When NPR doesn't Suck

I had just followed a link to an NPR piece, “The Benefits of Restlessness and Jagged Edges” which, of course had related articles, which is where I found this one titled “Me and My Depression”. A student, named Belia Mayeno describes her onset of it and how she came to terms with the medications she’s now taking. the part that resonates most was how she misses the highs, and to a lesser extent the lows, but her metaphor of choice was that there was a “war” going on inside her head. I never saw it that way. I still don’t.

Another piece by a staffer at NPR describes how he deals with the depression, and how, even though it seems everyone has some kind of mood altering prescriptions, Bipolar Disorder has a bit of a stigma about it.


This topic is close to me, because my son has been diagnosed with Childhood Onset of Bipolar Disorder. He gets it from his father. I’m haywired. I’ve never been officially diagnosed as having either ADD/ADHD or Bipolar Disorder. but I take the medications that can be used for both.

When I get a high, they’re not extreme. I can still sleep normally, I just scribble a lot of notes and sketches and let them run wild in my head and flow unrestricted onto paper as well as I can and save the notes and sketches and ideas for the times when the well runs dry, so to speak. the hypersexuality is fun, but a bit frustrating, it’s more akin to being hungry than horny. Every woman is especially attractive in one way or another on days like that.

When I get the blues, I just try to sleep it off. I can and will endure. I know it will pass, but I just get all the more irritable when my wife or someone close tries to “help”. It would be akin to me trying to help with PMS or childbirth. I can offer aid, and support, but it’s a reactive role, not an active one.

I try to help my son find ways to deal with the fact that the world isn’t made for people like us. I tell him how the world is made up of different kinds of people.

Some of us are built to be farmers, we get up at the same time, do the same routine day in and day out, and things change slowly. Others of us are hunter gatherers; we are restless, always looking out for something and when we come across something we really want, we’re able to focus in on it. We’re also good at taking risks. In a world of farmers, daring and inventiveness is a rarity, so we hunters stand out a bit. He seems to understand what I mean.

I originally read aobut hte Hunter/Gatherer theory a few years ago. Apparently a man named Thom Hartmann developed the theory about 5 years ago. I got this quote Here

I spent the first year after my son’s diagnosis (and the sermon by his psychologist that he “isn’t normal”) trying to find a deeper understanding of what this thing called ADD was. I read everything I could find, and talked with friends and former associates in the child-care industry. I learned that the three cardinal indicators of ADD are distractibility, impulsiveness, and a love of high stimulation or risk. (If you toss in the inability to sit still — hyperactivity — you have ADD-H or ADHD.) While I’d never seen it written anywhere, I also intuitively knew that people with ADD had a different sense of time from those without ADD.

And the more I looked at it, the more it seemed that this “illness” could also be an asset under some circumstances.

After six months of hyperfocused research, I was reading myself to sleep one night with Scientific American. The article was about how the end of the ice age, 12,000 years ago, brought about a mutation of grasses leading to the first appearance on earth of what we today call wheat and rice. These early cereal grains led to the development of agriculture among humans, and that point in history is referred to as the Agricultural Revolution.

As the article went into greater detail about how the agricultural revolution transformed human society, I got a “Eureka!” that was such a jolt I sat straight up in bed. “People with ADD are the descendants of hunters!” I said to my wife Louise, who gave me a baffled look. “They’d have to be constantly scanning their environment, looking for food and for threats to them: that’s distractibility. They’d have to make instant decisions and act on them without a second’s thought when they’re chasing or being chased through the forest or jungle, which is impulsivity. And they’d have to love the high-stimulation and risk-filled environment of the hunting field.”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“ADD!” I said, waving my hands. “It’s only a flaw if you’re in a society of farmers!”

From that concept came what was originally a metaphor, a less-disempowering story that I could tell my son (for whom I originally wrote this book) and others about their “difference.” Since that time, we’ve discovered that this original “story” may, in fact, be factually accurate: science is rapidly corroborating many of my original observations and theories.

So where we go from here is forward, into a future where people with ADD are not embarrassed or ashamed to say they are Hunters, where children are helped in schools with appropriate interventions and educational environments, and where teenagers and adults recognize in advance that some jobs or careers or mates are well-suited to their temperament and others are not — and from that self-knowledge can gain a greater measure of success in life.

We go forward with proud steps, ignoring those “helpers” who would cling to our legs and scream (or say softly) “you’re sick!” while offering us quick fixes, radiation, or expensive “cures.”

We go forward as Hunters.

Another time, at a renaissance faire, we saw a corgi puppy heard a bunch of animals in the petting zoo section. The pup would separate the two goats, and then the ducks, and move them to different parts of the fenced in area.

for those who don’t know what a corgi is, it’s a dog from the UK . You can adopt this kind of dog, and all sorts of critters, via petfinder.com. It's a site that is an aggregate of animal shelter databases across America. You just type in your ZIP code, or city, and other criteria, and they list what's available.

I explained to the Boy Child that he and I are more like the corgi, always running around, chasing down things and that most people are like the goats. As fate would have it, the goat got tired of the pup, and kicked him across the pen. Fortunately, the little dog got right back up and went back at what he was doing.

My daughter, the Girl Cub, is blessedly normal. Well, as normal as a dirkling could be.