ADD is not the symptoms

Saturday, December 10, 2005

It's all about focus control. When I first tried to explain ADD to others a while back, I often got the response "yeah I feel that way sometimes too." That's when I stopped trying to explain. Imagine having clinical depression and people saying "yeah, I get depressed sometimes too." It's taken several years but I now realise my mistake. I was describing the symptoms and not the cause.

Symptoms are just indicators of course. If you have a bad headache, it could be stress, tiredness or a brain tumor. ADD is not the symptoms.

Focus control

I hate the name, 'attention deficit disorder, because frankly, it's wrong. It was obviously created by someone without ADD to describe the outward symptoms. ADD is not about attention deficit, it's about focus control. When you have ADD focus can be a slippery slope and no matter where you try to place your attention it just seems to slip away from it the very next moment. It's very frustrating. Sometimes, however, focus is like fly-paper, you get stuck and can't seem to break away. An ADDer can summon up a state known as 'hyper-focus' where focus is concentrated for an extended period to the exclusion of all else. For an ADDer to stop hyper-focusing is just as hard as paying attention at other times. It's focus control at will that is the hard thing.

Symptoms

This causes all sorts of visible symptoms which typically characterise ADD in the media and elsewhere. Things like poor impulse control, hyperactivity, misbehaviour, inattentiveness, defiance and so on. But they are only external, and they are only highlighted when viewed in the context of situations where exactly opposite modes of behaviour are desired and expected. This is one reason why Adult ADD is often not noticed, while child ADD is. The behaviour of an ADD child in a classroom is clearly not appropriate for that context, whereas an ADD adult (addult?) can choose situations and surroundings where their behaviour is more acceptable.

But I can say "it's focus control!" till I'm blue in the face; what does that mean? I found an MP3 called "The sound of an ADD brain". It's from an organisation called Living ADDventure. It contains a recording of a teacher talking to her class as heard once as a normal child and once as an ADD child. The difference is quite clear. And through the magic of del.icio.us Play Tagger click below to listen. Go ahead it's only 2 minutes worth:

The sound of an ADD brain

A dozen radios

In a typical mind the brains focus control mechanism keeps them attentive to important things and filters the rest out. In an ADDers mind the focus control does not. Everything seems to have the same importance level and so everything attracts attention. I've described it as being surrounded with a dozen radios, all tuned to different stations, up loud, constantly. Your attention is flittering across different sources of external and internal input. Sometimes it's bad, sometimes not so bad, but it is constant.

That's ADD in a nutshell. Focus control is an interesting subject to me and I'll write some more about it soon.