A friend recently posted a link on Facebook to a report by a research team from Duke University Medical Central along with some Australian scientists who found that, “Addictive drugs may hijack the same nerve cells and connections in the brain that serve a powerful, ancient instinct: the appetite for salt.” One of the co-authors of the report, Wolfgang Lietke, M.D., Ph.D. said, “We were surprised and gratified to see that blocking addiction-related pathways could powerfully interfere with sodium appetite. Our findings have profound and far-reaching medical implications, and could lead to a new understanding of addiction and the detrimental consequences when obesity-generating foods are overloaded with sodium.” You can read more about the study and its implications for addiction research here.
This finding reminded me of something Tim Bilkey M.D. told me in a consultation following his diagnosis of my ADHD. He noted that in his clinical practice he was finding that patients with ADHD had cravings for salt in snacks not sugar. He wondered whether there might be some connection to the fact that the most commonly prescribed drugs for this condition–Dexedrine and amphetamine–are technically salts.
A comment made in a lecture a few years ago by Umesh Jain, who heads the ADHD clinic at Center For Addiction and Mental Health here in Toronto came back to haunt me over the last couple of days. He said that the major difference between treatment for Adults with ADHD and children is that with the adults you must first deal with the self esteem issues or you won’t get anywhere with treatment. With children, he went on to say, there usually aren’t any self esteem issue. There hasn’t been time. It is a different story with adults where has been failure after failure, defeat after defeat and years of not measuring up, all leading to self condemnation and despair. This is probably the reason that I have trouble controlling my anger when I encounter people who refuse to recognize that the disorder even exists. I hesitate to say that only a person who has been through the kind of failure that a lifetime with ADHD can breed can really understand that. Someone who has been down that path can have a special empathy for another fellow traveler. Perhaps some of us have developed a mechanism that prevents us from feeling sorry for ourselves. You could say this is a part of the resiliency that comes with making it into adulthood coping with a disorder that can be so debilitating. This mechanism doesn’t prevent us from feeling sorry for another individual who is struggling, perhaps still undiagnosed.
I have been puzzled lately, by how quickly I can be moved to tears, not in public, but in the privacy of my own apartment. Any suggestion on television or on the Internet that has to do with human suffering can trigger tears. After the potential for embarrassment I do hold them back in public. It doesn’t seem appropriate for a person with a second degree black belt in karate. But I am still affected.
On the other hand there is an upside to being an adult who has ADHD. Years of failure and defeat but never giving up means you have to have developed resiliency. It means you have staying power and you can survive. If you are an adult who has just been diagnosed–this simple fact may offer hope, perhaps enough hope to help you raise your self esteem.
When I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, a process that took a couple of months, I asked the psychiatrist, “Now what?”
He said, “I’m going to start you on some medication trials, personally I would advise you to take a martial art and I would look at getting a personal coach.”
When I inquired further about coaching he gave me a name and phone number and I called the person and set up a first meeting. The cost at the time, I believe was around $500 a month, which took me aback a bit but within a month or two my earnings were up to the point where it wasn’t too much of a burden. After about three months though, I started to have second thoughts and in spite of the coach’s suggestion that if I followed the process more closely more earnings would improve, I decided to take a break. I never went back although I did try to find another coach a few years later. At that time there were only a few in Toronto that specialized in helping clients who had ADHD. One took weeks to return a phone call and then suggested, by email, that I call at a specific time and when I did there was no answer. I decided that he probably also had ADHD and could benefit from his own coach. I then discussed the matter with a friend and mutual sufferer and in the course of our conversation we came to the conclusion that we both had enough coaching experience to try coaching each other and set up a process to do that and invited others to join us in the experiment in weekly meetings. We call it peer coaching. That was some years ago and although we now meet bi-weekly we are still going strong and last meeting added two new people to the group.
So what do we do? There is actually a fairly rigorous process that we set up. The meeting begins with someone volunteering to chair the meeting and there is a printed agenda. The meeting begins with each attendant invited by the chair to share on a personal update since the last meeting, new information which any of us might have come across concerning ADHD or anything else in neuroscience that might seem helpful and then what has become one of the most important aspects of the meeting although it wasn’t planned to be that. We share what we call ADHD moments and victories. This could be any of the things that make our lives miserable from losing the keys to our front door, or the car, to getting the time wrong for an appointment. What tends to happen is that these little tragedies have a brighter side in that we get to delight out companions with the stories at out next meeting. Victories could mean something such as finding a device that attaches to your keychain that beeps when you clap your hands or getting the time wrong for an medical appointment and calling the office to apologize and asking if they might be able to accommodate you later in the day.
I will describe the other elements of peer coaching in my next post and in a subsequent post try to explain why the psychiatrist that diagnosed me suggested I take a martial art.
Recently, I came cross a reference to the Mozart effect and, although the term sounded vaguely familiar, I really didn’t know what it meant and had to read a definition. That was illuminating as it lead back to a reference to a physician named Alfred A. Tomatis and his work with children with learning disorders and some other crippling neurological problems by improving listening skills. I was quite familiar with Tomatis. But first to back to the Mozart effect which says that listening to Mozart’s music will increase intelligence by eight to nine points–even if just temporarily. This caused quite a stir in the educational community when it was first revealed some years ago. One State Governor in the U.S. even had each pubic school student in his state supplied with a CD containing classical music. Okay, you run into claims like this on the general topic of education almost every day. However, when I found out much of the original research (actually clinical experience) was performed by Alfred Tomatis who was an ear, nose and throat specialist and used listening therapies (some involved listening to Mozart) to improve learning disabilities in children I became quite intrigued. Some 15 or so years ago when I was working as a management consultant, my firm was contacted by The Listening Centre in Toronto to request some pro bono consulting. I was chosen and went for an initial meeting with the two people who ran the centre. I have forgotten what services they required but I do remember how impressed I was with them as people and the passion they had about their mission to treat children with learning disorders using methods developed by Tomatis. Soon after I left the firm and performed the work for them as an independent consultant waiving any fees. Some time later, a friend came to visit, a man I had shared a flat with many years previous in London. He had become quite a famous actor (instantly recognizable in Dublin if not Toronto or New York) and had actually been passing through Toronto on his way from Vancouver back home to Dublin. Ray suffered from Tinnitus and I knew this was one of the disorders The Listening Centre claimed to be able to treat so I called them and asked if they would see Ray. They agreed to do the assessment for free but since Ray did not live in Toronto and there were no Tomatis practitioners in Dublin they could only recommend alternative treatment to the “electronic ear” that was at the heart of their regular program. Well to cut to the point it worked. Ray went home to Dublin, did the things they recommended (most of which I don’t remember save some things about diet) and got relief from a disorder that had been plaguing him for years.
Now, I know that there are a lot of treatments out there they looked like quackery even a few decades ago that utilize neuroplasticity to effect cures, or at least relief, for ailments that were thought to be permanent. Why am I writing about this in this post on this blog? The Mozart effect did not really go anywhere and I’m sure that almost no one now remembers Alfred Tomatis. The Listening Centre in Toronto fell on hard times, could not pay their rent and closed. One of the practitioners took up another career while the other followed some interest in the method to Mexico where there was a supportive clientele. But these days I read daily about miracles involving neuroplasticity. There are people blinded by strokes who can see again, Alzheimer’s patients that have no neurological symptoms, schizophrenics who improve their working memory and become symptom free. We are on the frontier of many great discoveries but to get there we might have to put away our skepticism and allow ourselves to experience awe and wonder without the dash of skepticism so many of us have developed as adults to prevent disappointment in chasing down blind channels or after miraculous cures. I say us and I mean me and if I write it hear perhaps I will be a little more likely to follow the advice of Herbert Spencer who wrote: “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance–that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”
Today I came across reference to a new therapy called the Dynamic Neural Retraining System (DNRS) that employs the principles of neuroplasticity to cure chemical sensitivities, Cronic Fatique Syndrome, Fibromialgia even Gulf War Syndrome. At first glance it looks a bit like snake oil but on closer examination it caught my interest. The system was developed by Annie Hopper whose life was devastated by multiple chemical sensitivities that resulted eventually in the lose of her job, her family and even her home. She began to educate herself in various approaches to treatment and in the process noticed that many of her symptoms were similar to those of persons suffering from Acquired Brain Injury (ABT). ABT usually results from a blow to the head. She developed DNRS based on methods used to treat ABT and now conducts three-day workshops to provide participants with enough familiarity with the system to carry on treatment on their own. Her website has many testimonials attesting to its effectiveness. At the time that her life was overwhelmed by these chemical sensitivities, Hopper had a therapy practice employing what is described in her bio as core belief counselling. I experienced something known as Core Belief Reengineering (CBR) about 15 years ago with some success but nowhere in her bio does it say that the counselling Hopper did was based in CBR. However, I did make this leap. About 15 years ago many of my friends were going throiugh the process of CBR with the only practitioner in Eastern Canada. I became intrigued. At the time I was a sucker for anything except chemicals or pharmaceuticals to make me feel better. I had just exited a relationship that in many ways was the most normal I had ever experienced and I was about to turn 50. There were a number of other things going on but suffice it to say I was an anxious mess. I have had anxiety most of my adult life in addition to the other numerous mental health disorders I have made reference to in past posts but pn top of all that I began to experience symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)–probably because of the high level of anxiety. OCD is a devastating disorder and I count myself fortunate that I only had symptoms for a short time. When my friends doing CBR started to report life-changing results I decided to do it. I was also intrigued by the term reengineering. I was working as a management consultant at the time and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was all the rage in the business world with huge global corporations, such as Ford Motor Company, were being transformed by it. The idea of applying similar principles in a therapeutic model was most intriguing.. Towards the end of my therapy sessions a number of things happened. A chronic pain in my left hip, the result of a shortened ilioibial band, disappeared. The OCD symptoms also went away and then miraculously my asthma seemed to be cured. Now I’m a skeptic and in spite of what I was experiencing, I was hard-pressed to ascribe these changes to CBR. The disappearance of asthma symptoms I thought could also be due to a new mattress, new pillows and new bedding. I knew, at the time, that one of the main causes of asthma is dust mites and with a new bed I would have been dust mite free. Having both allergies and ADHD I have seen many different kinds of alternative treatments and most of them leave me cold to the point where am long past any interest in exploring any of them that don’t seem to be backed by solid scientific research such as Cogmed Working Memory Training. Having said this there are few alternative therapies rooted in sound science available to address mental health issues that exploit neuroplaticity other than Cogmed. In fact, DNRS is one for the first I have come across. Taking this into account plus my own experience with CBR and my rather grudging acceptance that some really benficial changes did happen, if not as a result of CBR, at least simultaneous with doing the therapy, I am intrigued and will write further about this in future posts.