Driven To Distraction : Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

This book was recommended to me by a doctor. It has lots of real life stories about people with various types of ADD. As I suspect my son and I may have some symptoms of ADD, this book has been extremely helpful. I highly recommend it!

Someone commented that it doesn't help coping, it does because recognizing is the first step to coping. Also, different people's ADD manifests differently as people have different interests which they hyperfocus on or jump between and ignore everything else. It takes years of discipline and effort to cope or get it to work to your advantage instead of disadvantage. There is no simple answer, and this book won't give you that, but it will help you understand the nature of the problem which in turn will help you come up with a strategy that works for you. After all, most people with ADD are very intelligent, they can usually find what works for them.

The book reviewed is "Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with ADD from Childhood through Adulthood." I bought this book after reading so many glowing reviews, maybe I should have paid attention to the negative reviews.

My main reason for buying the book is for finding helpful advice for coping with ADD - in my logic, that meant a little self-help and management of this situation. How can I limit the distractions? What can I do to keep on track throughout the day?

Instead, what I found in this book was plenty of information on recognizing ADD. The book starts off with case study after case study after endless case study, showing quite obvious ADD behavior. There is no solution or even attempt to curtail these activities in the case studies, it just shows the various examples. One of the guiding principles of this book is to recognize your own behavior, see where you fit in the pattern and then get tested. What I want to know is: what's next?

To be fair, there is good information on how to talk to friends and family about ADD if you do in fact have it. That's about as much as I can be fair. One must patiently read through some 240+ pages to get to the "how do I make the best of it" part.

Around p.244, we are introduced to "Practical Tips on the Management and Treatment of ADD". There are good points here on using calendars, notes, etc. to keep in line. But with all the cases mentioned in the book, I found it quite an oversight not to mention if these tips worked with any other earlier cases, or just examples of how they fit in with person X or Y.

All in all, there is good information on the early stages: self-detection, getting tested, looking for patterns in children, introducing this to family and friends, but little in the way of actually finding solutions to work through the ADD in personal or business/school life. Because of this extreme oversight, I cannot find it within myself to give this book more then 2/5 stars. I do not recommend this book.

This book is a real page turner and eye opener for all those with ADD..its very insightful and helpful....a must read.

Thanks to the writers of this book I found them talking about me as it they knew me all my life.

Never knew why I was so easily hostile and exceedingly agressive when pushed around by my larger peers. I had no idea what ADHD, (Distractability Syndroms) was about me to the "T".

The writers both have ADHD; who better to write the book????

GARY R TOMS SR HOLLOWELL & RATEY'S BIGGEST FAN