Posted on

Does This Child Beater Need Help Or A Trip To Hell?

It’s a video that fills a parent like me with rage: A judge giving his 16-year-old disabled daughter a vicious beating.

If you watch the video itself, it’s nothing but terrible. The father is pissed because his daughter was apparently grabbing music and videos off the Internet and proceeds to lash her for several minutes. For much of the video, you hear the daughter screaming. The mom is in the video, too, joining in on the beating, though the daughter claims her father forced her mother to do it.

Here are more details (and the video) from CNN:

The graphic video drew international outrage after it was posted by a woman who said she was the victim of the beating seven years ago and that her parents — including her father, Aransas County, Texas, Court-At-Law Judge William Adams — were the ones seen beating and cursing at her in the video.

On Wednesday afternoon, Judge Adams was temporarily relieved of his duties for the next two weeks, and a visiting judge will take over his caseload while the matter is being investigated, according to the office of Aransas County Administrative Judge Burt Mills. No court dates were scheduled this week, Mills’ office said. In an interview with KZTV outside his Rockport, Texas, home Wednesday, Adams confirmed to a reporter that he was the man beating his daughter with a belt and a board on the video, taped in 2004.

“She’s mad because I’ve ordered her to bring the car back, in a nutshell, but yeah, that’s me. I lost my temper,” Adams told the TV station. “Her mother was there, she wasn’t hurt … it was a long time ago … I really don’t want to get into this right now because as you can see my life’s been made very difficult over this child.” Adams continued: “In my mind I have not done anything wrong other than discipline my child when she was caught stealing. I did lose my temper, I’ve apologized. It looks worse than it is.”

Speaking via phone to Texas television station KRIS, a woman who identified herself as Hillary Adams, the daughter in the video, said she posted the video, and criticized her father for “making light of the situation.” “I just can’t believe he would say something like, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal,” she said.

She told KRIS she set up the camera to record the incident seven years ago, but waited for “the right time” to release the video. “Waiting this long to publish it has enabled me to look at it with hindsight and not be so caught up in the passion of the moment,” Hillary Adams said. “I think we do, my mother and I, we do need to try to move on past the anger and just concentrate on getting counseling and help.”

So let’s try to see his side of things…

His daughter appears to be a challenge, the type who drives a parent over the edge. I can relate, because my children can certainly drain me of all patience and sanity. But that’s how most kids get, and I don’t beat my kids over it. When you have children, behavioral challenges is one of the things you sign up for, so to speak.

If you can’t control your rage, maybe the problem has more to do with your ability to be a parent than anything else.

As you can see, I’m having trouble seeing his side of things.

The reason is simple. Most of us lose our patience with our children on a daily basis. We punish them for their transgressions. We even yell when the situation is particularly bad. But most of us keep our hands to ourselves. We don’t smash our children repeatedly in the face.

When I was a kid, my mother took her rage out on us plenty. My sister bore the brunt of the most vicious attacks. Usually the catalyst was over cleaning. My sister was required to do house cleaning every morning before school, and if she missed a spot, she paid for it.

My mother was going through a lot of her own hell back then, and she has admitted more than once that she wished she had acted differently. I forgave her a long time ago. Ours still isn’t a very strong or healthy relationship.

Seven years later, this guy doesn’t think he did anything wrong. No remorse.

Yeah, it’s hard to see his side of things.

I think I speak for all the parents whose kids drive them crazy from time to time; the parents who are driven to the brink but are able to control their fists:

Fuck this guy.

As my friend Joe Yuska said on his Facebook page, “I (and the human race) have no use for someone who beats their kids like this. And to top it off this guy is a judge. Maybe he’ll get locked up with some of the guys he put there.”

OCD Diaries

Posted on

Being A Misfit Is Your Saving Grace

We often come undone when we start comparing our quirk-infested selves to so-called normal people. Instead, we should celebrate our insanity and put it to work for us.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:3d8yD2C8kNbs54mL9wboE1]

I used to despise myself for the things I thought were weird and out of place. The windmill hands. The inability to sit up straight in a chair. My big nose and ears. My laughter toward things others would consider serious and even tragic. My tendency to tell stories that are way out of context with the conversation around me. My inability to feel at ease in a room full of people.

In hindsight, I wasted a lot of nights worrying about all these things. I was certain nobody else had the strange behaviors I had and still have.

As I get older, I realize two things:

1. A lot of people have the same strange behaviors as me, including the constant pacing and talking to myself.

2.) People who fail to act out of the ordinary at least once in awhile bore me. Our quirks make us interesting. Our funny dress and way of talking can brighten up someone else’s otherwise ho-hum day.

I didn’t fully appreciate these things until I started working with my current boss, Derek Slater. One of the first things I noticed about him three years ago is that he was different from many of the editors I’ve worked with in the past. Journalism is a career inhabited by a lot of misfits who don’t always know how to walk in step with the rest of the crowd.

I’ve heard editors complain bitterly about how difficult these people were to work with because they were always off step with the newsroom machinery. They tended to ignore deadlines. Their writing wouldn’t conform with standard journalism 101. The people you report on can be infuriating to deal with, pulling tantrums over quotes they give you once they see the absurdity of their words in print.

I used to be one of those editors who couldn’t deal with these people, even though I was every bit the infuriating misfit myself.

The thing I immediately noticed about Derek is that he enjoys all of the above. To him, the folks who don’t behave and wait their turn to speak are simply interesting and entertaining. They help keep the world spinning.

Which is probably why I’ve lasted in this job. Not that I haven’t pissed him off more than a few times. And I don’t think he particularly enjoys it when people ignore deadlines.

I knew a reporter once who was always maligned for his aloofness. He would come in at strange hours, file stories and leave without telling anyone. His stories would just appear in the queue out of nowhere. He wore the same stained pants all the time. One day, he went into a gun shop to take lessons in how to handle the weapon. He pointed the gun at his temple and shot his brains onto the people and things around him. I was not kind to him back when I had the chance.

I sometimes wonder if more compassion for this kid — acceptance of his weirdness — would have made a difference.

My speculation is that not fitting in was too much for him in the end. He wouldn’t be the first person to end it for that reason. He won’t be the last.

I was lucky. I learned to see my misfit ways as a saving grace, the thing that gave me the strength to accept the strange and out-of-place things that have littered my life.

I see it as a gift, really. Like many gifts, it comes with a lot of baggage and can make my life and that of those around me unmanageable at times.

But when properly nurtured and controlled, it can help you make the big differences that make life worth living.

Posted on

An October Snowstorm? It Could Be Worse

New England is in the crosshairs of a rare, October snowstorm that could dump 3-6 inches on parts of my state. People on Facebook are freaking out. But let’s look at the bright side. Yes, there is one.

Mood music:

I’m not typically given to positive attitudes in the face of bad weather. In fact, I’ve written at length about the crummy impact too much cloudiness, rain and snow can have on me.

My moods almost always hit the depths when there’s too much rain, snow, cold and darkness.  It throws me into a prolonged period of discouragement and depression. All I want to do is fall asleep in my chair, but that’s not possible most of the time. It becomes a lot harder NOT to binge on the things my addiction craves.

I’m not a special case. In the book “Lincoln’s Melancholy” by Joshua Wolf Shenk, we see how long periods of gloomy weather drove Abraham Lincoln to suicidal thoughts in the 1840s, two decades before he was president. It’s a common problem.

All that said, Saturday’s weather forecast should be freaking me out. A few years ago, it would have. I have plans for the day, and a storm like this will probably ruin them. There are warnings of power outages, which make me particularly uneasy.

It’s not freaking me out though, and it shouldn’t freak you out, either.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not particularly happy about the forecast. I just want to have the Halloween weekend I’ve been expecting. But as sucky as it may seem to many of you, there’s a positive perspective to be had. Simply put, it could be much worse. Consider the following:

–On Halloween 20 years ago, we were hit with a devastating storm that left coastal communities deep under sea water. I was living in the Point of Pines, Revere, at the time and mine was one of three houses in the neighborhood that escaped the flood waters. The neighborhood as a whole resembled a war zone after that storm. This storm is nothing like that.

–The arrival of snow means we’ve seen the killing frost, which means the outdoor allergens are dead until spring. That’s something to celebrate in my house, where allergies hit all of us hard.

–Snow in October is unsettling, but it also shakes up normal patterns and habits we need to be jolted from once in awhile.

–Whatever happens, the sun ALWAYS comes out again. In fact, the forecast calls for a warming trend next week. Not a bad way to start November.

So don’t get mad at the weather forecasters. They are merely delivering the picture as it looks to them now. And the only reason that picture drives us to depression and distraction is because we let it.

7-day forcast

Posted on

Teddy Roosevelt Did It All. What’s Your Excuse?

Today is Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday, which I bring up because his is the ultimate story about staring adversity in the face, grinning and spitting in its eye.

Mood music:

TR was a sickly boy whose asthma often left him struggling for breath. He could have used that as an excuse early on to avoid life’s big challenges. Instead, he lifted weights obsessively and built himself into a bull of a man who would live what he called “the strenuous life” until it drove him to the grave.

TR went through a lot of bad stuff in his life. Let me demonstrate with a little help from Wikipedia:

–Sickly and asthmatic as a child, Roosevelt had to sleep propped up in bed or slouching in a chair during much of his early years, and had frequent ailments.

–His first wife Alice died young of an undiagnosed case of kidney failure two days after their infant Alice was born. His mother Mittie died of typhoid fever on the same day, eleven hours earlier, in the same house.

–His youngest son was shot down behind German lines during the first world war.

Despite all that hell, he lived every day like it was his last.

–He was a prolific author, writing with passion on subjects ranging from foreign policy to the importance of the national park system. wrote about 18 books (each in several editions), including his Autobiography,[90] The Rough Riders[91] History of the Naval War of 1812,[92] and others on subjects such as ranching, explorations, and wildlife. His most ambitious book was the four volume narrative The Winning of the West, which connected the origin of a new “race” of Americans (i.e. what he considered the present population of the United States to be) to the frontier conditions their ancestors endured throughout the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries.

–He was a political warrior. We all know he was president, but before that he was governor of New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, vice president, NY police commissioner and a state assemblyman.

–While running to win back the presidency in 1912 (he didn’t succeed), he was shot in the chest. He delivered his speech anyway, speaking for 90 minutes.

–After the presidency, he lived hard right to the end, going on expeditions of Africa and South America (the latter journey nearly killing him) and staying active in politics.

I think of him whenever I have a tough day, get sick or experience tragedy. He never took it lying down, and neither will I.

So, what’s your excuse?

Posted on

Before You Hate Someone For Life, Consider This

We all have someone in our personal life who we hate. There’s often a good reason for it, especially if you’ve been molested. But we often loathe someone before we’ve considered all the complexities of the relationship.

I’ve been there. But as I get older, the chip on my shoulder gets smaller and I’m better at seeing the other side. In that spirit, let’s consider the following:

Mood music:

A lot of us hate one or both of our parents because we felt neglected or we were physically and verbally abused as kids.

People think I hate my mother because we haven’t spoken much in 5 years, but the truth is that under all the bitterness and resentment I still love her. In hindsight, two of her three kids were very sick as children and one didn’t survive. Her marriage to my father ended badly. She was also from a line of women who had the chronic urge to lash out. Inevitably, some of that’s going to rub off.

In hindsight, I think she did the best she could with the tools she had. The problem now is just learning to get along and setting boundaries that will be respected.

People who remember me from my days at The Eagle-Tribune probably think I hate some of the bosses I had while there, especially between late 2000 and early 2002. I did for a long while, but no longer. Looking back, one or two people struggled with their own health problems and were equally prone to depression.

When you spend every waking hour in fear that you’re not going to measure up and that someone somewhere is out to get you, you will have a hard time being a nice person. When we feel embattled, we have trouble seeing that the person at the focus of our anger is dealing with his or her own pain. Pain makes you do bad things — sometimes to yourself, sometimes to others.

On the flip side, some have questioned my devotion to the Catholic faith. A lot of people hate priests who sexually abused children and I can’t blame them. Molesting a kid is one of the best reasons to hate someone that I can think of. You’re especially going to be inclined to feel that way if you were abused or if, like me, you have children. It’s also easy to hate when you run into churchgoers who hammer you with all their self-righteous views while hypocritically ostracizing people who don’t fit the prim and proper mold. But in our moment of anger, we forget that priests are human with all the same weaknesses we have.

Those who act on their darker impulses deserve to be removed from the picture. It becomes a matter of safety and justice. But when you consider how close a lot of us come to stepping over the edge, it’s hard to keep hating. Besides, a person’s faith shouldn’t be about the damaged humans you have to deal with at church. It should be about you’re direct relationship with the Man upstairs.

If we want to hate and flip off the guy who cuts us off on the highway, it’s worth considering that the guy probably had as shitty a day — or worse — than you’ve had. We’re all capable of being dicks after a rough day.

If we want to hate the weather forecasters because it’s pelting rain and snow when we’re craving warm sunshine, we should remember that at that moment, we’re just being stupid. Especially if we live in New England, where the weather patterns often defy even the most seasoned meteorologists. Besides, its supposed to be hot in summer and cold in winter.

Posted on

Get In The Van And Head To The Channel

A friend from the Point of Pines, Revere shared a memory yesterday. It involved getting in my brother Michael‘s van and going to see a rock legend perform at the Channel in Boston.

Mood music:

Julie Doyle Frascino read my post “Lost Brothers” and posted this on my Facebook page:

“Michael was such a good kid! I remember one time we all piled into that van he had and went to see the Joe Perry Project at The Channel rock club in Boston. It looked like a Cheech and Chong movie when we all pratically fell out of the van in the parking lot! Kids! We were all crazy back then!”

That van was quite a site. The paint was peeling off and the body was covered in rust. Exhaust fumes rose through tiny holes in the floor and into the back. It probably wasn’t good for his asthma.

But that van shuttled kids to a lot of shows at The Channel, which used to stand at 25 Necco St. in Boston. It’s where I first saw live Rock ‘n Roll and I would go on to spend a good chunk of the late 1980s there, usually with Sean Marley, Dan Waters and an assortment of others.

Bands I saw there included Gang Green, The Neighborhoods, Kix, King Diamond, Flotsam and Jetsam, Extreme, The Circle Jerks, Slapshot and The Ramones.

The place had a bar called The Cage for the obvious reason that it was caged in. I couldn’t go in there for the first few years because I was under 21. There were a lot of 18-plus shows there, but I did manage to sneak into one 21-and-over show, which was The Ramones. I skipped the senior prom for that, and never regretted my choice. I couldn’t find a date for the prom, anyway.

They used to have Sunday afternoon shows that I loved going to because they were more lightly attended. It was also typically when the more obscure bands got to play, though one of those shows was The Neighborhoods, which Dan took me to see. Before that day, I had never heard of them. It wasn’t the type of band Sean was inclined to go see, because his tastes by that point were veering off to industrial metal, which wasn’t popular yet.

Dan shared his passion for that stuff, but he also had a deeper appreciation for the more melodic, pop-driven bands.

I spent a lot of angry nights heading to The Channel. I had a chip on my shoulder the size of Texas and I could slip through the front door, become invisible and shake my fist all night to whatever band was playing until I was exhausted and felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. Once I reached that state, I would feel better. That kind of pain is perfect for pushing the anger out a young kid’s pores.

Since my brother was five years older, I didn’t get to go to any shows in that van. But like him, I would shuttle a car full of friends to The Channel in a beat-to-hell, putrid green 1983 Ford LTD station wagon I bought from my aunt after I got my driver’s license. The radio didn’t work so I kept a portable radio in the front seat; one of those big cassette players we used to call ghetto blasters. That car also made a lot of packed runs to the Worcester Centrum to see the bigger bands, including four Metallica shows in 1989 alone, during that band’s “And Justice for All” tour.

But the trips to The Channel were always a lot more fun. They were short runs from Revere, which meant less opportunity for the car to break down en route.

In the worst of times, those were some of the best of times.

Posted on

Thanks For The Memories

Duncan and I took my father to the last place on Earth I wanted to be Saturday afternoon: The family business in Saugus.

Some of you know it as the blue, white and gold striped building across from Kappy’s Liquor store on Route 1. I’ve been trying to keep him out of there since he was released from rehab. Given his slow recovery from two strokes, I didn’t want him climbing stairs.

I also didn’t want him doing work things that would raise his blood pressure. You could say I’ve been trying to insist he do something I would never do: Sit at home and stay out of trouble.

Mood music:

But by the end of the afternoon, it occurred to me that maybe — just maybe — some of us well-meaning family members need to loosen our grip.

The first clue was that he insisted on leaving his wheelchair in the trunk all afternoon. He got around using his walker. As often as he could, he lifted the walker off the ground and took some steps without the help.

Of course there’s the constant danger of an accident. Maybe he’ll slip and fall. Maybe his blood pressure will spike to dangerous levels and set him back further. But when he was contained like he was in the hospital and rehab, you could see the depression setting in.

Saturday he was in the best mood I’ve seen him in since the first stroke in May, and I think it’s because I did loosen the grip and let him do what he wanted: Go through 37 years of paperwork in his office. He knows he’s going to be home a lot more than he would like. He’s going through the drawers of his desk to find things to save and clean out the stuff that has no more value: Phone bills from the 1990s, for example.

We got in the office and I plopped myself down in a chair, staring intently at my Android phone. That lasted about 30 seconds.

“Billy, see those two book cases next to you?” he asked. “I need you to empty them and put everything over here…”

This was familiar ground. As a kid I worked in his warehouse. I pretended to work, anyway. Those who remember the younger me will recall a long-haired slacker with moods that would rise and fall like a hammer in the hands of a coke addict.

I always felt like I was in a cage, chafing against my father’s constant orders. I rebelled hard. I’d hide behind boxes in the back of the building, chain smoking when I was supposed to be filling out inventory sheets.

In hindsight, I had the same problem you see in a lot of idealistic college kids: I thought this work was beneath me. I was too smart for this shit. I was destined for bigger things. Or so I thought. Back then I often confused being educated with being smart.

My father’s lessons about hard work and the value of a dollar eventually caught on. I just had to have two kids and a mortgage before I got it.

This time, I put the phone down, got up and started the clean out. I found a couple empty canisters used to store blueprints and gave them to Duncan, who happily grabbed scissors and markers and set about building himself a couple missile launchers.

He was also in good spirits because we found a package of “carpet skates” my father bought for the kids a few years ago but shelved because he figured I wouldn’t be crazy about the boys sliding across the living room and smashing into furniture.

I found this picture of me, Michael and Wendi visiting Santa Clause sometime in the early 1970s. I’m holding the doll and sulking over something, perhaps the fact that my siblings got to sit on Santa’s lap and I didn’t.

I also found boxes of trinkets my father had collected from the Republican party over the years. It turns out that he got a lot of stuff in the mail for his donations: Gavels with Newt Gingrich’s signature, a medal with Ronald Reagan’s likeness carved into the center, autographed pictures of George W. Bush thanking “Mr. Brenner” for his support of the party.

Dad let me walk away with one of the Gingrich gavels. I never liked the former House speaker, but there’s something cool about holding a gavel in your hand. It now sits on my desk at the office, where I’ll probably bang it on the mouse pad during moments of fidgeting, to the annoyance of co-workers.

There had to be nearly 20 years worth of these trinkets. Some people, like me, would have proudly displayed them around the office. Not my father, though. Appearances don’t mean much to him. The trinkets sat unopened in white boxes on the shelves, buried under blueprints and billing forms.

As I was playing with the trinkets, Dad was finding a lot of things from the past, some of it painful.

There were outtakes from my late brother‘s yearbook photo shoot.

And he found my brother’s death certificate.

I’m sure he’s looked at it a hundred times or more, but this was the first time I saw it. Death certificates are cold documents with a thudding finality to them.

They say nothing about the life. Just the cause and location of death, age, occupation (student), parents, place of death (Lynn Hospital, which is now the site of a Stop & Shop) etc.

Last year, I spent a few afternoons in the warehouse across the street, digging through a bunch of rotting old boxes in search of old notebooks from my song lyric-writing days. I never found them. It turns out, though, that I was like the Nazis in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — digging in the wrong place. All the interesting stuff was sitting in my father’s office all along, collecting dust.

It could have been a morbid trip back in time, my father closing out the defining chapters of his life as he prepared to spend the rest of his days in solitary confinement.

But it wasn’t for one simple reason: That whole afternoon my father stubbornly moved around without a wheelchair, determined to do whatever the fuck he pleased, no matter what well-meaning loved ones were telling him.

He was preparing for the next chapter, and like many of his actions over the years, it was a teachable moment for me.

Posted on

My Mood Swing: A Soundtrack

I’m in a rotten mood this afternoon and I’m not sure why. Various people are pissing me off though. So I’m listening to songs that seem to commiserate with me. Allow me to share:

http://youtu.be/PBT5nAqMwvs

http://youtu.be/TraSBSNfpCg

That’s better.

Posted on

Feel It, Don’t Fight It: Making The Disorder Work For You

Instead of fighting mental disorder — be it OCD or A.D.H.D. — picture yourself accepting and even embracing it, then learning to use it to your advantage.

It’s kind of like Luke Skywalker learning to use and control the Force instead of it controlling him.

Yesterday’s post on mental illness as a luxury item resonated with several readers, especially the part where I quote Edward (Ned) Hallowell, psychiatrist and co-author of “Driven to Distraction” and “Delivered From Distraction.”

Here’s what my friend Heather Stockwell said:  “Dr. Hallowell shaped a lot of my perceptions about A.D.H.D. and how to live with it rather than fighting it.

From my friend Anne Genovese: “Ned is a great guy and has developed many techniques to deal with his A.D.H.D. Ask him about highly purified EPA and DHA. We did a study with him on about 20 A.D.H.D. kids; the ones on the ultra-purified fish oils did way better concentration-wise than the ones considered to be doing well on medication.”

Hallowell has written about mental disorder being the stuff legends are made of. The thinking is that you have to be a bit crazy or off-balance to do the things that change who we are and how we live:

“Consider also the positives that so often accompany A.D.H.D.: being a dreamer and a pioneer, being creative, entrepreneurial, having an ability to think outside the box (with some difficulty thinking inside of it!), a tendency to be independent of mind and able to pursue a vision that goes against convention. Well, who colonized this country? People who have those traits!

“Back in the 1600s and 1700s, you had to have special qualities — some would say special craziness — to get on one of those boats and come over to this uncharted, dangerous land. And the waves of immigration in subsequent centuries also drew people who possessed the same special qualities. In many ways, the qualities associated with A.D.H.D. are central to the American temperament, for better or worse. I often tell people that having A.D.H.D. is like having a Ferrari engine for a brain, but with bicycle brakes. If you can strengthen your brakes, you can win races and be a champion, as so many highly accomplished people with A.D.H.D. are. But if you don’t strengthen your brakes you can crash and burn as, sadly, many people who have A.D.H.D. but don’t know how to manage it ultimately do.”

That’s also true of people with OCD, like the late Joey Ramone, Harrison Ford and Howie Mandel.

Early on in my efforts to get control of my life, one of my biggest struggles was that I didn’t want to completely rid myself of the OCD. I knew that I owed some of my career successes to the disorder. It drove me hard to be better than average. I needed that kick in the ass because being smart didn’t come naturally to me. I had to work at it and do my homework.

There was a destructive dark side, of course: The OCD when stuck in overdrive would leave me with anxiety attacks that raised my fear level and drove me deep into my addictive pursuits. That in turn left me on the couch all the time, a used up pile of waste.

The two sides of the disorder were like two buzz saws spinning in opposite directions. My brain, caught between them, took a lot of cuts.

My challenge became learning to shut one of the blades down while letting the other keep spinning. Or, as Dr. Hallowell put it, developing a set of breaks to slow it down when I needed to.

My deepening faith has helped considerably, along with the 12 Steps of Recovery, therapy, changes in diet (more on that tomorrow) and, finally, medication.

You could say those are the things my breaks are made of.

I still need a lot of work, and the dark side of my OCD still fights constantly with the good side. I’ve come to see the OCD as a close friend. Like a lot of close friends, there are days I want to hug it and days I want to launch my boot between its legs.

My progress has come with a fair share of irony: Without the fear and panic driving me, I sometimes act more like someone with A.D.H.D. I lose focus, my mind wafting into that place that makes you forget to put your coat in the closet and pay the electric bill. Erin has noted more than once that I’ve become a slob.

I have. But I am in a happier place than I used to be, so it’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept, even if earns me the occasional scolding.

Posted on

Is Mental Illness A ‘Luxury’ Disease?

There’s an interesting debate unfolding on The New York Times website about mental illness in America. What got my attention was the suggestion that mental illness and the related treatments are luxury items.

Mood music:

The debate — between a variety of professionals in the mental health field — runs the spectrum from suggesting mental illness is still misunderstood and undertreated to being over diagnosed and used as an excuse to hide from personal responsibility.

From the introduction:

Whether you call it hypochondria or American exceptionalism, the numbers are plain: Americans lead the world in diagnoses of mental health problems.

For some conditions, perhaps wealth explains the disparity: in developing nations, more people are focused on pressing needs like food and shelter, making depression a “luxury disorder” in wealthy nations like the United States.

But are there other factors at play for conditions like attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, that may be “culture-specific”? Maybe the condition is more common in the United States because the high-energy, risk-taking traits of A.D.H.D. are part of America’s pioneer DNA. Or maybe the same behavior is common elsewhere, but given another label? Some critics would argue that American doctors, teachers and parents are simply too quick to diagnose A.D.H.D. and medicate children. Do the American medical and educational systems inflate the numbers?

Edward (Ned) Hallowell, a psychiatrist and co-author of “Driven to Distraction” and “Delivered From Distraction,” suggests that A.D.H.D. in particular is part of the American DNA:

There are two main reasons the diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is high in the U.S. First of all, our gene pool is loaded for A.D.H.D. Consider the central symptoms of the condition: distractibility, impulsivity and restlessness. Consider also the positives that so often accompany A.D.H.D.: being a dreamer and a pioneer, being creative, entrepreneurial, having an ability to think outside the box (with some difficulty thinking inside of it!), a tendency to be independent of mind and able to pursue a vision that goes against convention. Well, who colonized this country? People who have those traits!

His description of someone with A.D.H.D. is priceless:

I often tell people that having A.D.H.D. is like having a Ferrari engine for a brain, but with bicycle brakes. If you can strengthen your brakes, you can win races and be a champion, as so many highly accomplished people with A.D.H.D. are. But if you don’t strengthen your brakes you can crash and burn as, sadly, many people who have A.D.H.D. but don’t know how to manage it ultimately do.

As someone with OCD, I’d add that the description also fits for my condition.

Peter R. Breggin, a psychiatrist in Ithaca, N.Y. and author of more than 20 books and the director of the Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education and Living says the drugging of children for A.D.H.D. has become an epidemic:

The A.D.H.D. diagnosis does not identify a genuine biological or psychological disorder. The diagnosis, from the 2000 edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” is simply a list of behaviors that require attention in a classroom: hyperactivity (“fidgets,” “leaves seat,” “talks excessively”); impulsivity (“blurts out answers,” “interrupts”); and inattention (“careless mistakes,” “easily distractible,” “forgetful”). These are the spontaneous behaviors of normal children. When these behaviors become age-inappropriate, excessive or disruptive, the potential causes are limitless, including: boredom, poor teaching, inconsistent discipline at home, tiredness and underlying physical illness. Children who are suffering from bullying, abuse or stress may also display these behaviors in excess. By making an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, we ignore and stop looking for what is really going on with the child. A.D.H.D. is almost always either Teacher Attention Disorder (TAD) or Parent Attention Disorder (PAD). These children need the adults in their lives to give them improved attention.

He makes an important point about the use of medication. A lot of parents turn to drugs because they simply don’t know what to do. Junior is a terror in school and on the playground and he’s exhausting everyone at home with his behavior. Turning to drugs is often an act of desperation. Desperation can be a good thing. It can force us to deal with our problems in ways we weren’t willing to consider before. But it can also rush us into bad decisions.

Erin and I are walking this tightrope with Duncan. We’ve had him tested in the doctor’s office and at school, and he has all the textbook traits of someone with A.D.H.D. But at 8 years old it’s still difficult to know for sure if this is A.D.H.D or something else that acts like it. Pills could tame his difficulties, but if he has something else that’s simply acting like A.D.H.D. — bi-polar disorder or OCD, for example — the pills that work for A.D.H.D. could make those other things much worse. So we’re not doing the medication.

This much I can tell you: When his older brother asks aloud if Duncan has A.D.H.D., Duncan bristles. He doesn’t like the label. And who can blame him?

I can tell you that Duncan has made a lot of progress with the other tools we’ve deployed: cool-down exercises, activities to channel anger (painting is one of his favorites) and so on. But there are still big challenges every day. And that’s ok.

Does the search for a problem and solution make us over-reactive parents? I don’t think so. When you see your child struggling, your instinct is to help them find a better way. Their happiness is what matters to us in the end.

Are kids diagnosed too easily and drugged too quickly? I’m sure of it. But to simply write the parents off as over-reactive is silly.

Society in general has learned to take everything too far. Ever since tragedies like the Columbine High School massacre, school administrators and teachers go crazy over things that are usually nothing. A kid collecting sticks and rocks in the schoolyard because he simply likes to collect these things becomes a danger. Why would a kid collect rocks and sticks if he didn’t intend to hurt his classmates with them, right?

We all struggle to find the sensible middle ground, because American society has seen some really bad shit in the last two decades: 9-11, Columbine, kids knifing each other in schools. We’ve seen the worst of the worst. The resulting fear can blind us to the fact that we’ve also seen the best of the best, including the advances in medical care.

When I was Duncan’s age and I was behaving badly, I was simply written off as a behavioral problem. I saw it happen to other kids as well. In hindsight, the building blocks of my mental illness were already swirling around in my head, shaped by the hard stuff I was experiencing back then, like my parents’ divorce, my brother’s death, the hospitalizations with Crohn’s Disease and the schoolyard bullying over my excessive weight.

Behavioral problems aren’t written off as easily today, and we should all feel good about that. The trick is to make the best use of all the newer mental health treatments, and that’s still a work in progress for all of us.

In my case, I’m lucky because I was determined to try everything else before trying medication. That resulted in several years of hard self-discovery and a better understanding of how I got the way I am. It led me to an array of coping tools I may not have learned to use had I turned directly to medication. Eventually I learned that my brain chemistry was still too far off center for me to control without medicine, and that’s when I tried the Prozac, which has worked exceptionally well.

It didn’t turn me into a robot. I’m still me. I see everything and feel everything. I still get depressed. But with the Prozac correcting the chemical traffic in my brain, these things no longer incapacitate me.

Is treatment a luxury? Sure. If you live in deep poverty and your biggest concern is where the next meal for you and your family is coming from, that’s going to be your first focus.

But if you aren’t in that situation and you have the luxury of dealing with mental illness, you shouldn’t feel bad about it.

You should simply thank God and do your best to pay it forward.

fulllength-depression-1