Posted by chujoe on June 16, 2010, at 13:52:34
In reply to Re: My doctor doesn't believe i have ADHD » chujoe, posted by violette on June 16, 2010, at 12:00:12
Violette, I hope you won't completely give up on thinking about this stuff -- I find that your information and speculations rhyme with my own! Let me respond to a couple of specific things:
1. I have a cousin with mild autism. A lot of my family tree is lost to me (bad marriages, abandonments, etc.) so there might be others, or none.
2. People tell me I'm very right-brained, which makes sense -- I'm an artist and writer. Richard Bentall in his book "Madness Explained," cites studies that suggest a link between certain forms of mental illness and "over-lateralization" of the hemispheres -- your theory may have empirical support. (Aside: I think there are two kinds of writers: those who write because they are so fluent, and those who write because language is such a struggle for them they need to write and rewrite in order to get their thoughts straight. I'm the second kind of writer.)
3. I learned very early to compartmentalize feelings, but this was largely due to a family dynamic in which most kinds of emotional display were off-limits. This is another case, perhaps, of psychology influencing neuroanatomy.
4. You'd also like Bentall's book because he insists that the names we have for most of these diseases don't really name any single thing, but constellations of underlying symptoms.
poster:chujoe
thread:951172
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100615/msgs/951250.html