Dr. Mate explains how stress can cause ADD ADHD.
Stress changes the brain chemistry and lowers important neurotransmitter levels.
“3 Steps To Conquering ADD” teaches you how to restore these levels in a healthy naturally way, thereby eliminating ADD ADHD symptoms naturally.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned you suffered from ADD- attention deficit disorder- yourself and were drugged for it. Explain your own story.
DR. GABOR MATÈ: Well, I was in my early fifties and I was working in palliative care at the time- I was a coordinator palliative care unit at a large Canadian hospital- and a social worker in the unit who had just been diagnosed as an adult told me about her story.
AMY GOODMAN: Just diagnosed as an… an addict?
DR. GABOR MATÈ: An adult. This social worker was diagnosed at age 38.
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, as an adult she suffered with ADD.
DR. GABOR MATÈ: Right, as an adult. And as a physician, I was like most physicians who know nothing about ADD. Most physicians really don’t know anything about the condition. But when she told me her story, I realized that was me. And subsequently, I was diagnosed.
AMY GOODMAN: What was that story? What did you realize was you?
DR. GABOR MATÈ: Oh, uh, poor impulse control for a lot of my life. Impulsive behaviors, disorganization, tendency to tune out a lot, be absent minded, and physical restlessness- I had a lot of trouble sitting still. All the traits that I saw in the literature on ADD, I recognized and myself. It was kind of an epiphany, in a sense, because you get to understand- or, at least you get a sense of why you’re behaving the way you’re behaving. What never made sense to me from the beginning, thought, is the idea of ADD as a genetic disease. Not even after a couple of my kids were diagnosed with it, I still didn’t buy the idea that it’s genetic, because it isn’t. Again, it has to do with- in my case- very stressed circumstances as an infant, which I talked about on a previous program. In the case of my children, it’s because their father was a workaholic doctor who wasn’t emotionally available to them. Under those circumstances, children are stressed. I mean, if children are stressed when their brains are developing, one way to deal with stress is to tune out.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned that you described this in a previous interview, but described it now. Describe your youth.
DR. GABOR MATÈ: I was a baby in Budapest, Hungary, in 1945. Born in January- two months before the Germans occupied Hungary. Jewish parents- my father was away in forced labor, my grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. My mother was a very stressed and depressed woman who could barely assure my own survival. And at a certain point, I was separated from her for a few weeks, at eleven months of age. She obviously could not give me a sense of comfort and ease and attuned communication. Her life itself was in danger- and mine- so her focus was simply on survival. Under circumstances like that, the child’s brain just doesn’t get the kind of emotional input that the circuits need for their healthy development.
But it doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that, you see? All you need is people who are very stressed in their lives- as under the current economic crisis, for example. In Windsor, Ontario- which is a twin city of Detroit, and therefore an auto making town in Canada- in 2009, the number of visits for childhood mental health disorders went up 50%. So what happens is the parents are stressed because of their economic status and the uncertainty, and the children are diagnosed with mental health disorders.
Original Article Here – http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2010/11/24/drgabormatonadhd_bullying
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