Welcome
Disorder is a funny word. For most people, including “professionals”, it conjures a sense of illness — of being broken. If we can just find that nasty bug and treat it with just the right medication, we can fix the illness and make it go away.
The reality, of course, is far more complex. Disorder merely indicates that a person is having symptoms — some atypical experiences — and that these symptoms are causing distress and interfering with function. But to dive headfirst into these symptoms and simply attempt to eradicate them without exploring them first would be like treating hyperventilation by choking someone to death. The goal should be to understand first, treat second. To realize that “Mental Disorders” are not like having a virus, but rather the effect of numerous, ever-changing traits in a person’s psyche that have come together in a troublesome way. To help the client grow into something more, not beat them into something less.
The Hyperfocus Myth
I recently came across a blog entry by a well-meaning psychiatrist who wanted to stress how important it is to not diagnose nonconformity as a disorder (the original blog entry is linked below). Certainly I cannot argue with that point! However, the example she used was ADHD. In this example she attributes to the ADHD child a sense of internal focus: as if the child were simply “attending to something else” rather than the thing her parents would prefer she attend to. This is the hyperfocus myth — that in ADHD, the child is...
read more