Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD - Hardcover

Denevi, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1476702578 ISBN 13: 9781476702575

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The first book of its kind, this compelling and moving memoir about what it’s like to be a child with ADHD also explains the history of the diagnosis and how we have come to medicate more than four million children today.

Among the first generation of boys prescribed medication for hyperactivity in the 1980s, Timothy Denevi took Ritalin at the age of six, and during the first week, it triggered a psychotic reaction. Doctors recommended behavior therapy, then antidepressants. Nothing worked. As Timothy’s parents and doctors sought to treat his behavior, he was subjected to a liquid diet, a sleep-deprived EEG, and bizarre behavioral assessments before finding help in therapy combined with medication. In Hyper, Timothy describes how he makes his way through school, knowing he is a problem for those who love him, longing to be able to be good and fit in, hanging out with boys who have similar symptoms but meet different ends, and finally realizing he has to come to grips with his disorder before his life spins out of control.

Skillfully and seamlessly using his own experience as a springboard, Denevi also reveals the origins of ADHD, from the late nineteenth century when hyperactivity was attributed to defective moral conscience, demons, or head trauma, through the twentieth century when food additives, bad parenting, and even government conspiracies were blamed, to the most recent genetic research. He traces drug treatment from Benzedrine in 1937 through the common usage of the stupefying chlorpromazine and brand new Ritalin in the 1950s to the use of antidepressants in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Riveting, thought-provoking, and deeply intelligent, this is a remarkable book both for its sensitive portrait of a child’s experience as well as for its ability to illuminate a remarkably complex and controversial mental condition. Rick Lavoie, author of It’s So Much Work to Be Your Friend, says Hyper is “a significant and singular contribution to our field.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Timothy Denevi received his MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. His writing has appeared in various magazines including The Atlantic, Time, Gulf Coast, and Arts & Letters, and he’s been awarded fellowships by The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. He lives near Washington, DC and teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University. Hyper is his first book.

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Hyper

1

The Evil Logic of Clenched Hands

It’s late afternoon, suddenly evening. The shadows in dense fingers along the wall. As if in a dream the color begins to drain from the wallpaper. The door is gauzy, the carpet insubstantial. Puzzle pieces litter the floor like flat, monstrous teeth. Or maybe not. In truth the details are a blur; for minutes I’ve been standing near the door, sobbing, screaming, the world reduced to darkness and light beneath the thing I feel.

Northern California, 1984: I’m five years old. It’s my very first complete memory: I was having dinner with my parents and one-year-old sister and refused, when asked, to give something up. A toy car, baseball card—it doesn’t matter; I was ordered from the kitchen and into my room. All I needed to do was serve the time-out.

But the memory never changes. What I wanted is gone, I’ve lost it forever, and perhaps the last identifiable emotion is something deeper than anger, a sense of desperation akin to homesickness; there’s no way back to the place I just left.

Later, standing in the middle of my room, I’m voiceless, tensed, my face briny with sweat. There’s pain; I’ve been dragging the corner of a building block across my chest. It’s still in my fist, the color of sand. I drop it, look up. As if for the first time, I see them: my parents.

They’re enormous. My father, Mike: his dark hair, the slope of his neck and shoulders, mustache; he’s crouching, trying to catch my eye.

“Timmy!” he shouts.

For an instant they seem like strangers, a reflection. I feel a terrifying crush of loneliness, something I hate to recall even now. But I’m not the only one who’s been shouting.

My mother, Patty, is sitting next to him, her cheeks thinly drawn as if she’s been attempting to speak the entire time. Her eyes are small and bright. Huge lashes. She’s crying.

And like that the tantrum is over. The room is measured and still. Once again I’m me: a skinny, sensitive boy who can be bargained with.

»

What would you do? Your child won’t stop screaming. Maybe he’s sick, exhausted—any trigger could have started it. Then, miraculously, he calms down. Later you talk to him, emphasizing that such behavior is unacceptable, that there are consequences for his actions, and that most of all you love him very much. Of course you wonder how you might have handled it differently. He has had problems before, serious ones, but this is something altogether new.

By this point my parents had been married for almost a decade. There’s a story they like to tell about their college days, right after they first started dating. A party at Santa Clara University, the early 1970s: My mother walks into a crowded dorm room. My father is sitting down. Already he’s a standout baseball player, and on his lap is a preening, blond-haired girl, a freshman, who seems to be nuzzling him. My mother screams. Not at my father. She’s telling everyone else to leave. The girl looks up—“Do you think I should go too, Mike?” But before he can answer, my mother is dragging her by the ponytail into the hallway. Only after the room has cleared out does she turn to my father and slap him. (“What was I supposed to do?” he likes to say. “The girl sat on my lap.”)

Another story: they’re seniors. For the last four years they’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship—recently they’ve broken up. My mother is going out on a few dates, my father is miserable. And yet, they still spend a lot of their time together. My father has been drafted by the Kansas City Royals. This particular afternoon he’s just finished practice. In a few weeks he’ll be reporting to a minor-league affiliate in Florida.

“I was thinking we should get married,” he says to her.

She straightens up. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Come on,” he says happily, impulsively. “You know I can’t live without you.”

And it was true, for both of them, has been ever since. But then my parents have always had too much in common. They were born, unbelievably, on the same morning of the same year—February 19, 1953—at Bay Area hospitals forty miles apart. Both my grandfathers were authoritative, first-generation Italians, parlaying whatever advantage they could find—the GI Bill, an athletic scholarship—into college and, later, moderate financial success. Both my grandmothers were Irish, beautiful, mildly alcoholic, and between them raised nine children in three decades.

Growing up, my mother wanted to be an actress. At Santa Clara she acted in plays, her black hair down to her waist. Even today the family home is decorated like a personal stage: crucifixes, family photos, and poems about dogs. But now, in her early sixties, she has only enough energy to engage the people closest to her. It wasn’t always that way.

My father loved everything about baseball. At nine, the youngest on the team, he won the local Little League championship with a bases-loaded double. He was drafted at eighteen by the Chicago Cubs but went to college instead. He grew up surrounded by a large, excitable family, and I have a feeling he probably had more in common with me than he’d like to admit; but his mother, Jo Ann, would ignore his most egregious behavior, while his father, Pietro, would swing at him with an open hand. He hated high school; his father was the football coach. But he loved Santa Clara, and his coaches there adored him. Following an All-American senior season, he settled with my mother on a four-year plan to make it into the major leagues. Five years later, he was injured and demoted from Triple-A, so he came home to take a job in the real estate business. My mother was already pregnant with me.

»

The San Francisco Bay Area, 1984: That September we were part of a family gathering in Los Gatos. The commotion! My Italian aunts and uncles speaking in loud voices, eyeing one another from behind their drinks. I kept running from group to group, shouting until I was shaking, hoarse. Then I wandered into the silence of the garage and saw, perched on a shelf, an enormous fishing pole.

I froze. I’d never seen anything like it: the slacked line, the fleshy handle. I could hear family members behind the door. The air was heated, dirty. I stared at the object for what felt like minutes. It didn’t move. And then I understood: this was some sort of marvelous tool, textured, intricate, meant above all to be held in your hands. I climbed the bench and was reaching for it when my father walked in.

“Oh!” he said. “Goomba!”

In the whirlwind of the party he’d been eating and drinking, keeping track of my sister, and socializing. Who knows how he ended up in the garage precisely at this moment, but he was genuinely happy to see me—discovering his young son in the midst of such an earnest mission. A light switched on. I was scooped off the counter and carried outside.

The afternoon, its dried canvas of grass and juniper bushes. Uncles and aunts crowded along the patio, talking with bright, hurried gestures. I started shouting about the garage. I had been so close: the lure, the feathered tip, the hem of mysterious wire. I kicked and twisted, my fury amplified by a complete lack of power. Nothing helped. It was happening again.

“Hey,” my father said. He looked around for my mother.

The sky was a domed, colorless vault. The grass emptied of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476702578
• ISBN 13: 9781476702575
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar