Giftedness and ADD – medicating the gifted and talented
Maggie Preston and Ritalin
A news article on the topic of ADD and treatment interviews several people, including Maggie Preston [27, right] who “was diagnosed with ADD at 16 and took Ritalin for four years. She quit over concerns about addiction after several occasions when she used her medications recreationally. Now she’s a student of photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.” [In their own words, By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times Dec 18, 2006]
Preston says, “It was just hard for me to do the [school]work, because I didn’t want to… I was pretty much of a troublesome kid. I did not like authority that much.”
“It [Ritalin] was kind of like weirdly amazing… You get excited about monotonous work, honestly. Like, translating Spanish becomes totally fun… The thing is, it works. But why are we forcing people to be in the position that they should like something that they wouldn’t ordinarily?”
She also notes, “If I really had ADD, how could I go in the dark room and spend eight hours without looking at the clock?… When you’re trying to do things not natural to your capabilities is when it’s really apparent… But kids just aren’t going to be equally good at all [subjects], and I think Ritalin is a way of trying to get kids to be good at everything.”
[photo by Randi Lynn Beach for The Times]
Her site: www.maggiepreston.com
Giftedness looks like pathology in school
In our interview, Stephanie Tolan [who writes novels for children and young adults and is co-author of Guiding the Gifted Child] commented, “If you’re in an environment like a school that says you must attend to these things, in this order, then a highly creative, a highly gifted person is going to have difficulty with that.
“And it’s so much more complex than that. Dabrowski points out that psychomotor overexcitability is one of the pieces of giftedness, so they have this incredible energy, and they’re bored out of their minds in school, and they’re expected to follow straight lines from ‘A’ to ‘B’ to ‘C’, none of which they can handle, so it looks like pathology, and they get drugged.
“It may be true that some adults really have ADD,” she adds, “but I find it so unlikely. If you look at the list of characteristics of ADD, and the characteristics of gifted, they are virtually the same.”
Related Talent Development Resources pages:
ADD / ADHD quotes articles sites books
Giftedness characteristics
photography/photographers
article: Gifted, Talented, Addicted – by D. Eby
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Technorati tags: gifted and talented creative talent ADD treatment
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