Scattered minds: do I have ADHD? Part 1

All photos by Rachael Morgan

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A month ago on September 25th I wed Jackie, my partner of seventeen years. There’d been no going down on bended knee. In fact it was she who proposed to me, from the bed to which I’d brought her breakfast tray (a now daily routine detailed in the first stage is denial) she having led into the proposal with “this isn’t very romantic but …”

(One month earlier, and one day before we set off for the WOMAD music festival, Jackie was diagnosed with lung cancer metastised in throat, spine, liver and lymph nodes as detailed in my August posts, dear steel city followers and before the hurricane. Given the high likelihood of her ‘predeceasing’ me, and fearing for my future solvency on a state plus small private annuity, she wants me to have that portion of her pensions to which only marriage can entitle me.)

Romantic or not, the ceremony at Sheffield Registry Office was a deeply moving event for all concerned, ¹ as was the wedding brunch eight days later ² at which, between main courses and champagne toast, my short speech alluded fleetingly to a daughter’s adamance that I display textbook signs of ADHD; adding, to laughter from our guests, that this “would explain a lot …”

So this post is not about Jackie, who has forbidden me from writing about her: beyond reporting on clinical aspects as they unfold, and on their practical as opposed to emotional consequences for her. Nor is it about our wedding. It’s about the earth shatteringly vital question: is I or isn’t I a man whose seventy-four spins round the sun have been taken in the company of the condition, thus far undiagnosed, known as ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?

As chance would have it the reason daughter Annie arrived so decisively at such a diagnosis is that she recently read a book, Scattered Minds, by the Canadian physician Gabor Maté. Why do I invoke chance? Because a family likeness in a YouTube podcast led me to look him up. His son Aaron is often cited in my posts: occasionally on Ukraine and Syria where, like me, he counters with facts the corporate media instilled falsehoods of Putin waging an unprovoked war in Ukraine ³ and Assad gassing his own people, ⁴ but most frequently in the context of the Gaza holocaust on which, like his Grayzone colleague Max Blumenthal – and Jeffrey Sachs, Norman Finkelstein, Katie Halper, Zak Polanski and many other Jewish anti-Zionists – he backs with a plethora of facts his denunciation of the self proclaimed ‘Jewish State’.

I mention this not for novelty value but because when you watch Aaron Maté podcasts – and guest spots on Judge Andrew Napolitano, Electronic Intifada and the Katie Halper Show – he displays a grasp of facts as unnerving as it is impressive, along with the slightly robotic delivery of a Finkelstein or Blumenthal; a commonality unattributable to Jewishness or its Israel-critical subset but, I suspect, to ADHD. Sure enough, Gabor Maté reveals in Scattered Minds  that both of his sons are simultaneously blessed and cursed with the condition.

As, says Annie, am I. As evidence of which she cites two of the most glaring indicators:

• High intelligence in one arena – mastery of symbolic logic and verbal agility in the written word – combined with obtuseness, naivity and indeed stupidity in many;
• an ability to focus to an obsessive degree on one or two points of interest while displaying the inattentiveness and absent mindedness of a scattered mind.

And one glaring antecedent:

• A deeply traumatised and troubled childhood.

In part 2 I’ll seek, neither mechanically nor with a-priori reductivity, to map these indicators to a review of Scattered Minds: the origins and healing of attention deficit disorder, ⁵ the better to answer the question posed earlier: is I or isn’t I ADHD?

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1. We wanted Louise Morgan, dear friend and Renaissance Woman – baker, forensic scientist, advocate for disabled access to the Great Outdoors, licenced Registrar and much besides – to preside over our wedding but within the city limits Sheffield will only allow its own Registrars, and we weren’t confident of Jackie being well enough to travel. In the event she could have made the trek but the Registrar who did oversee things was (almost) as good as Louise would have been, combining efficiency with great sensitivity to our situation.
2. Chapeau to Cornerstone, the venue in the Hunters Bar district of Sheffield. Chloe, Emma and the team came through for us big time; managing all of our advance requests, and serving sumptuous food with elegance and loving care in a venue made perfect by bright sun delivered through skylights in a converted attic. And in keeping with the pragmatic note struck at the start of this post, let me add that the bill was amazingly modest.
3. In a post yesterday on his website – Trump is right: Zelensky “should have settled this war a long time ago” – Aaron Maté, while no admirer of the tangerine narcissist, charts the Democrats’ dirty dealings in the empire’s proxy war on Russia. For a wider overview of the “Putin’s unprovoked war” nonsense, see my post A Ukraine timeline.
4. Of my many posts on the dirty war on Syria – in the fact-defiant name of humanitarian intervention using Al Qaeda cut-outs! – the most comprehensive is a 2017 post, Monbiot, Syria and universalism.
5. Scattered Minds was published in 1999, at which point the term, attention deficit disorder, was still transitioning from its three word form by addition of the h-word into the now medically accepted, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.