Douglas Edwards 
I've now finished Chapter 2 of "ADHD 2.0" (#Hallowell and #Ratey 2021). I've had some hard things to say about this book so far: its #extranormativity, its tone of pontificating certainty, its overconfident reliance on dubious #fMRI findings, the appalling glimpse of support for #ABA in a skimmed later chapter. But in the second half of Chapter 2, I've found something really interesting and potentially helpful, something that rings true from my experience, quite apart from any #fMRI findings.
The authors point out a way that #anxiety and #depression can arise purely from the #attentional-focus problems definitive of #ADHD, and NOT from the cognitive errors to which #CBT attributes such problems. The idea is that the obsessiveness of #ADHD, when focused on anything negative, creates a self-sustaining, self-amplifying vortex of negativity. Their description makes it sound almost like a bad trip on #psychedelics. The solution is NOT to try to debunk the negative thoughts that make up the vortex, #CBT-style; indeed, that approach might make things worse by reinforcing the focus on the negative thoughts. Instead, try to refocus on — indeed, obsess about! — something positive instead.
Indeed, #anxiety and (especially) #depression were my own psychiatric diagnoses (not counting bipolar disorder, which later psychiatrists rejected decisively as a misdiagnosis). #CBT was worse than useless. Instead, I got help from antidepressant drugs — and I don't think it was an accident that the best one for me turned out to be Wellbutrin (bupropion), which doubles as a third-line #ADHD drug. And the subjective experience of depression, and of recovery from it, matched Hallowell and Ratey's attentional account, rather than the error-correcting story #CBT tells. I suspect that if there were such a thing as "attentional psychotherapy", I might have benefited from getting that instead of #CBT.
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