[Ben Lahnger]

I'll jump into this with three thoughts.

1) I have ADD (without hyperactivity) and am thankful for Adderal when I can afford the doctors visit and prescription. I was diagnosed in my early 40's and could finally put a name on the unidentifiable fog, the invisible cage that hindered my progress all my life. I had seen counselors in my 20's and 30's and tried to explain the inexplicable trouble I had always had making any headway in life. I never ran into anyone who could comprehend the dichotomy between my obvious creative intelligence and my inability to concentrate on and complete tasks and my issues with memory retention. My teachers had explained it years before when they said to my parents, "He's so bright and he get's A's on all the tests. We just can't figure out why he doesn't apply himself to his daily schoolwork better." I graduated from high school in 1976 with mostly C's on my report cards (A's on tests and finals minus incomplete or no attemped homework equals C's).

I am currently unemployed and without health care insureance, so I am doing without Adderal. Experience has tought me that self-medicatiing with lots of caffiene somewhat counters the chemical imbalance and makes it easier for me to focus, but I must balance that with how irritable I become to live with if I have too much coffee. So it is hard and it makes the tedium of job searching even harder to stick to.

My ADD manifests as an inability to focus on things for any length of time. However, I am capable of a state of hyperfocus where I concentrate on nothing but a certain thing for long periods of time. It's kind of like having mental tunnel vision. I can be very good at long term projects that require patience and determination to complete. I just ignore everything else ... and I do mean everything. On the other hand, I am terrible in a fast paced enviroment where I am expected to multitask. That just frustrates the hell out of me.

2) I agree that the disorder is somewhat over-diagnosed, and there are some parents who are guilty of wanting to drug Johhny so they don't have to parent when he gets rambunctious. But I don't think it's as widely over-diagnosed as you believe. Looking at a comparison between the US and the rest of the world is a faulty indicator, as the rest of the world does not necessarily share the same reporting mechanism, diagnostice acumen or medical knowledge base to produce comparitive results. I also happen to believe that there are reasons why ADD and ADHD might occur much more often in the US than in other parts of the world, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Geisha, you have observed people you believe to have an Attention Disorder. Were all of those people dignosed? I ask because I know many people who have it have not been diagnosed ... I have witnessed some of them.

An example: a woman came into my store wanting a cell phone, but the process of getting her into one took a lot longer than it should because every other minute she was jumping on the phone. She would call a subordinate and drill through a list of commands in like 30 or 60 seconds. Then she'd get off the phone and ask me, "Now where were we?" And a minute later she's calling another subordinate and another machine-gun list of orders. I imagine her office is this bee-hive of people swarming around, each person hurtling along in a different direction due to her latest round of chaotic instructions. But she might not be diagnosed, as she is highly functional, at the cost of other people's sanity. Of course, she wasn't so functional with me, and I finally told her I needed her undivided attention or someone else would have to help her. It pissed her off at first, but we finally got the deal done.

Also, I have several books on ADD/ADHD and there is some link between creativity and this disorder. So some adults who have it might never get diagnosed because eccentric behavior is expected from artistic and creative people.

3) This is just a theory, but I think the human brain is evolving in a way that creates more Attention Disorder occurances, especially in the United States. In other words, the chemical imbalance is a result of changes in our physical, cultural and social enviroment. Let me make the case here:

When I was a kid, we would watch the same channel on TV for hours. In 1965, Sunday night was a no brainer - CBS all night: Lassie, My Favorite Martian, The Ed Sullivan Show, Perry Mason, Candid Camera and What's My Line. But on Thursday's it was a little more complicated. We watched NBC: Daniel Boone, Laredo, Mona McCluskey and the Dean Martin Show. We didn't want to watch Mona McCluskey, but we didn't have a remote control, so we sat through it. That's what people did back then.

Then we got remote controls, and we could change channels for that half hour of program. So we clicked once at 8:30 and back again at 9:00. But we still watched every commercial straight through, because there were only 3 networks.

Then with the advent of cable, and MTV in particular, things changed dramatically. MTV was the first channel that perfected and profited from programing that lasted less than 30 minutes. And the abundance of channels suddenly available meant that there was a better option than sitting through the latest 30 second commercial.

Now many of our movies are spliced together with jump-cut, camera-always-moving action to keep our attention. Commercials are going further and further to keep you from tuning out. Networks are shifting the start and end times of TV programs in a bid to keep your attention for a few minutes longer. Movies are sped up to run in a shorter timeframe when they air on TV. We live in an information-overload, can't-get-it-quick-enough, I'm-5-minutes-late-for -my-appointment-road-rage time. And I believe it is accelerating.

One of my favorite movies of all time is "12 Angry Men" from 1957. It is the story of 12 men on a jury and almost the whole movie takes place in one small room where these men are deliberating the verdict of a murder case. There is no fast editing. There is no change of scenery. There are no special effects. It's just a slow, deliberate drama about the very important converstaion these 12 men have. And I cannot get my girlfriend's daughters to watch it because "It's too slow and boring."

In my opinion, most of the citizens of the United States have an attention deficit.