Adult ADHD
By Dr. Robert Sprackland
"Robert, stop it!"
Those words haunted me most of my life, whenever people became overwhelmed by my behavior. I just didn't understand what their problem was. Neither did any of the voices in my head.
The voices were constant and all mine, not God or spirits, and they didn't tell me to do anything antisocial. Rather, each (I counted eight) was a stream of regular thoughts, running concurrently, like an eight-track tape playing all tracks simultaneously. I often wandered into a conversational mode described by friends as a "Robin Williams monologue," telling jokes, making puns, jumping from topic to topic, and even changing voices and character.
But my head had always been like that. To me, everyone else moved and thought slowly, took forever to get to the point. I was driving my friends, coworkers and family nuts, and I couldn't to do anything about it. I was also a compulsive eater, injuring my health. Even my decades of meditation practice could not control the internal restlessness.
Then an odd conjunction of events led to help. My sister-in-law, Tina, an Army physician, suffered an injury and needed help driving home from Illinois to New York. I was available, so I spent three weeks with the family, during which time Tina got to observe me at close hand. She soon bluntly told me, "I really, really, really think you have ADHD." When Tina, a lieutenant colonel and formidable diagnostician, uses three "reallys" in a sentence, you had better take her seriously.
But ADHD? Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? Me? I had thought ADHD, ADD, and all those other new acronyms were children's ailments. I couldn't have ADHD; I was from the generation that found super-fast flashing of movie trailers and TV shows with handheld camerawork difficult, indeed painful, to watch. My attention span could be measured in minutes and hours, not milliseconds and sound bites. I was a trained systematic zoologist, a profession dedicated to compulsive organization of vast amounts of data. No, I couldn't have ADHD.
But as we discussed my symptoms, it became clear that kids do not have a monopoly on brain chemical imbalances. I had all the usual symptomatic suspects. Despite earning my two masters and a doctorate, school had always been excruciatingly painful for me, from staying still in my seat to following laboriously slow lectures. I tested poorly because I either read too much into a question or knew about the rare exceptions. In conversations, I often completed other people's sentences.
Getting to sleep was always an ordeal because my thoughts would not turn off. Though I am very goal oriented, I found it difficult to complete some tasks because I had so many projects going on simultaneously. For example, I had spent a year writing a CD-ROM key to the sharks and rays of the world, but had put off getting it commercially published. On some tasks I focused like a laser, while on others I was dim as a candle. I saw my own physician and a neuropsychologist and, sure enough, got the ADHD diagnosis.
ADHD, first described as "defect of moral control" by an English physician in 1902, is a simple failure of the brain to balance levels of neurotransmitters called dopamine and norepinephrine, which help regulate moods. My diagnosis and subsequent treatment with Adderall radically and swiftly changed my life for the better. This amphetamine--an "upper"--actually quiets the ADHD personality. My hunger cravings are gone, I sleep well, get more things done, do them better, and haven't gotten on anyone's nerves lately--especially my long-suffering wife of thirty years! Overall, I have been clam and happy--not excited or ecstatic--every day since treatment began. Best and strangest of all, I now have only one thought in my head at any time. It is the psychological equivalent, I think, of having sent all the kids off to college, and I get the house to myself.
There has always been stigma attached to mental illness; it's "all in our heads." Mental difficulties are still seen as other than physical or physiological, and even Congress refuses to recognize mental illness for what it is. This stigma is devastating. As a zoologist, I understand how my insides work, so it didn't affect my decision to be treated, but for most people, being "mentally ill" ranks in the bad news category with heart problems or cancer--or worse! People who could benefit deny themselves help that could substantially improve the quality of their lives. We do not mock a person with a faulty heart for taking nitroglycerin; a person with a defective pancreas for taking insulin; or any of us with an overwhelmed or compromised immune system for taking antibiotics.
Even Viagra jokes are rare these days. Why, then, do we see such intolerance when another organ, the brain, is ill? Many influential people had ADHD, including Dustin Hoffman, Will Smith, Jimmy Stewart, Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, and, of course, Robin Williams. Brain disorders are real physical manifestations that can often be simply treated. Unless our brains get moved elsewhere, mental illnesses will always "be in our heads." Those of us who can benefit from medication should take it, and the rest of us should support our loved ones who need it. It will make things much happier in our hearts and in our heads.
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