Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “The Roots of ADD in Family and Society”

Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “An Utter Stranger: ADD and the Family”

Mate shares several childhood photos in which he looks “far away” and his mother has a yellow star on her chest. He describes the period of his infancy; he was born in 1944 in Budapest as the child of Jewish parents. When he was two and a half months old, Hungary was occupied by the Germans under the command of Adolf Eichmann, who would later be directly responsible for the near eradication of Hungarian Jews, killing over two thirds of them in death camps. Maté has kept his mother’s diaries from this period, during which his father was in a forced labor camp. He examines these accounts in the context of understanding his mother’s anxieties during the first months of his life. He recounts a story in which his mother complained to a doctor about her infant’s incessant crying, to which the doctor responded that all his Jewish patients had crying babies. Maté says that these babies absorbed their parents’ anxieties.

Maté’s maternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. His mother became despondent after they were taken, and she later said that Maté’s presence saved her life by giving her reason to live. A few months later, the deportations ended, but the Hungarian Jews were rounded up into segregated houses. When this happened, Maté says, his mother’s breast milk dried up. During this period of unimaginable turmoil, Maté’s mother left him in the care of her gentile cousin so that he would not have to live in the ghetto. Following this three-week separation, the Red Army took Budapest, releasing the Jews from the ghetto. Maté’s mother returned to him weighing a mere 90 pounds. She told Maté that he would not look at her for days, treating her like a stranger.

Maté shares another picture of himself as a boy—this one alongside his little brother, who was born a few years later into much stabler circumstances. Maté describes the look on his own face in the photo as contemplative and avoidant. Maté believes that his experiences reflect the way the emotional states of caregivers affect the infant brain. Even in everyday circumstances, he says, parental anxieties or absences may foster unconscious anxieties in the child.

Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “Stories Within Stories: ADD and the Family (III)”

Maté describes the parents of many children whom he works with as conscientious, loving people who try their best. However, none of these parents have been asked to recognize how their own emotional states might be affecting their children. Many parents have normalized the perpetual stresses in their lives and no longer recognize the effects of these pressures, but in almost every scenario where ADD is present, Maté finds conflict in the household (though it may be unconscious on the parents’ part). Maté describes the reactions of parents who argue that their child’s behavior could not be associated with their divorce given that the specified behavior began before the divorce. What this fails to recognize, Maté says, is that the acrimony in the marriage far preceded the divorce itself. The environment of the household already contained emotional heaviness, which Maté identifies as the impetus for the behavior. Maté says that even in cases where the parents insist that no such acrimony exists, he is left with the suspicion that there is something beneath the surface that the parent isn’t ready to face.

Many adults with ADD have trouble processing the pain they experienced as children, but learning about these generational patterns is important for growth and healing. Maté cites an example of a mother who came to speak with him about her daughter with ADD. The mother insisted that the ADD-related behavior did not become a factor until years after her divorce, but deeper investigation made it clear that the mother had been taking care of the girl’s father emotionally, which undoubtedly took a toll on their daughter. Maté believes that there are all kinds of reasons people might deny the tension in their lives. Sometimes, he says, projecting their own tensions onto a child helps a couple avoid their own conflict. It is not unusual, Maté says, for the mother to be the only parent willing to bear the emotional responsibilities of the household. Maté thinks that this imbalance of emotional labor is responsible for the higher rates of depression among women.

Maté cites a patient he worked with who had repressed his abuse. Like many people with ADD, the patient couldn’t remember the bad things that had happened to him. In other cases, patients with ADD will remember what happened to them, but the real emotion of that event is obscured by accepting the blame for it or diffused by humor. These patients often describe their pain as mysterious and have a low estimation of themselves; they are highly self-critical and have adopted a framework of understanding themselves that offers little compassion. This minimization of their own trauma is a way of blaming themselves for their pain, Maté says. These patients suppress their own experience, which they had to do as children to maintain a relationship with their caregiver.

In addition to divorce and alcoholism, there are a variety of other stressors that are more common in families of children with ADD, leading some to speculate that the child’s behavior may cause these issues. Since environmental conflict always predates the child’s ADD symptoms, Maté encourages parents to recognize how their own emotional expression or suppression might affect their child. Maté speculates that abuse more commonly affects children who have ADD because the psychological atmosphere in which abuse occurs already existed in the children’s infancy.

Family strife and depression can greatly exacerbate ADD symptoms, but the pressure put on a family by society, Maté says, is equally important. To understand ourselves, Maté says, we have to understand the unresolved trauma of our parents. Maté believes that this approach avoids blame and instead fosters mutual compassion.

Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary: “The Most Frenetic of Cultures”

ADD is prominent in North America, says Maté, which some believe is the result of heredity. These researchers speculate that the intrepid explorers of America had restless, independent genes. This account is ahistorical, Maté says, and doesn’t account for the millions of refugees and enslaved people who arrived in America or for the rise of ADD in Britain. Maté contends that the true origins of ADD lie in the destruction of the family by socioeconomic pressures.

Society greatly affects the development of families and the human brain. Citing John Bowlby’s “environment of adaptedness” (109), Maté compares the increased rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity in American society with the upsurge of emotional afflictions such as chronic stress and depression. Citing psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, Maté comments on the great insecurity of American life. Calm parenting, he says, is becoming harder to control for. The American workforce has lost 23 hours of free time since 1935, which robs the entire family of much-needed emotional nourishment and stimulation. The introduction of women into the workforce, while a critical step for women’s empowerment, has left both parents ill-equipped to spend time with their children. Maté says that caring for children is undervalued by North American society. Underfunded childcare programs often fail to meet the standards needed for adequate childcare. The answer, Maté argues, is not to force women back home but to create a society that understands the importance of infant development and puts programs in place to support parents.

American society itself has a predilection to distraction, Maté says, which can exacerbate ADD symptoms. Citing Drs. Hallowell and Ratey, Maté describes the way even people without ADD must conform to a frantic, restless culture of hyperstimulation and distractibility. The short term is prioritized, as is overworking. These cultural influences do not create ADD, Maté says, but they do make it harder for people with ADD to break free from their neurological situation.

Mate discusses how Sesame Street was created specifically for underprivileged urban youth, a group thought to disproportionately have ADD. The program flashed between vignettes so that children with short attention spans would stay interested. Maté says that this was unwittingly a response to the socially constructed ADD of these children. Since that time, media has trended even more frantic, impairing the entire population’s ability to pay attention.

Part 3 Analysis

This section fleshes out Maté’s claims about The Physiological Impact of Social Pressures on the Family. Maté introduces this with an extreme case: his personal experience as a survivor of the Holocaust. His account of this period makes it clear that he has absorbed his family stories in much the same way that he absorbed environmental stress as an infant, and it places his story in the larger context he argues for throughout Scattered Minds. It is thus a way not only of explaining his experience with ADD but also of extending empathy to himself. Maté also extends empathy to his mother, recognizing that she was not to blame for the disruptions of his early childhood. Maté uses this episode of his life to highlight his belief that our stories are not our own and that we must look into the stories of our ancestors to understand where we come from.

Extrapolating from his story and others like it, Maté claims that underlying social stressors create anxiety in parents that prevent attunement with their children. Behind every child with ADD, Maté believes, there are such stressors. A seeming absence of parental stress only indicates the parents’ capacity for hiding it; even in such cases, Maté feels a tension right below the surface. Though Maté believes that parents will often blame their child for behavior as a way of avoiding conflict with each other, Maté asserts that stressors always predate the child’s behavior. In addition, Maté believes that a child exhibits behavior in response to a parent, meaning that parents are ultimately responsible for the emotional environment of the household. It is parents who have all the power and responsibility to change the situation, Maté says, and it is the low frustration tolerance on behalf of the parent that triggers and exacerbates the child’s ADD symptoms. As Maté has previously noted that many people with ADD have internalized the sense that they are responsible for their own grief, this explanation of the internal dynamics of the households where they grew up aims to help them heal.

Still, Maté is not without sympathy for parents—even those whose behaviors create less-than-ideal circumstances for their children. In fact, his assessment of North American society implies that creating such circumstances is almost unavoidable: Maté argues that people in North American society are dealing with forces beyond their control, leading to a feeling of powerlessness. In particular, Maté identifies the erosion of community and mounting financial insecurity as factors that make attuned parenting difficult. This is one of many moments where Maté uses hard data to bolster his claims, citing research that Americans work more than people in other countries and that American childcare and schools are underfunded. The conclusion—that these factors compound the problem of ADD—is Maté’s own, as he argues that little provision is made for infants to establish attunement relationships. While Maté clearly believes that safeguarding child development is intrinsically worthwhile, he also makes a pragmatic case for doing so, saying that the societal benefits of nurturing attunement relationships would be enormous (this recalls, for example, his claim that much crime stems from unaddressed childhood trauma). Instead, Maté says that American culture simulates the restless, high stimulation of ADD. These cultural forces cannot create ADD alone, but they add to the stress that makes ADD more likely to occur.