Minding the Details: Why your gifted child’s “Attention Issues” might not be what you think they are . . .

There are adults/children who have been identified as gifted who in fact have issues relating to attention.

These issues manifest as troubles with sustained focus and spotty attention to task, that precludes productivity.

Regardless of their innate and idiosyncratic gifted style they indeed also have attention troubles.

But.

This does not mean they have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

They might.

But they also may be in the throes of a complex anxiety arc fed by under-stimulation and over-stimulation, in uneven measure. Sometimes the world they live in is grossly inadequate to feed their hungry mind and heart. Sometimes their inner world is so rife with ideas and feelings — unfed and unexpressed — that they are felled, psychologically clear-cut.

This extreme lack of fit, intellectually, socially or emotionally, can be disastrous and severely interfere with their capacity for attention.

Which begs for a nuanced and differential diagnosis and valid treatment plan, one that is based on broader, widespread understanding of the complexity inherent in mental health for gifted individuals. It requires a commitment to teasing out the multiple layers inherent in any person’s psychology, and a readiness to take a hard look at the contexts they inhabit.

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”

William James A Pluralistic Universe

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