Dr. Gabor Maté - A doctor specializing in attention deficit disorder (ADD,ADHD)

Dr. Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté is a family physician and writer, with a special interest in counselling. He was a long-time medical columnist for The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. He lives in Vancouver. He is married, with three children.

Until four years ago," Gabor Maté writes in Chapter One of Scattered " I understood attention deficit disorder about as well as the average North American doctor, which is to say hardly at all. I came to learn more through one of those accidents of fate that are no accidents. As medical columnist for The Globe and Mail, I decided to write an article about this strange condition after a social worker acquaintance, recently diagnosed, invited me to hear her story. She had thought I would be interested—or more likely she sensed it, with a gut-level affinity. The planned column became a series of four.

To dip my toe in was to know that, unawares, I had been immersed in it all my life, up to my neck."

It was this self-recognition and subsequent diagnosis, (and the diagnosis of his three children with ADD) that triggered Dr. Maté's interest in attention deficit disorder. Since then, he has treated hundreds of adults and children with ADD, and receives many referrals from other family doctors, as well as from psychologists and psychiatrists. He has given seminars on ADD to parent groups, doctors, teachers, and other professionals.

"From the very beginning," Gabor Maté says, "the idea of ADD being some sort of genetic disease failed to make sense to me. There is biology involved and in many cases medications may help, but there is far more to ADD than heredity, and far more to its treatment than pharmacology. I wrote Scattered to explore the roots of ADD in life experience, and to investigate how we can help children and adults develop beyond the impairments ADD imposes. The long term objective is not just symptom control or even behaviour control, but development."