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Treating ADHD Blog

A blog about treating adult ADD with meditation, medication, alternative therapies - and humor
by Bill Mehlman

After twenty-five years as a chef, caterer, and restaurateur, Bill took the oath. He hasn’t set foot in a commercial kitchen for three years.

He now freelances as a writer, copyeditor and proofreader. His interests include architecture, fishing, languages (currently studying Latin — good luck) and golf (in the abstract) and littoral heliotropism (lying on the beach). May one day finish The Novel.

Native New Yorker. Congenital Yankee fan. Would love to start playing nine-ball again.

Recent Blog Posts

The Ultimate SuperBowl Special

posted: Friday January 30th - 1:36pm

If this SuperBowl snack doesn't tempt ADHD sufferers, then you have more self control than I.

Much has been said about the positive effects of a nutritious diet on ADHD sufferers. So, in the spirit of the upcoming SuperBowl, I wanted to provide links to the following plats du jour. Eye-catching, nostril-tickling, mouth-watering examples of haute cuisine at its highest. The Bacon Explosion Roll And Snack Food Stadium Bon Appétit!! ...
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The Difference Between Depressed and Sad

posted: Wednesday January 28th - 9:25am

Depressed isn't the same as sad. It's worse than sad. Depression lies closer to numbness.

How do people who do not, by the most wonderful roll of the genetic dice, suffer from depression? And, further, how much do they understand about those of us who do? There's been so much talk about depression on television and the internet that I'd have to guess that the average non-depressive person has a better idea of what the story is than was the case decades...
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The ADHD Fastball

posted: Tuesday January 27th - 11:08am

Great pitchers remember their failures and never repeat their mistakes. I can't even focus long enough to remember there is a fastball coming at me.

For reasons unknown to your faithful ADHD scribe, sports journalists decided long ago that players at certain positions would have almost invariable tags, attached in Homeric fashion, to their names. So there's the "slick-fielding shortstop," the "rifle-armed rightfielder," the "far-ranging centerfielder" and my personal favorite, the "crafty southpaw." Sometimes the broadcasters slip and say "crafty leftie" but that sounds like a political statement or a breakfast...
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Booze, ADHD, and Blogging

posted: Monday January 26th - 12:10pm

My hands keep working pretty well when I'm drinking. My ADHD mind is more problematic.

I've tried to avoid this, largely because I think that according to whatever code of scribal ethics I do, or should, observe, it's reprehensible. Nonetheless — and this might well have summat to do with my having read about one of my literary heroes, W.H. Auden, sitting in a dive bar on St. Mark's Place sucking down the VSOP all day long, no doubt fending off propositions...
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Money Makes the ADHD World Go Round

posted: Friday January 23rd - 11:53am

Money goes not to the brilliant or the aggressive but to those who welcome it.

Emotional/psychological/cognitive problems being what they are, which is to say resistant to precise definition and highly mutable, the temptation exists, once one has been diagnosed with one or more, to attribute all of one's difficulties to those accused malfunctions. Like so many temptations, this one often leads to unconstructive, if not actually ruinous, behavior. In my case, one of the sorriest aspects of my connection to the...
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Punctuating My ADHD Brain

posted: Thursday January 22nd - 11:25am

My ADHD kicks in almost exclusively when I'm dealing with abstract situations.

I believe that in an earlier Treating Adult ADD Blog posting I mentioned my perhaps-Romantic attraction to craftsmanship, and my regrets that I'd not pursued, say, tool-and-die making or furniture building in my youth. (Saying, "I believe…I mentioned" means, as those of you who stop by this stand regularly know, that I may have done so, may not have done so, may think I've done so...
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The Perils of Technology + ADHD

posted: Wednesday January 21st - 10:21am

If your ADHD doesn't leave you depressed, wasting a half-day redoing the computer work you've already done will.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. As a matter of fact, it's always better to be lucky than good, since, or so we're told, no good deed goes unpunished. This is by way of demonstrating another area in which I'm dysfunctional: sending email. When I started writing blog postings for ADDitude, I typed the postings in Word and sent them as attachments. This was easy...
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My ADHD Wanderlust-Infected Synapses

posted: Tuesday January 20th - 11:02am

An ADHD diagnosis is like driving a nail through a blob of mercury. With all the other comorbid conditions mucking up my brain, diagnosis is a shot in the dark.

So. Depression/ADHD. ADHD/anger management. ADHD/substance abuse. Substance abuse/loss of concentration. Depression/loss of concentration. Chicken/egg. Carrot/stick. Cart/horse. Nature/nurture. Remember "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story? Brilliant lyrics (you were expecting maybe gibberish from Sondheim) including this line: Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived. It's a problem. You go to your doctor with your pinkie finger sticking out perpendicular to the side of your hand, it's pretty obvious...
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A Fork in the ADHD Road

posted: Monday January 19th - 12:59pm

I'm trying to find a balance between sharing my ADHD experience in a blog and putting too much personal information out there in the digital world.

Yogi Berra, the Sage of the Grand Concourse, the omphaloskeptic Neapolitan, once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, you should take it." I haven't a clue how one would accomplish that, but I am at a fork in the road. The blame for my erratic blog submissions to ADDitude can be laid on several doorsteps: my innate laziness, my inability to manage my time...
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Why ADHDans Make Poor Poker Players

posted: Monday January 12th - 1:30pm

It's difficult enough for my ADHD brain to remember what I'm doing, let alone what five or six other mooks are up to.

I was diligently studying Latin; OK, I was watching some tournament poker over the weekend when I realized that in a treating ADHD blog post last week I'd discussed the hardships an ADHDan faced when playing cards. My point was that given our ADHD impaired memories, we were at a gross disadvantage, since being able to recall the cards which had been played was critical to...
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