A Successful Life With ADHD—Without Drugs
A Personal Story That Defies the Pharmaceutical Industry
The 7-year-old boy in the public school classroom squirmed in his desk. His gaze flitted from the windows to his classmates, then back to the windows. He drummed with his hands on the hollow metal book compartment beneath his seat. He drew doodles, then flicked a triangular paper football at a nearby student.
Eventually, the teacher was fed up. She ordered the boy to come to the front of the classroom, then dragged his desk out the door and into the hall. Then she ordered the boy to return to his desk—in the hall—and remain there for the duration of the class.
The boy wasn’t particularly upset. If anything, being in the hall was something new and different, and he entertained himself with the sound of his desk drumming as it reverberated down the hall.
That little boy was me, in 1969, in a relatively good public school in a southern college town. And that scene was repeated many times throughout elementary school. Teachers sent exasperated notes to my mother, with comments like “Obviously very smart but doesn’t focus.”
In 1969 nobody had heard of Attention Deficit Disorder. But squirrelly kids? They’d been around for centuries. In 1798, Sir Alexander Crichton described “mental restlessness” in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement. In 1952, the DSM-I characterized the symptoms as “minimal brain dysfunction;” and in 1968, the DSM-II carried the more imaginative description of “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood.”
My grades throughout primary and secondary school were all over the place. D’s and F’s were as common as A’s and B’s. Teachers almost unanimously thought I was incredibly bright (this is what my mother tells me) but distracted and unfocused.
I remember being fascinated by science in elementary and middle school, but always did poorly in those classes because they required the kind of patient, focused, cumulative learning I might have been incapable of, but also thought was just horrendously dull. Ditto for math, which I just plain hated. (My mother says this is because I had lousy math teachers; I think I just hated it.)
The only aspect of math I did well at was learning my multiplication tables. In an early sign of the intensely-directed focus that was to become my salvation, I still remember reciting them aloud, over and over, in an almost rhythmic mantra:
Two times two is four.
Two times three is six.
Two times four is eight.
Two times five is ten.
Not surprisingly, I involved into an arts and humanities kid. I had always loved to read. From as far back as I remember, my mother drove my sister and I to the local library on weeknights, where we’d spend an hour, sometimes two, sitting on the floor in a corner surrounded by books. So English classes in school were enjoyable and somewhat effortless.
I also loved listening to music. My father had a ridiculously eclectic record collection with everything from Otis Redding and Nina Simone to The Beatles to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. I remember sitting on the living room floor in front of the stereo cabinet, wearing a bulbous pair of Pioneer headphones, literally tripping out to music.
Then, in the summer before my eighth-grade year, I discovered drumming. My best friend had taken up drumming in the school band a year before, and I couldn’t stop messing around with his sticks and rubber practice pad. I seemed to have a natural gift for rhythm, and taught myself to read music.
Drumming became my passion. I immediately won entry to the school band program and practiced obsessively. Looking back, I think my love for music wasn’t the real reason I became obsessed with drumming. I know now I loved it for its combination of physical motion and Zen-like repetition.
When I wasn’t outside exploring the town where I lived, I’d sit in my bedroom for hours at home, tapping away on a rubber practice pad:
left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left
right-right-right-right-right-right-right-right
left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right
left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left
right-right-right-right-right-right-right-right
left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right
I’m sure it sounded as boring as it looks, and yet I enjoyed it, and even found great solace in the focus and repetition.
I almost didn’t graduate from high school. I was a superstar in band class, being the youngest student to make it into all-state band. And I continued to do well in English…but failed almost every other class. (Which was largely because I wasn’t in those classes—I’d skip dozens of classes just to hang out in the band room and practice.)
It was only through the grace of a sympathetic English teacher that I graduated. She knew I wasn’t stupid, and offered me a deal: memorize T.S. Eliot’s entire poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in two weeks, and she would ensure I’d graduate.
I threw myself into that poem with the same passion as I drummed. I lived with it day and night and memorized it stanza by stanza. And I still remember my English teacher’s look of amazement when, sitting in an empty auditorium, I recited all 1,088 words without hesitation.
I went on to attend The Juilliard School in New York City, where I did incredibly well and received a bachelor of music degree. I struggled for a few years in an abyssmal orchestra job market, and worked for a while in Venezuela because there were no orchestra jobs for a timpanist available in the U.S.
In 1987, I decided to abandon music as a career. My fallback, not surprisingly, was writing and communications—the only other subjects I’d ever excelled at in school.
I BS’d my way into a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency (no doubt aided by my impressive-looking Juilliard degree), and thus began a successful career in marketing and communications which ultimately led me to my current position, where I oversee a division of 60 creative communicators at a major university.
I’ve told you my backstory because many of the details are directly relevant to ADHD. As an adult in my forties, I visited two clinical psychologists and took a battery of tests. One psychologist declared me a textbook case of ADHD, and the other (more recently) suggested I have hypomania—characterized by periods of euphoria mixed with periods of irritability.
I tried taking Strattera, Ritalin, and Adderal—mainly out of curiosity—but they seemed to have little affect. And this may be because unlike the 3.5 million kids on ADHD medication today, I had none.
Whether my brain chemistry is different in some way or not (and it appears that it is), I learned to live with that brain. I developed habits that enabled me to work in a more focused way—such as listening to minimalist music by composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and keeping my desk completely clear of any clutter.
I also made life choices—likely driven by my restless mind—that were appropriate for someone like me. In my case, drumming gave me a physical outlet for my energy, and subjects like writing and English are well-suited for someone whose mind tends toward rapid and random connections.
The New York Times recently published a feature story in their Sunday magazine called The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder. The story focuses on an epidemic of kids (and now adults) who are prescribed drugs like Adderal for their supposed cases of ADD…but also interviews many professionals who say this is not an epidemic, but the result of a calculated marketing campaign by big pharma.
Parents are drawn like bees to honey by pharmaceutical ad campaigns promising to help their kids do better in school and be happier at home.
The point of my story is not to suggest there aren’t people in the world who may genuinely benefit from ADD drugs…but to say, with certainty, that there are many successful, productive people around us today who would undoubtedly have been diagnosed with ADD as children—had the diagnosis existed.
We are surrounded by people who might have been given drugs like Adderal but weren’t…and learned to live with their brains as they are.
Could people like me have had fewer difficulties throughout childhood if we’d been taking Adderal? Could we have been even more successful? Maybe, or maybe not—and this is speculation that could be entertained for an almost infinite number of hypothetical variables in our lives.
What matters, in the end, is that we played the hand that was dealt us, and we’re doing just fine today.
I’d also add that it’s very possible some of us did far better than most people as a direct result of our ADD tendencies: extreme, sustained focus, high energy, and the achievements to which those characteristics contributed. (As an aside, some think hypomania may have evolutionary advantages—people like Andrew Carnegie and Steve Jobs were supposedly hypomanic.)
Are there times when I hate my restless mind? Are there times when I feel irritable for hours for no real reason? And has my ADD resulted in some terrible times in my adult like (like multiple failed marriages before I finally found the stability of a happy family today)?
Absolutely. But I’ll take the good with the bad. Because isn’t that what life is all about?
