Noisy Brain
Over the last few months my path has crossed with several people who are troubled by the fact that they seem to be acquiring label after label from mental health practitioners. The complaint is usually expressed something like this, “I just got used to the idea that I have an attentional disorder and now I’m told I have bi-polar disorder and an anxiety disorder as well.”
I understand their discomfort as I believe everyone wants to think of themselves as normal, functional and worthy of their own self esteem. But just thinking of yourself as normal doesn’t make it so. Besides that, it really seems like sweeping the problem under the carpet. Decades ago a friend of mine began seeing a psychiatrist who told him in the first visit to pretend he was normal until he was normal. Of course the psychiatrist would analyze his actions and thoughts over a period of time and offer advice and direction that would lead him to being normal. Another friend, only a year ago, when I raised the issue of my ADHD, asked me, “Why can’t you just think of yourself as normal?” My reply astonished even me at the time when I said, “I don’t want to think of myself as normal. I want to be normal.” I went on to explain that I thought that my journey began with finding out what wasn’t working for me, such as focus and attention, and then I could do something about it. This is what I have tried to do with medication. I would go about it differently now that I know about neuroplasticity and that problems with working memory seem to be at the heart of ADHD and that you can improve working memory. In other words I would be looking for a more permanent kind of change than what medication provides. To me this represents the hope provided by the new research in neuroscience–that the brain can change and we can change it.
In addition, multiple disorders do not necessarily equate to multiple causes or underlying problems. In fact one job of the diagnostician, as I undertand it, is to find the primary disorder. In many cases treatment of this disorder will have a beneficial effect across the board. A few years ago I read a book entitled Shadow Syndromes written by John Ratey, who co-wrote Driven to Distraction with Edward Hollowell. Ratey’s thesis is that there are a number of disorders that seem to have a common underlying cause which he calls ‘noisy brain’. This spectrum of noisy brain disorders would include Bi-Polar, Tourettes Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Anxiety Disorders, Mood Disorders. I know that ADHD, which would be included in the noisy brain spectrum, almost always occurs with co-morbidities as they are known, that would be in the ‘noisy brain’ spectrum. It seems a forgone conclusion that if you could alleviate the ‘noisy brain’ problem you would also alleviate symptoms of the co-occurring conditions or co-morbidities.
The idea of multiple diagnoses would then not really matter if you could just treat ‘noisy brain’. I don’t know that ‘noisy brain’ is related to problems with working memory but I would be willing to bet on it. If this is the case, improving working memory could have a positive effect on all of these ‘noisy brain’ disorders and that I find that encouraging and hopeful…