disorder, and from the title I’m worried people will think it’s a book about cars.” Nearly two million in sales later, Jon and I still chuckle at the fallibility of even the most perspicacious of editors. Driven to Distraction PDF

Back in 1994, few people had even heard of ADD, as it was then called (now it’s ADHD, soon to change again, no doubt!). Those few who had heard of it didn’t really know what it meant. It conjured up stereotypical images of hyperactive little boys disrupting classrooms and turning life at home into chaos.

It was thought that children “grew out of” ADD, so that it disappeared by adulthood. Only a rare few doctors knew that ADD could continue in adults and that females could have it as easily as males. I learned about ADD in 1981, the first year of my fellowship in child psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston.

Driven to Distraction PDF – Edward Hallowell, John Ratey

Before then, if you’d told me a person had attention deficit disorder, I would have thought it was some psychoanalytic concept that referred to children who didn’t get enough attention. But then one of my teachers, Dr. Elsie Freeman, gave us a lecture on ADD. That lecture changed my life forever. As I listened to Elsie speak, my jaw dropped. Driven to Distraction PDF

I had the greatest “Aha!” experience of my life. Elsie was describing me. At last, I found an explanation for the different ways I thought and behaved. I’d always excelled in school and college, so no one, including me, thought I had a learning disability.

I knew I was a slow reader—and I have since pieced together that in addition to ADD I also have dyslexia—but I never had understood why I came up with different ways of solving problems, why I had an intuitive approach to so much, why I tended to think outside the box, why I could be so impatient so often, why I was so quick to draw conclusions, why I had an oddball sense of humor, and on and on.

Driven to Distraction PDF – Edward Hallowell, John Ratey

Although I am not what I now understand to be the classic version of a person who has ADD, I do have the condition for sure. More importantly, back in 1981, I realized that many more people had this condition than experts realized. I also knew it extended into adulthood. ADD became my subspecialty; I began to read papers about it and look for it in my patients. Driven to Distraction PDF

I also began a dialogue that continues to this day with my friend John Ratey. I met John in 1979, when I was a first-year resident at Mass. Mental, as it was called, was a state hospital that was also a Harvard teaching hospital. John was my chief resident, part mentor, part friend, for that year.

When I finished residency and started my training in child psychiatry, John and I remained in touch, meeting once a week to play squash and discuss what interested us. ADD became one of our lead topics. All through the 1980s and into the 1990s, John and I explored the topic, comparing notes on patients, speculating on what more went into ADD than was in the books.

Driven to Distraction PDF

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