Attention Deficit Disorder and the Desert Fathers



Edward Hallowell is a child psychiatrist and author of bestselling books on Attention Deficit Disorder. In a new and provocative book called CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! he tackles “The modern phenomenon of brain overload,” in which we juggle email, cell-phones, Blackberries, and iPods, responding to and initiating a level of sensory and mental bombardment that in Hallowell's view has “reached the point where our entire society is suffering from culturally induced ADD.” The defining symptoms? Distractibility, inability to filter information, forgetfulness, high anxiety &#0151 the sort of things he was accustomed to seeing in his ADD practice but was initially surprised to increasingly find in non-ADD patients.

Many of us can easily recognize the state of mind he is talking about, since we encounter it in ourselves and our children. As diagnosed in “kids these days,” it's characterized by superficiality, a short attention span, and low boredom thresholds, and general restlessness but it's not limited to the kids.

Take the evocative phrase “surfing the net.” You move from site to site, intrigued by new links, abandoning original topics or unable to find whatever it is that prompted you to log on in the first place. Several hours of that, like an evening channel-surfing on TV, can leave you with the junk-food-binge feeling of being full of something essentially non-nourishing. The bombardment of undigested and semi-digested chunks of confirmed and unconfirmed information, opinion, and anecdote all contribute to what I call the “centrifugal self,” which is the very opposite of the centered, self-composed, self-possessed self.

Hallowell has a strong though not exclusive emphasis on non-pharmacological approaches to ADD which he carries over to his treatment of ADT (Attention Deficit Trait, his term for people adversely affected by CrazyBusy-ness). He offers commonsense advice on healthy diet and exercise (an article directed toward the business community advocated eliminating junk food from workplace vending machines and opening up on-site gyms to all employees). He suggests techniques for building structure into the day and breaking up tasks into manageable chunks. And he recommends reducing sensory and psychological bombardment by limiting television, magazine and newspaper reading.

At this juncture the modern self-help book and traditional writings on spiritual formation intersect in interesting ways. In our Christian tradition, for example, 2000 years worth of spiritual authors almost unanimously pursue a state of recollection by means of selective attentiveness (often identified as “custody of the senses”), lots of quiet time, and a dissatisfaction with living life in the shallows.

Where do fishermen find fish? Beneath the domain of the surfers, in the deep. Where is the Gospel's pearl of great price to be found? Buried until the determined treasure seeker unearths it.

This accent on depth, concentration, discipline, extended time and attention both attracts and repels us nowadays. It attracts because most of us, at least some of the time, realize how shell-shocked we are; it repels because we are so habituated to shifting sensation, so eager to be entertained, so unaccustomed to the discipline of the long haul and the subtle satisfactions of steeping ourselves in a topic or enterprise.

The yearly experience of Lent shows us this dual dynamic. In the early days and weeks we struggle to keep our penitential resolutions or establish new habits. By the end of Holy Week, a kind of regret at leaving behind this cleansing period of deprivation competes with relief. The same is true for the end of a silent retreat or a Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament.

We are awed and even appalled by some of the extreme penitential practices of the Desert Fathers and early saints, but these men and women weren't just grappling with lustful temptations or satanic visitations; they also struggled with distraction, the desire for ease and the hunger for the new and strange.

Our case is much worse, in part due to the “CrazyBusy” world we've constructed. It distracts us from the “one thing needful,” the better part that Mary took and Martha missed out on. It distracts us from following St. Augustine's solution: “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in thee.”

Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.

(This article courtesy of The Fact Is.org.)

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