Transcription
The Jurgen Experience. I was just watching this very disturbing commercial, yeah, um, yesterday with children and it was talking about ADHD. And it showed a kid that was not paying attention in class, and it showed these kids like playing around and doing things they weren't supposed to be doing. Yes. And then they introduced this medication, and then you have the child raising their hand, and then you have everyone clapping, and you have the child with a big smile on their face. And you've medicated your child to be a successful and integrated person in society.
Should I? Should I spit off about ADHD? Yes, please. That was my first book on ADHD. It's "The American Scattered" or "Scattered Minds," depending on which edition you got. And that was after I was diagnosed with it myself in my 50s. Um, what does it mean ADHD? Yeah. What is it exactly? Is it real? Oh, it's real. But what does it mean? Well, like, if someone has ADHD, it's not like you have herpes, right? Like you say, "Oh, I've got, you got a disease." Well, uh, what is it? Well, they, that's the whole point is that the medical profession and a lot of the so-called experts think about it as a disease, another one of these inherited diseases. In fact, they say it's the most heritable mental illness there is. And I say it's neither an illness nor is it heritable.
So, the the hallmark are difficulty paying attention when you're not motivated. Yeah. So, kind of tuning out, like that kid in the commercial, like me. Okay. Poor impulse control, so that you tend to act out whatever emotion arises. And sometimes the hyperactivity, difficulty sitting still and then to fidget and all that. And that described me to a T. And but as soon as I learned about the diagnosis, I knew something, this is not a disease, and it's not heritable, despite the fact that some of my kids were diagnosed with it.
What is it? So, tuning out is not a disease. So, let me ask you a question, if I may. Okay. If I were to stress you right now, um, create stress, emotional difficulty, or attention for you right now, what would be your options of dealing with that? Of dealing with me? What would be your options? I could get upset, or I could leave. Exactly. You could get upset, flight, or fight. Yeah. But what if you didn't have those options? Yeah. Then you're stuck. And now, what does the brain do when you're stuck like that? Gets distracted. It gets tuned out. Yeah. Tunes out. You want to do other things, think about other things. In other words, it's a coping mechanism. Yeah. It's normal.
I mean, the the idea that your child who is, uh, you know, an eight, nine-year-old ball of energy, filled with, you know, hormones and life and thoughts and things they enjoy, and then you make them sit down all day in this unnatural state in a classroom with fluorescent lights and stare at a teacher that's unmotivated and underpaid and is teaching something in a very boring and non-entertaining way. Yeah. And then if this kid doesn't lock in like a zombie, we need to medicate them. Yeah.
Well, the other part of it is that if you look at my infancy, and it sounds like yours, we spent our first year or two under very difficult circumstances, a lot of stress. Infants can't help but absorb the stress of their parents, right? They can't help it. What does an infant do? Could I have escaped or fought back? Could you have? All we could do is tune out. Yes. But when is this tuning out happening? When our brain is being developed, right? And our brain, this is the part that nobody taught me in medical school, but it turns out that brain science now teaches us that the human brain develops under the impact of the environment. So, the the most salient feature of the environment that shapes the circuits of the human brain is actually the relationship with the parents. And if the parents are present and emotionally attuned and available, child brains develop properly. But if the parents are stressed, the child absorbs the stress. What can they do with it? They tune out. And that tuning out then gets programmed into the brain. And then 10 years later, or 50 years later, we say, "You got this disease." No, you don't. You've got a coping mechanism that's no longer working for you, but it had a function when it first came along.
So, this whole idea, and and by the way, if a family comes to me with an ADHD child, I'll say to them, "What you've got here is a very sensitive child. That sensitive child is picking up on all the vibes, energies, and stresses in your family. I want to help this child deal with the whole family. Look at the parental relationship. Look at how, what stress is there in your life? Look at how you react to the child. Look at, do you understand the child's behavior or the emotions that the child is having, or you're just trying to control the child's behaviors? Look at all that." And very often, parents will tell me after they've read that book on ADHD, they've totally changed their relationship to their child. The child changes. What a surprise. But you go to the most doctors, you got this disease, here's the pill.
And by the way, I took those medications, and they helped me for a while. You know, so I'm not, when you're in your 50s. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not anti-medication. Which ones did you take? I took Ritalin. Um, which I can tell you the story. Sure. So, you know, one of the hallmarks of ADHD is poor impulse control, right? So, um, [Music] I found out about ADHD, and even before I was diagnosed, I took Ritalin. And, you know, why'd you take it before you were diagnosed? Because I'm a doctor, and I could. Hey. And oh, so you diagnosed yourself? Well, they did. And and so you, at least assumed that you had that? Yeah. I knew I had it. And and but not only that, also because I had poor impulse control, I never practiced medicine that way. If you came to me for any problem, my first impulse would never be to write your prescription. Honestly, it was obvious that you needed it for an infection or something. I'd sit down with you and talk to you about what's going on here. But, but not me. Poor impulse regulation. So I went to a colleague of mine, a medical colleague. I said, "Hey, Bev, I think I've got ADHD. Can you, um, can you give me some Ritalin?" So she writes me a prescription. Then I took it in a higher than recommended initial dose, because, I mean, if a little bit is good, then more must be even better. And again, it's not how I practice medicine, right? But I came to myself, that's a totally different ballgame. So I felt immediately present and calm and grounded and real. Yeah. And it's a stimulant. And I went, "Well, it calms the ADHD brain." Then I go home, and my wife says, "You look stoned." Because you're calm. Because, yeah. Well, because I got this glassy-eyed expression. And within a couple of days, the Ritalin made me very depressed. That's one of its potential side effects. So I did see a psychiatrist. I was formally diagnosed, and they gave me Dexedrine. And I took that for a while. That's an amphetamine. Yeah. It's amphetamine. It's another stimulant. Um, and it did help me. I became a much more efficient workaholic. I could do even, it didn't change any of my emotional issues, but it made me more focused and so on. It helped me write my first book. But I, I haven't taken them for decades. Because also, I know that the brain can change if you treat it right.
So, this reliance on medications that we have is is a real poverty of the spirit, the real poverty of imagination, a poverty of medical education. The average doctor never learns this stuff. The average physician never gets a single lecture on brain development, how the brain develops in interaction with their environment. So when they're seeing, let alone do they hear about trauma? They don't hardly at all, right? So when they see an adult with ADHD, or depression, or addiction, or, or, or bipolar conditions, or, or for that matter, autoimmune illness, or anything else, they don't think of trauma. They just think of this disease. And they think that the diagnosis explains everything. But the diagnosis doesn't explain anything. Because think about it. Let's say Gabor or Joe goes to a doctor and they're diagnosed with ADHD. Well, why is, what are the hallmarks of ADHD? Well, tuning out, poor impulse regulation, maybe hyperactivity. Why does Gabor have poor impulse control, hyperactivity, and, uh, tuning out? Because he's got ADHD. How do we know he's got ADHD? Because he's got poor impulse control and tunes out and he's hyperactive. Why is he hyperactive, tunes out, and has poor impulse control? He's got ADHD. How do we know he's got ADHD? Because, you know, it doesn't, it's circular. It doesn't explain it. It doesn't explain anything. Diagnoses describe things, and that there, that can be helpful that way, but they don't explain.
One of the things that people get, they get, they get treated for and they get diagnosed with is anxiety. Yeah. And that one drives me nuts. Yeah. It drives me nuts because people pretend that anxiety is a disease. It's not. And I'm like, my God, the world should make you anxious if you're a sensitive, introspective person. If you're just looking at the world itself and you, you don't put it in perspective, like the world's, it's filled with anxiety. The anxiety is, it's future problem-solving. You're, you're thinking about all the things that can go wrong. You're thinking about your life in a, you know, potentially, uh, devastating way. And that's not a disease. That's just the way you look at the world. And people getting diagnosed with it.
Well, I won't quite agree with you on that one. In what way? I've felt anxious at times. Sure. The world is the same. If I actually, the world is the same, but the way you look at it is not the same, right? The whole point. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So the world is giving you anxiety? No, the world is not giving me anxiety. You're giving yourself anxiety by looking at the world, right? And by how I look at the world? Yeah, because I look into, I can look at the same world one day and feel grounded and connected, and I may have all kinds of concerns about what's happening in the world, but my nervous system won't be on edge. My, I don't know when it's flowing, I won't be anxious. That's my point is that it's not a disease. It isn't a disease, right?
So, remember I talked about those brain circuits of lust and care and rage and and and and seeking and so on? One of the brain circuits that we have, as described by a very prominent late neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, is for panic and grief. Panic and grief are the normal responses of the young human being or the young animal when care isn't available. So when the parents are stressed, distracted, economically or politically, or because of their own unresolved trauma, or whatever is going on in their lives, and they don't respond to the child's distress, they don't pick up the child when they're crying, they make the child be alone when their child is upset, the child's panic circuits get activated, as they should be. Because when the child's panic circuits get activated, they cry for help. Yeah. That's so it's necessary for survival. A young animal should feel panic when the adult is unavailable. In a rational world, in the same world, that child would be responded to. But when children, as in our society, are not responded to in their distress, the panic becomes built into their nervous system. And now you have a lot of anxious people. And that's why more and more kids are being diagnosed. You're right, it's not a disease, it's a response to the environment.
And the thought process of like leaving a child alone when the child's crying is that to toughen the kid up? Is the thought process that you don't want to encourage this sort of behavior because then they'll do it all the time and then you'll develop an indulgent child? Like, what is the thought process? The thought process is that the child's behavior is the problem, and so we have to fix the behavior by controlling it. Now, actually, the opposite is true. Because if you pick up the child when a child has distress, physical or emotional distress, you're teaching a child that the world is safe, and they don't have to be, they don't have to be anxious about it, and they can just ask for help. And it doesn't entrench kind of crying, manipulative behavior. How, how it works. Dr. Daniel Siegel, who's a psychiatrist at UCLA and a very prolific author and mind researcher, he says in his book "The Developing Mind" that the child uses the mature circuits of the adult brain to regulate its own immature, unregulated circuits. So when the adult shows up in a calm, loving way, that the child downloads that into his own nervous system, and then he grows. He doesn't, it's not going to be an infant forever. At some point, he's going to be a mature adult who knows how to take care of themselves. That's a natural process. We don't have to teach kids to be independent. Independent is nature's agenda because the parents are going to die at some point. The mother bear is going to disappear. That bear cub has to be able to look after themselves in a mature, confident way. That's nature's natural agenda. What the mother, what the mother bear needs to do is to meet the, the needs of that infant bear so the infant bear matures. So if we meet the child's needs, they're going to mature out of that helpless state with a sense of self-regulation and calm confidence in their own capacity. When you don't pick kids up, what you teach them is that the world is not available, that they're alone, and that they're helpless. Talk about a formula for anxiety.