Thom Hartmann - ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmers World

Dedicated to the memory of Carl and Jean Hartmann and Gottfried Muller

ADHD

A Hunter in a Farmers World

In this groundbreaking book, Thom Hartmann makes a unique contribution to our understanding of ADHD. In considering ADHD in an evolutionary context, Thom was the first to point out the survival advantages of ADHD in hunter-gatherer societies and also the first to identify the link between ADHD and creativity. As such, Thom will be recognized as a pioneer contributing to the reconceptualization of ADHD from being considered only a disorder to being viewed as a mode of thought characterized by enhanced flexibility and creativity.

RICHARD SILBERSTEIN, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AT SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY

It is refreshing to find a book that places ADHD in a framework that does not imply dysfunction.... The metaphor of a hunter in a farmers world fits so many of the ADHD youngsters and adults with whom I have worked.

MARGARET (PEG) DAWSON, ED.D., NCSP, CODIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR LEARNING AND ATTENTION DISORDERS

Why are attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and related conditions so common? Could they in some way be advantageous? These questions and some possible answers are woven through this book, providing basic factual information about ADHD with a twist that helps readers recognize the valuesometimes quite specialof people who have it.

DALE E. HAMMERSCHMIDT, M.D., FACP, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

This book did for our family what years of being in and out of therapy failed to accomplish. It helped us to understand and appreciate each others unique way of doing and seeing.

JANIE BOWMAN, MOTHER OF AN ADHD ADOLESCENT

A clear and positive view of our remarkable children with practical tips for the parent.

STEPHEN C. DAVIDSON, M.ED., FOUNDING MEMBER OF SAFE KIDS OF GEORGIA

I highly recommend this book to parents and educators.

JACK NEERINCX, PH.D., SUPERVISING PSYCHOLOGIST OF GASTON COUNTY SCHOOLS, NORTH CAROLINA

This book helped me better understand ADHD and gave me practical strategies on how to deal with these children in the classroom.

ANNE BENNETT, SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHER, GRADES K8

ADHDers arent abnormal; they are uniquely gifted individuals in their own right. Thom Hartmann describes these ideas in a book that belongs in the hands of every educator, counselor, doctor, and parent.

LEARNING DISABILITIES NEWSLETTER

Acknowledgments

F or the preparation of this manuscript thanks go to those many ADHD adults who shared their life stories so others could learn from their successes and failures.

Dianne Breen, who helped give birth to this book, and Dirk E. Huttenbach, M.D., an expert in the field of child and adult ADD, were invaluable in providing anecdotes, information, and some of the core concepts that shaped the ideas presented here. G. W. Hall and Carla Nelson did a marvelous job of editing the early manuscript, and Fran and all the folks on CompuServe were a big help.

I owe a special acknowledgment to Dave deBronkart, who liberally shared his knowledge and experience with ADD, and proofread this book so thoroughly that it would not be inaccurate to say that he wrote parts of it. On the subject of ADD, Dave is the most knowledgeable layman Ive met, as well as an articulate public speaker and outspoken defender of this worlds Hunters.

Im also immensely grateful to my dear friends: Andrea Bilbow of ADDISS in the U.K., Sari Solden and Ellen Littman, Ph.D., for their brilliant work on ADHD and women and girls, and Richard Silberstein, Ph.D., for his groundbreaking research work on ADHD and creativity. Additionally, Edward Hallowell, M.D., and John Ratey, M.D., have done so very, very much to popularize these ideas and make credible the notion that were different but not broken.

Special thanks go to Susan Barrows, one of the worlds great proof-readers, who caught at least a hundred typos in the early draft of this book while simultaneously offering valuable editorial assistance, and new and important insights into ADD.

Thanks also to Kyle Roderick and Alexis Fischer for useful suggestions that added to the content of this book.

My agent, Bill Gladstone, and Ehud Sperling, Jon Graham, Jeanie Levitan, Patricia Rydle, and Kayla Toher at Inner Traditions did such a great job bringing this book back into print in a new and improved format. Thanks so much!

And special thanks are due to my wife, Louise, whose patience and support have helped bring this work (and so many other projects) to fruition.

Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middleclass person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps.

FROM WANDERING: NOTES AND SKETCHES BY HERMANN HESSE. TRANSLATED BY JAMES WRIGHT WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF HIS SON FRANZ PAUL.

FOREWORD

Re-affirming the Value of All Human Beings

Michael Popkin, Ph.D.

E very once in a while, someone comes along who takes a body of knowledge and tilts it in such a way that a new view of the information raises up in a flash of hope and encouragement. Thom Hartmann is one of those people, and through this book he has finally put the concept of ADHD into a context that we can appreciate.

With as many as 10 percent of the Western worlds children suspected of having ADHD, Ive often wondered how nature could have made such a mistake. Or was it a mistake? Perhaps we were just overdiagnosinglabeling more children as ADHD than was warranted. Thom Hartmanns insight into this phenomenon offers a third alternativeone that both re-affirms the wisdom of nature and the value of all human beings.

As the author and director of Active Parenting Publishers, I have spent the past three decades developing programs to help parents. Each of these programs is based on the idea that the purpose of parenting is to protect and to prepare children to survive and to thrive in the kind of society in which they will live. All of the skills that we teach to parents in Active Parenting, from discipline to communication to encouragement, are designed to instill in children those qualities that will enable them to thrive in a contemporary democratic society. To approach the critical job of parenting without looking at the world in which our children will liveand the qualities and skills necessary to thrive in that worldmakes as little sense as, well, lets say trying to hunt wild bear in the middle of a cornfield.

Yet Thom Hartmann has illuminated the fact that this is exactly the situation that ADHD children and adults find themselves in, namely, hunters in a farming society. Although tremendously frustrating for the ADHD person, there is nothing innately defective about the conditionat least as it is reframed in this book. It is simply a matter of having some of the right skills for the wrong time.