Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

Scattered Minds explores Maté’s relationship with his mother through a series of photographs and diary entries, analyzing his and his mother’s facial expressions and the extreme family stresses he faced as an infant. Maté discusses his tendency to turn away from difficult emotions, a characteristic he refers to as repression; it is a coping strategy he associates with ADD. This tendency, he says, came from his childhood desire to protect his anxious mother, who he recognized could not handle his emotional expression. Maté recognizes that his mother’s extreme emotional environment overwhelmed her capacity to develop an adequately attuned relationship with him regardless of their love for one another. Maté investigates his parents’ psychological states to understand his own resentment toward them and to make sense of this resentment in regard to his physiological ADD symptoms.

Maté’s mother features particularly in Maté’s account of his infancy. At that time, the Matés, a family of Jewish Hungarian refugees, faced the threat of execution at the hands of the Nazis. Maté suggests that this period informed his development of ADD—particularly his sense of abandonment, which he attributes to a three-week period of separation from his mother that occurred during his infancy. Maté further believes that he absorbed the anxiety that his mother experienced during the Holocaust, contributing to anxieties of his own.