From the Globe & Mail

Maté's argument is organic, a refreshing change from the medicalized and mechanistic models dominating the debate.  You won't find a drug chart or Seven Easy Steps to the Road Less Scattered here. You will find family stories, an accessible description of brain development and sound information.  You will also find hope. Maté claims that the neurophysiology of an infant's brain is shaped by the psychological climate in which the child is nurtured. Loving, devoted and conscientious parents can transmit unwittingly their own and their birth family's (usually unidentified) emotional issues.  The intention to love is not enough. Only the work of reconstructing feeling of security and constancy at home and school can overcome the frantic need for attachment at the core of ADD. We heal the family, we heal the child.

Dozens of best-selling experts pontificate on phenomena they haven't lived inside. And we hear plenty from chirpy relationship doctors, with their planetary comparisons and their McDinner solutions. Add to those educational droids who prefer to paper a child with diagnosis rather than listen to her.  Really listen. Maté is none of these.  His hard-won wisdom and his lucid and thoughtful call to action invite us to begin, as the physician did, by healing ourselves. Read the rest of this review...

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From Publisher's Weekly

In one of the most comprehensive and accessible books about Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Maté , a Canadian physician and popular medical columnist, challenges many accepted notions about the condition, which afflicts more than three million children and a significant number of adults. An ADD sufferer himself, and the father of three children battling the disorder, Maté discusses its origins and development, drawing on four years of study, research and patient interviews. Since its discovery in North America in 1902, ADD has been characterized by a poor ability to focus, deficient control of impulses and hyperactivity. Taking a maverick stance, Maté doesn't believe it is purely a genetic condition, but rather one with a physiological component linked to culture and environment. He contends that it can stem from a variety of ordinary sources--from stress to marital woes, from school and peer pressures to substance abuse--causing serious problems in academic achievement, employment and relationships. In chapters that include his patients' commentaries on the impact of ADD on their lives, Maté discusses its symptoms, ADD in the classroom and effective ways parents can handle and treat the unruly behavior of children with the disorder. In the closing pages of this well-documented but sure-to-be-controversial book, he effectively hammers home his suspicions about the possible over-prescription of Ritalin and other drugs to control rather than heal children, and proposes that, in some cases, emotional support, patience and love can be more powerful remedies than chemicals.

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From the Vancouver Sun

In Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder (Knopf Canada, 248 pp., $33.95) - an utterly sensible and deeply moving book written for a general audience - Dr. Maté offers an original and helpful theory about a condition whose diagnosis has spread like wildfire in North America. Until now, the medical profession has mostly proclaimed attention deficit disorder as a hereditary genetic disease and prescribed a drug called Ritalin by the bucketful. Read the rest of this review

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From About.com

Among the usually impersonal "This is your brain; this is your brain on ADD" type of books, Scattered Minds stands out as a deeply personal book which sees ADD not as disease needing to be treated but as a way of life that needs to be dealt with. The book offers insight for parents, ADDults and their spouses, and for those who work with ADD people.

"Scattered Minds" is a hopeful and helpful book for any ADD library.  Read the rest of this review...

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From Library Journal  

Among the recent epidemic of books on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), this one is valuable for its stress on environmental issues and the author's experience with the syndrome in his own family. Though a physician himself as well as a columnist for Canadian newspapers, Maté dismisses the "medical model" of ADD, arguing that it is the combined result of genes and stressed parenting. Neurological deficits intervene in this process. Drug therapy is viewed as useful but no panacea for what is essentially a problem of society and human development. Well-written explanations and descriptive case studies fill the book, and guiding principles and suggestions for reversing the course of ADD through therapy make it useful for parents, stricken adults, and counselors alike. Focusing on parents as the cause of psychological disorders is not a new idea, though, and Timothy Wilens's Straight Talk About Psychiatric Medications for Kids (LJ 2/15/99) may be more practical in a society where drug therapy is ubiquitous.

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From Macleans

Vancouver physician Gabor Maté has a striking photograph of himself at the age of four months. The infant, held by his mother, gazes unsmilingly and seemingly with apprehension towards the camera. The year is 1944, the place Budapest, Hungary, and visible on his mother's jacket is a Star of David -- "the badge of shame Jews had to wear in countries under Nazi rule," Maté notes in his book Scattered Minds, in which the photo appears. Even as the picture was snapped, Adolf Eichmann was preparing a plan for the extermination of Hungary's Jews. And the anxious look on Maté's young face, he suggests, reflected his mother's fears of the Nazi death machine. His maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust, but Maté's immediate family survived and came to Canada in 1957. Maté believes that the Nazi terror may have left a lasting mark on him by crippling at a critical stage in his life any chance of untroubled mother-infant relations. "These were hardly possible," he writes, "given the terrible circumstances, her numbed state of mind and having to concentrate her energies on basic survival."  The rest of this review can be found in the April 5, 1999 edition of Macleans

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From the Canadian Medical Association Journal

... What we can learn from this book is that people with ADD live with a monkey on their backs. They know it is there, but others have to discover it. Having ADD still leaves all the variety of intelligence and creativity, all the usual joys and sorrows and all the struggles to live a good life. Living successfully with a person who has ADD requires that the monkey be known, too. For it will continue to demand its place, at least until we learn more about how to avoid, cure and accommodate ADD. Those with ADD, their loved ones and their physicians will profit from reading this book. People who do not yet know they have it will have their lives transformed. Read the rest of this review...

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