Dr. Lanet: …where you have trouble unless it is very interesting. And I have had some kids, some very bright boy who was acing science and failing English because he was very interested in Science and he did not read the poems about the leaves turning colors.
Male1: It is called selective focusing?
Dr. Lanet: Well, normally, the way humans and animals are built is that we are not robots. A robot can be programmed to go to the store and it will go to the store come hell or high water and that is a great analogy—you can throw rocks at it, you can put a brick wall in front of it. He will try to climb over it. Animals and humans have a distractability factor—in other words, if a baby falls out of a window or somebody is getting mugged while you are walking to the store, it is a good idea for you to change your goal, but with attention deficit disorder, the threshold is set differently and Murphy said that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so with attention deficit disorder, you are going to the store but you may never get to the store because you are getting involved with something else too easily. If it is very interesting as I would have said before, that may hold the person’s interest. One of the reasons that the medicines that generally are the most effective being the stimulants, one of the reasons that it may work is that it may stimulate the nervous system and so then, the individual is not so hungry looking for stimulation. A typical example is a boy who is in class and he is in some kind of social studies class and he does not know what is going on because he has not been paying attention for a few weeks, looking out the window.
He is looking for stimulation. If today, the teacher is Ms. Gorgeous, he may stop all of his doodling and as she goes to the blackboard and writes, he may be very attentive, although he may not know what she wrote on the board.
So if you pay attention, but you have difficulty sustaining attention, unless it is a high interest value—some teachers are able to teach more interestingly, so sometimes, I will see a child and the parents will say, he really did well last year and he is doing terribly this year and the year before—well, last year he did well, and I notice that he had a different kind of teacher.
So if the disorder is not so severe, it is possible that the teaching of the individual, the method of the teacher they are using, the personality may keep the disorder from being so obvious, but it is hard for the individual to stay—to get themselves to stay with the task. An example that I would like to use is parents who have kids with attention deficit disorder know this, you do not necessarily have to do work with them, but you may have to stand there to keep them focused because they cannot focus so easily themselves. You help them get through the work, not by doing it, but just by keeping them on task. You cannot say go finish these ten problems and then I will go take a shower and then I will check it after I come out of the shower. You come out of the shower, you may not find your son or daughter there. So it does not have anything to do with intelligence, but it is a serious condition—32% of people with attention deficit disorder do not graduate from high school and the national average is about 10% so it is three times as much. The average person with attention deficit disorder earns $10,000.00 a year less than the equivalent IQ of the individual, high functioning people and there are people, there are doctors who have this, there are executives and businessmen at high functioning levels, there is a $40,000.00 a year differential in income. I am not saying this because money is the only thing. I am just making use of the fact that it is an indication of how the impairment can be very real.
Male1: What tools can you do to make the proper diagnosis?
Dr. Lanet: Well, there are no blood tests, there is no brain scan. The diagnosis—there really is no test, the diagnosis is made on history and observation as is the case with all psychiatric diagnosis. It is made by a conglomeration of behaviors and symptoms so that if the individual is not paying attention—that itself is not enough to make a diagnosis, but if an individual is running around when in the situation that calls for being a disease in itself or not, basically, you have to have symptoms of overactivity, but not necessarily overactivity—that is just one aspect of it; distractability, and impulsivity.
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