CH.A.D.D., nationally, is the leading non-profit organization serving individuals with AD/HD and their families, with more than 16,000 members in 200 local chapters throughout the country. In 1994, after my younger brother was diagnosed with ADD, my mother began to volunteer for CH.A.D.D. of Nassau County, a chapter organization with approximately 300 member families. It is a group that provides education for the parents and teachers of children with AD/HD, as well as for adults with it.

For almost a decade my mother volunteered tirelessly, and in many capacities, including co-president and vice president. She was also the group’s publicity chairman, which entailed writing and publishing the CH.A.D.D. of Nassau County newsletter. Fredy, as her friends call her, also was a support group leader, and was on the Telephone Squad. And in her “spare time,” my mother also led seminars in her school district for educators to provide a better understanding of the children with learning disabilities and AD/HD in their classrooms.

Today, my mother is enjoying an active retirement, but still keeping busy in her community with various charitable organizations. She is now a dedicated volunteer with Hadassah, which supports the Hadassah Hospital in Israel, including stem cell and cancer research. During the last three years, she has been the donor chairman and organized this year’s annual donor lunch. Fredrica recently joined ORT America and plans to become very involved with this organization and support their efforts to fund educational and vocational initiatives in America, Israel, Latin America and other countries around the world. As an educator, this is an organization she truly believes can “change the world by giving young people the power that comes with knowledge.”

Her work doesn’t stop there! She is also involved with the Women’s Club of Valencia Shores, which raises money for a local battered and abused woman’s center; The Valencia Shores Cancer Research Organization, which raises money to support the Sylvester Cancer Research Center; and the National Council of Jewish Woman, which supports many local community service projects. She has also helped raise money for The Jewish National Fund and Young Judea.

Carol was very bright but did not do well in school. Finally dropped out of high school and got her GED. She went on to college and did well because she was into sports and didn’t have to do much on the academic level.

She went to the University of Illinois which is the only University in U.S. with a wheelchair varsity team. She won many national races and participated in the Paralympics in Barcelona, Spain, in 1992, and won a gold medal in track.

She married and worked as a vet tech and loved animals. But she wasn’t organized in her life and felt something really missing, felt depressed. It was after she was diagnosed with ADHD and got help that she really began to live a full life.

When she and I talk about those times, she reflects that her real difficulty in life was the ADHD and not the birth defect. That is how profound and real attentional issues can be.

Happily she found neurofeedback as a therapy and, through use of EEG and computer technology, she was able to retrain her brain to a much more alert, focused and organized state. It was really amazing how effective it was.

Now she even writes thank-you notes and can study for hours effectively. She is in her second year of acupuncture school and is learning hundreds of Chinese herbs and loving it. Never could she have accomplished this without the neurofeedback. The whole training series took about 4 months and she’s never regressed.

Carol’s Mom

My poor mother struggled day after day with me until she couldn’t handle it. She wasn’t sure how to deal with my stubbornness and get me to cooperate in anything. Finally she broke. One day we had a really hard morning–my mother and my attention span–and she sent me to my room at 9, or so, and told me I couldn’t come out until I had changed my attitude. I resented her for it because of my pride/strong will (which I sometimes think is just one of my character flaws from being the bratty youngest child in my family and not my ADD) and would not budge in changing because I was so angry with her. I did not understand as to what the real problem was. I laid in my bed all day and cried until I went to sleep that night. The only thing I remember eating that day was some hot sauce from Taco Bell that was sitting on my window sill, which I had been so excited to grab handfuls of out of the bins the day before when we went to town for lunch.

My mother had been talking to some of the women in the small town. One of the women had a similar situation with her son and introduced the possibility that it was ADD/ADHD that I was dealing with. In conversing, she mentioned that Ritalin had made a world of difference in her son. The next day, after my mom’s breaking moment and my long confused day of crying in my bedroom, she woke me up and told me to get ready for the day. She was going to take me into town to the doctor in hopes to find a cure for my bad behavior. I was fine with going to the doctor since it meant I would not have to do my studying which I now resented because of how we were communicating with each other. Needless to say, I came home with a bottle of pills and a happy mother full of hope.

I took the medication for about two years. It really did help me in a lot of ways, but I stopped taking them when I moved to Washington and my parents enrolled us in public school. I feel that for some reason I did better in public school because I had more people/distractions around me to divert my attention, but at the same time because it was new and frightening (due to the fact that I had never set foot in a public school before) it forced me find new ways to focus. I still did struggle day-to-day with my ADD but I have also been able to figure out how to somewhat channel my ADD and use it to my advantage.

It is funny how people call it a disorder because I do not find it to be one in the least. There are so many advantages to having ADD/ADHD. I have discovered that individuals with ADD/ADHD are able to find a few select things to really excel in whereas “normal” people have a little knowledge in a lot of areas, but not to the extent that someone with ADD/ADHD has in those few select ones.

I also find that people with ADD/ADHD tend to be more ambitious. I am not sure if this because they hold a lot of enthusiasm for the things they do excel in or because of the amount of daydreaming that goes on in their heads. This is another aspect of ADD that I have dealt with frequently. I find myself staring at walls for long periods of time daydreaming of ridiculous things. My dad has ADD as well. A few years after I was diagnosed with ADD, I was rummaging through his stuff from when he was a kid. I came across his report cards and in EVERY single report card the teacher left the comment “Sam needs to stop daydreaming in class”. It has been interesting to watch his behavior and find the similarities that we have in our ADD.

Though I have suffered from the disadvantages to dealing with ADD/ADHD, I am grateful to have it for the advantages that come with it.

Ty apparently has a very moving success story detailing his struggles with ADHD as a child and eventually dropping out of his first year of college, to finally seeking diagnosis and treatment for his ADHD and becoming one of the most well-known and well-loved TV personalities. He has been a spokesperson to help raise awareness about ADHD for several years now and, in honor of ADHD Awareness Week

“As an adult with ADHD, I know how important it is to be able to focus and get work done each day. After I was diagnosed and started treatment for my ADHD symptoms, I was able to hold steady jobs in the construction and graphic design businesses, which ultimately led to me hosting ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

I know, firsthand, the importance of understanding and treating ADHD. I believe if I’d been diagnosed and treated earlier, I would have struggled less as a child,”

Check out Ty’s interview with ABC News here: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=5428757

Spread the word, talk to those you know. Let’s see if we can’t get to Ty share his great story with Another Daily Dose! A video blog would be a great contribution & inspiration to this new community! What a great example of succeeding with ADHD!

Diagnosed at the age of 4 during the ‘hyperactive’ craze of the early 1980s (pre-ADHD definition), this Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder is not something that I have ever been able to touch or feel, but something I am only able to notice or pinpoint after the fact. Incidents or pseudo-moments of aloofness or rushes to judgment (the ever-popular ‘impulsive behavior’) happen on the regular, my checks and balances not in effect really unless under the influence of any of the popular control drugs on the market (RITALIN: off-and-on from kindergarten through early college; CONCERTA: summer and fall 2006). I suffer from genuine moments, let’s say deficits, of physically being there for events unfolding around me, of which I have no or minimal recollection.

I start useless fights with my girlfriend over the minutia of detail, something that she said randomly that I dwell upon. This something is usually the fifth sentence, third-seventeenth words of that sentence in a paragraph of speech that is tangential in nature. I am stuck in the rut of focusing on that, dwelling on that, fearing that which was said on the random. Then, a hummingbird whispers to a worm that it is about to have for dinner some two miles away and I snap out of the deficit in question.

This however is not to be about the toils, it is a song to the triumphs, here goes. Against some odds, I am the owner of a Bachelor of Sciences in Speech/Communication, Broadcasting. Following graduation I worked for a few years as a Sports Journalist with two separate newspapers. Suffering the squirrellys at the hands of my ADHD nature, I decided I was not climbing the ladder quickly enough, not making enough money and hopped into the mortgage sales game.

For a little while I made good money. The market fell apart and I had not the patience nor the coin to ride out the adjustment period necessary to succeed in these realms again and found that I had to leave the business.

Having built up some debt over the years, I found it necessary to work two full time jobs to the tune of 80 hours a week to get me on my feet again and to blast away debt. After six months of rocking that schedule, I was made an offer by one of my then two employers that pays me 90% of my income that I made over the two posts and am able to spend and save a little bit with each pay.

I work for an alarm security that runs its own central station (dispatch center that receives home/business alarm panel signals (usually false alarms) and notifies the proper authorities and contacts associated with individual accounts). I am a manager who has been assigned the task to bring the central station up to full/higher functionality. I am told the job, once the revamp is completed, will turn into a sales/dealer support/account specialist type of position.

Some would deem this as a success. I, ever the dreamer, see it as a small victory in what could be a lifelong war to be able to spend my working hours somehow fulfilled. This goes something to the effect of, ‘Yea. Now I know I can keep a job that I am not terribly enthused about.’ I remain unfulfilled.

Fulfillment for me work-wise would be putting my creative mind to use, through writing, through think-tanking, through entertaining, through making folks laugh—all through my odd ways and –isms that are direct results of the skewered way I see the world and interactions therein as a result of the supposed chemical imbalance in my brain that the pundits have come to call ADHD.

Dissatisfied with the current job situation, I constantly seek creative projects that will allow me the balance and justification to keep my current job in tact, for reasons other than just keeping the bills paid and money in my pocket. I have acted in two independent films, have a stand-up comic routine ready for the unveiling (which once unveiled will no doubt score me the chance to step in and help Lorne Michaels with making Saturday Night Live relevant again) and six separate ideas for novels/screenplays that suffer false starts or long pauses (when any of the other active ideas need to be written on for three days and then be put aside for one of the others).

The most shining golden sunny creative ‘side’ project I have going on right now is a promising start to a freelance writing career. I have written web content for an artist and a couple of non-profits and am currently assembling newsletters and annuals reports for entities providing genuine benefits for humankind. An entrepreneurial direction with a focus on being able to share with folk seems to be the ideal direction for my defining my own success.

Is the bar that measures success for those who suffer from ADHD set lower than that of the rest of the functional world? I think so. Using that measure, I have exceeded the expectations of society and therefore can be deemed a success.

I have a 16-year-old client that reports after 3 sessions of neurofeedback therapy he was able to study chemistry for three hours straight the night before a test. He maintained concentration during the test the next day. He completed two papers days faster than prior to neurofeedback and now can pay attention in class.

While this is wonderful progress, it does take some time for the brain to learn and remember. This is permanent learning, kind of like getting braces on your teeth. You have beautiful teeth when you are done. You can have a more attentive beautiful brain with neurofeedback therapy.

I just wanted to get the word out that there is a permanent solution to a life of ADD/ADHD.