Roman Wyden – Author Of ADHD Is Over

 

When children are diagnosed with ADHD, they are unfortunately seen by society – and sometimes, even their own parents – as broken individuals who need correcting. Roman Wyden, an award-winning filmmaker, entrepreneur, and life coach, wants to put an end to the current narrative of labelling ADHD children as “disordered.” He joins Dr. Timothy J. Hayes to share how his own son’s ADHD diagnosis opened his eyes to the fact that conventional labels surrounding it are actually unhelpful and in bad taste. He explains how his book, podcast, and documentary aim to change everyone’s perspective on ADHD, helping parents to start trusting their intuition and raise their children with genuine love.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Roman Wyden – Author Of ADHD Is Over

Roman Wyden, an award-winning filmmaker, entrepreneur, and life coach, has established a multifaceted career marked by diverse and impactful projects. His creative portfolio includes the Eleanor Roosevelt award-winning documentary, Ageless Wisdom, the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival winner, Deface, and critically acclaimed short films such as Asparagus, Max, and Ricky Limon. He has also directed the feature films Quail Lake and Seven Days and produced high-quality narrative content for multinational clients like Chrysler, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and the VA. Roman is developing the documentary ADHD Is Over, which aims to address what he perceives as a one-sided and incomplete narrative surrounding ADHD.

Additionally, he is the creator and host of the ADHD Is Over podcast, where he has interviewed leading experts in the field, including Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Bruce Lipton, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Erica Komisar, and Dr. Stephen Porges. In addition to the ADHD Is Over project, Roman is a certified conscious parenting coach with a particular focus on empowering parents of neuro-unique children to lead more authentic and fulfilling lives. He understands the unique struggles and triumphs these families experience. He’s driven by a deep desire to offer personalized guidance and unwavering support.

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Welcome, Roman. Thanks for being here. It’s great to see you again.

Same here. Thank you for having me, Dr. Tim.

Creating A Book, Podcast, And Documentary About ADHD

I’m hoping you can get us started in this little conversation by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.

I’ll try to make it as short as possible because it’s a ten-year story. My then seven-year-old son, Kai, was diagnosed with ADHD, or I should say we had him diagnosed. The school that he was attending at the time, the principal and the teacher said, “We think he has ADHD.” I think they said something like, “We believe he does,” which is stronger than “we think,” in my opinion. We had him diagnosed. I wanted to see what the establishment thinks. Sure enough, he was diagnosed with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, learning disorders, and tic disorders. There were six of them.

That woke me up and had me question all of it because it was so strongly different than who I knew my son to be. As a filmmaker, I decided to do a documentary about it. Documentaries take time, energy, and a lot of money. That’s still running in the background. In the meantime, I needed to get the information out that I was finding during research, interviewing hundreds of experts, parents, authors, and educators. I started a podcast with the same name, ADHD Is Over, and wrote a book called ADHD Is Over. I wanted this information out there for parents who are going through the same thing, which I call the aftershock of an ADHD diagnosis. I wanted to create, in a way, the unofficial ADHD diagnosis survival guide.

There you go. Good title. It is a template for how to deal with this mess. What’s the status of either the documentary, the book, or other projects that you’re working on?

The status of the documentary is in production, as they say. I still have to choose to shoot three or four more expert interviews. I have to do a lot of motion graphics and put them all together. It could still be a year. The podcast is up and running. That’s been going on. We’re at 225 episodes, so that’s well out there. The book is available on Amazon. They are constantly running out of stock, which is a good problem to have. I keep getting emails and texts from friends, listeners, and people who have bought the book. It’s like, “It’s out of stock again,” or, “It hasn’t been sent yet.” There’s nothing I can do.

My publisher is trying to fulfill Amazon’s orders as quickly as possible because it’s print-on-demand. It is what it is. For any reader here, and I came up with it on the walk, if a family has had a recent diagnosis, and I’m talking 2 to 3 months, they can reach out to me. I will give them a free book because it’s a wedge that I want to insert between a diagnosis and the first action. Anybody reading, if you’ve just had a diagnosis and you’re spinning out of control and you’re open to the alternative approach, please contact me on ADHDIsOver.com. I will send you a free book.

Addressing ADHD Through Stress Reduction And Management

I can verify for people that it works because that’s how you and I are talking. I sent you an inquiry through the website ADHDIsOver.com. What have you learned? You get this diagnosis or a series of them with your son. You dive into it and say, “I want to understand this better,” rather than blindly accept a label and whatever those people who label it know as experts. What did you learn?

That’s what had me write the book. I would get the same question wherever I go. It doesn’t matter if I’m at a party or at an event, a gathering, anything. People say, “What do you do?” This project is brought up. Everyone’s like, “Really? What have you learned? What is it?” I always tell them, “That’s a whole podcast episode.” Here we are. I’m glad you asked that. It’s not simple, but it’s something that I can, in a few words, put in one sentence, and then I can elaborate some more.

What I’ve learned is that what we call ADHD is made up. When you said label, it’s a triggering word for a lot of people. A label is a made-up thing. When I take a plastic bin when I’m moving, and I put a label on it that says ‘living room stuff,’ the label itself isn’t the living room stuff. Not even the box is the living room stuff. The living room stuff is the stuff in the box inside. The label is made up. Part of your mind goes, “What should I call this? I’m going to call this that.”

The same happens with ADHD. How it ends up in the DSM is that there are about 8 to 15 experts, depending on the DSM’s task force size, that vote on, in a meeting room, what the label shall be called and what the symptoms are to put in the DSM. I just want to clarify that’s something I’ve learned that’s common knowledge. It’s not my opinion. It’s not my point of view. After that, I learned that it’s observed behaviors, meaning there is no blood test.

There’s no biomarker for ADHD. It’s observed behavior, meaning whoever observes the behavior of a child is the one who gets to say, “You have a disorder or not.” Again, no medical tests exist for ADHD. That’s something big I’ve learned as well. People always say, “What causes it? What have you learned about the cause?” There’s not one cause. If I had to point to one group of causes, one direction, or one area of life that I believe is mostly responsible for someone to behave in the way that we would then label as ADHD, it would be stress. Call it trauma.

It would be a wide spectrum of stressors that, in a way, attack a human operating system. The system defends itself with a coping mechanism, a stress response. I’ve learned that when we reduce stress in a child’s life, these symptoms dissolve over time. That I would bet my finances and my children on. Can I prove it? There’s more and more scientific research and evidence coming out. It’s slow because it’s in no one’s interest to have trauma or stress be the cause. That doesn’t sell any pharmaceuticals. Depression, anxiety, and stuff, yes, but it would disrupt the ADHD medication complex, a $20 billion industry.

When we reduce stress in a child’s life, their ADHD symptoms will dissolve over time. Share on X

Again, I’m a father expert. I’m an expert in my son. I’m an expert in doing research as a parent on ADHD. I’m here to say what I’ve found to be the most effective in our son’s life is to redesign every area of our life, of our family, at that time. I am divorced, but we still have a very amicable co-parenting relationship. There’s a lot of love in our family still. We’re still a family. We reduced the stressors in each area. A stressor in the marriage or the parenting looks different than a stressor in nutrition.

In nutrition, it could be a food dye that stresses the system. In parenting, it could be verbal abuse that stresses the system. In a marriage, it can be secrets, like the uncertainty and unsafety that little children pick up because they’re very perceptive when there are secrets in the family. The stressor in the environment could be pollution, toxins, and so forth. Stress isn’t just stress, the way we are used to talking about it. There are stressors everywhere. There are media stressors, too much media or rapid media. Whether you believe in it or not, there are EMF waves. All these things stress the nervous system.

Let me give you another one. When I was in graduate school in an advanced group therapy class, one of the brightest professors I had said, “Today’s topic is scapegoats. I want you to understand that I can construct a group up here in which any one of you would become the scapegoat.” We said, “We’re graduate students. We know our stuff. We’ve been working on ourselves. That can’t happen.” The stressor comes from being put in an environment that is not conducive to your style and your skills.

He did this three different times. He picked a person. “Who wants to be?” “I’ll be the person.” He told the other five or six people to be in a group. He gave them, “You’re a housewife. You’re a plumber.” All of a sudden, the person with four doctorates who wants to be in the group is the scapegoat in that group. There’s nothing wrong with the person with four doctorates. There’s nothing wrong with the housewife. If it doesn’t fit well, there’s this intense stress of trying to make the round peg fit in a square hole.

I love that you bring that up. That’s a great example because I was thinking about this, mentally preparing for our talk. I love that you said that because, first of all, the environment is the stressor. We’ve learned, and this is scientific medical knowledge, yet experts out there try to downplay it, but the brain develops in relation to the environment. In the case of ADHD, it’s not a tumor in your brain that reacts to something. It’s actually the opposite. It’s the wiring that gets constructed in relation to the environment. Like you said, the round peg in a square hole, for example, at school, that’s called a misalignment.

What you were pointing out is that there’s a misalignment, and the person who’s misaligned in that environment reacts. The example, I was walking, and it came to me. It’s very simple. It’s like sticking a forest ranger into an accounting school and saying, “You should sit still all day long inside a building. You can’t go outside, because we’ve cut so many sports programs and arts programs.” In other words, there’s a misalignment. We label or we call this a disorder that the person, that forest ranger, is not sitting still in the accounting school. I’m being dramatic, but to your point.

It’s very similar to what happens with our children in our school systems.

Not everybody’s going to be a forest ranger, but lots of kids that are diagnosed, and I can’t say all of them, it’s a misalignment. They’re in the wrong school. They’re exposed to misaligned teaching styles and antiquated teaching styles. There are kids who are visual learners or kinetic learners. There are different learning styles. We have a one-size-fits-all. Not everybody fits in.

When you were talking about this earlier, you were talking about yourself as an expert father. You’re the expert on who your son is. Do you have seven or eight doctorates? No. This puts me in mind of the interview you did with Dr. Roger McFillin. His podcast is Radically Genuine. You did a podcast with him titled ADHD Myths Exposed. One of the lines I love from that was the person who was sharing their information, and a doctor or a professional expert with degrees said, “Are you an expert?” The response was, “No, I don’t have a doctorate, and so I have to rely on the evidence.”

I remember.

Here it is. This is exactly what I’m trying to do in my life, in my practice. I don’t care how many doctorates a person has. If they’re spouting something that doesn’t work for me, it seems like nonsense. I’ll go look at it for myself. I want that firsthand experience or different options because maybe what they’re saying works well for them. Maybe that’s a truth they can live with. Maybe it doesn’t apply to me at all. Some kids just fit in the accounting school. They love it, and they click. Other kids need to be out in the outdoors in the forest ranger program.

Everything’s changing with AI. I did an episode on my podcast called Robots Don’t Need Adderall. I wanted to make a point that if you’re obedient and efficient, you’re fine. No one’s going to point you out and say, “What’s going on over there? We need to fix it with medication or, in the case of AI, with code or whatever.” If you’re obedient and efficient, you’re good. If you’re disobedient, which could be misalignment, you’re just not doing what you love, or you’re not at the right school, then you’re also not efficient. You’re a nuisance. You’re a problem for that system.

A medication is brought in to fix that. You’re being put back to being obedient and efficient. That’s not a way to carve out a unique, fulfilling life. That’s just a way to be a productive citizen, which works for some. More and more people are waking up and saying, “What am I doing? I don’t want to slave away for the rest of my life and make someone money. I can barely pay my bills, but I’m not fulfilled. I’m not stimulated.” We’re waking up a little bit to what alignment is. What do I need to align myself with such that I’m happy? I hate to use that term because it’s subjective, but it is to have a balanced life.

How To Thrive By Connecting To The Source

It is to have contentment, to have satisfaction, or to have a sense of meaning. As you’re talking, I’m thinking about this. Have you ever heard about the book The Da Vinci Method?

Yes, you mentioned it last time we talked.

That wouldn’t have been on a podcast, and so we should mention it now. The idea is that he talks about this as though there is a way to look at every human individual as though they’ve got a certain level of access to inspiration, intuition, insight, and creativity. Some people have a much bigger fiber optic cable to that cloud of creativity than others. The theory in that book is that even if the individual is trying to be good within themselves, they want to please the teacher who says, “Sit down and be quiet.” They want to please the parents.

Even if it’s all coming from inside that child, as they try to deny and suppress their urge to get up, run around, and be creative or get out their ya-yas, they create the tension within themselves. It manifests as things like depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety, bipolar, mood swings, et cetera. It’s a good set of things for us to look at. I’m so grateful to you for putting this out there to parents that if they’ve gotten a diagnosis recently, they can contact you and you’ll get them a free book. It is because looking at what you’ve discovered over X number of years of research and condensed for them would be very valuable prior to making a decision.

I love that you brought this up with The Da Vinci Method and this divine connection to the source. I’m rarely so amazed by one expert because I go from expert to expert, and I keep going. Dr. Gabor Maté was my rock star up until now. I have to say, Dr. McFillin came into the picture. Gabor Maté is a bit more on the softer spiritual and a little more esoteric than Dr. McFillin, although I know both of them have each other’s traits for sure.

Dr. McFillin has got the science and the practice. He’s outspoken and younger than Dr. Gabor Maté. If you’re a parent reading, please follow both of them. Listen to their talks. If you’re open to alternative healing, and I don’t like to use the word healing, but dissolving ADHD symptoms is what I call it. Back to what you mentioned, I 1,000% agree with you when you said it. It resonated because I have the same feeling about it. All these mental disorders that we know are an internal misalignment. Like you said, there’s this internal wrestling conflict between our divine self and our personality, or our worldly exterior self and our spiritual interior. There’s a wrestling match daily. I have the same thing. We all have it.

It’s part of being human and finding our purpose. Dr. McFillin actually wrote a beautiful article. I believe it was in his newsletter. That’s probably on it. It’s not a Substack, but it’s on his newsletter. It is exactly about that. How can we determine if someone’s going to thrive in life or not? He said it’s not genetics. It’s not circumstances. It’s not luck. It’s that variant that if you’re connected to a source, meaning if you’re internally referenced, you trust your intuition, you’re building a life that’s unique, you’re not a copycat, you’re not trying to dance to the tune of others, or you’re not dependent on external substances or circumstances or people telling you what to do, you will thrive. That’s his theory.

If you trust your intuition, build a unique life, and refuse to be dependent on external substances or circumstances, you will thrive. Share on X

Why Disorder And Disease Are Actually Good Words

I’ve said this a long time ago. What you said was great, because if that happens, none of these disorders would exist. I just want to say one last thing in this long train of thought. The word disorder inherently is a good word because it’s telling us there’s something out of order. The agreement that society has given the word over time is negative or disempowering. The way I always say I could prove it is if I went out in the street and did a man in the street interview with people who were single. I would say, “Would you be open to dating someone with a mental disorder?” They’d be like, “No, I don’t think so.” Some might say, “Yes, I’m open,” because they’re trying to look good, but most people would have a negative reaction. Why? It is because the agreement in society is that with a disorder, you’re broken.

It’s broken. It’s this solid external thing that’s a disease. It’s gotten into my blood system. It’s cancer. If you take the word disorder like you did and say, “It’s something out of order,” it means if we put it back in order, we’re going to have better results. The same thing with the word disease. If you put a hyphen in there and say it’s any kind of dis-ease, let me rearrange things until I’m back in the flow or back in more ease in my life. It doesn’t carry that heavy weight of the implication of the disorder or the disease state that is so prevalent in the meanings that we give those words in our culture.

I often get accused of semantics. I say, “Words create.” If you keep telling someone their disorder over and over again, guess what they’re going to believe? They’re broken. There’s something wrong with them. You have a mental health issue, not because of the ADHD or having a disorder. That person suffers from insecurity and a lack of belief in themselves. That’s years of therapy. We have to be careful as parents not to label. People always say, “Once I found out that it was ADHD, now I know what’s wrong with me.” That’s a problematic statement. They say, “It explains it.” It doesn’t explain it. It describes it, but it doesn’t explain why you behave that way.

Here’s the problem. When you say it describes it, my experience with people so often is that they get the label, and maybe they look at some of the symptoms that have been used to give them that label on a checklist. When they are talking to me in my office in sessions, they say, “That’s just my ADHD taking over. My ADHD is blocking me from taking that job.” They’re not thinking about a list of traits that they have that can be used and worked with. They produce good results in this kind of setting, but not in that kind of setting. You’ve talked about us as hunter-gatherers in a farmer’s world and that kind of thing.

They’re not thinking that. I frequently will confront them and say, “Please consider instead of saying my ADHD, say my creative brain, my creative style, my way of interfacing with structure and creativity means that I need to do this to function at this level.” Just that much has helped a number of people if they’re willing to go there. Some people cling to their ADHD diagnosis. They want to keep talking about it. That’s okay if that’s what they want to do. I just haven’t experienced it as being as productive as viewing this as, “This is me. This is my brain. This is how my brain works best. Let me optimize my results by going with that flow.”

I put this in my book. We’re all younique, as in you. You’re that person. We always say, first of all, we’re not the same. None of us is special or more special than someone else. We’re just unique. That in itself is special because if you look at our fingerprints, your thumbprint is not the same as mine. No one’s is. That’s mind-blowing. The same with our brain. We talk about a normal brain. It’s the simplest way to explain. To me, that right there is the idiocracy of our psychiatry establishment. Where is a normal brain? Is it in a museum somewhere under a bell jar? We’re comparing that brain wiring.

I forgot who told me, but supposedly, there are four normal brains in the world. It was some weird research. There is no normal brain. If there’s not a normal brain, then we have all different, unique brains. What works for you and what works for me is different than what works for the reader right now, reading for their child. We’re using one-size-fits-all diagnoses. Here’s a cool thing. It might’ve been Dr. McFillin or someone who brought this to my attention. If we look at a child’s brain in the case of ADHD, there is no test, for example. People always say, “The chemical imbalance.” That’s made up.

In other words, there is no test that each individual is getting tested for ADHD. There’s no medical test that you take that would show you that your brain is out of balance chemically. The reason there is no test is that our brains are chemically in and out of balance all day long. If I scarejumped you at night in a dark, empty parking lot, and I could be able to measure your chemicals at that moment when I scared you, you would be out of balance, a chemical imbalance.

My point is that we are sold a one-size-fits-all theory in order to be diagnosed with what they think is a medical disorder, which it’s not. It’s so wacky. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I acknowledge you for being somebody who’s so open-minded. You’ve been doing this for a while. That is part of what I call my team of questioning the mainstream narrative, not for the sake of questioning it and bringing it down, but for the sake of the sanity of parents, for the well-being of their kids.

It is for the sake of providing options to people who want options. If somebody wants to take meds, take the meds. In the situation that you were describing with your son, if there are parents who want to keep their kid in that school and say, “He needs to learn to cope,” okay. Bless your heart, if that’s what you want to do with your life and your child, and you’ll be there to support them through that. I’d like to have people know their options. You talked in the interview with Dr. McFillin about finding a different school that was a better match for your son. That wasn’t easy. You had to overcome some of your own fears and prejudices about that, et cetera.

One of my biggest mottos in life is, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” You can’t argue with that. You can, but then you’re basically shutting down a lot of the ways.

You’ll get different results if you argue with it than if you experiment with it.

An Important Update About Roman’s Son

It’s never going to be perfect. I have a cool update about my son. He’s doing a year of high school in Ecuador with his mother because she’s from there. I’ve been a single dad for a year with my youngest one. We were on a call together. At some point, his mom said, “He’s recently asked me about ADHD medications.” I said to her, “Interesting.” It is because he was not labeled. He never considered himself ADHD.

We never gave him medications. Every two years or so, we’d be like, “Should we do it? Maybe it’s better if we do.” We would be looking to our intuition and go, “No, we’re not going to do this now.” I’ve always said like you, there’s no judgment. You want to take meds, great. I, as his father, said to his mom, “If he wants to take ADHD medications when he’s an adult, meaning once he turns eighteen, that’s his call. I will still show him the scientific evidence that there are a lot of negative side effects and there are a lot of problems.”

Just so he knows, but he’s an adult. I said to her, “I don’t want him to take ADHD medications until he’s eighteen. I hope you agree.” She agreed. With him, I wanted to know, “Where is this coming from? Why do you suddenly want to take ADHD medications?” It turns out it was his best friend, who’s been diagnosed and on medications for years. He’s planning to come back for his senior year of high school and go to his high school.

They’re together. His friend had been pitching to him, “It’s much easier to get good grades and much easier to do.” I said, “I get it. Again, I’m not condemning that. I’m just saying it’s not coming from him saying, ‘I love this school. I want to do well because I’m going to go to that college, or I want to become this professional, whatever.’ It’s not coming from inside. It’s coming from an external source. If something is easier, you get better grades, and everybody gets off your back, then it would make sense.” Just a little update, but we’re handling it intuitively by saying, “If he wants to do it at eighteen, great, but not right now.”

Why Are We Now Producing More Sensitive People Than Ever

I want to come back to the idea that we’re living in a culture that wants us to be in competition and wants us to be, “Who’s the best? Who’s the loser?” et cetera. My experience has been that my life gets better when I move into collaboration and cooperation and away from all that competition. If I’m looking at how a system works and I find fault with it, my intention is to be able to help provide solutions and options, not to tear something down, but to offer the tools for other people to build something else up.

There are lots of problems with the medical model and the focus specifically on materialism and the material world to think that I am just the physical body or the protoplasm. What you were talking about earlier with I forget whether you said connection to a higher power or source or something, but this idea of awakening to the fact that there’s a lot more going on here than my five senses can clue me into, it doesn’t mean I can’t get access to them. It just means it’s going to have to be something more subtle and more practiced than what my five senses are constantly throwing at me.

I have this spiritual theory that I’m starting to see evidence. I’ll tell you about that. It’s about the sensitivity gene. The theory was that I believe that the reason why there’s a rise in ADHD behavior, and I don’t even want to call it an epidemic or overdiagnosis, but even the observation that more and more people seem to be less focused and have a harder time functioning in this right world, my theory is whether you believe in reincarnation or not, we’re producing more sensitive humans. That’s not a bad thing. I’m not saying sensitive is like, “He’s so sensitive.” It has a negative connotation.

All it means is that you’re taking in much more information through all your six senses than the other person. The other, meaning someone who takes in less information, or maybe their senses aren’t as open and as sharp to take in information. We get sensory overload, which to me makes sense that there are more columns, more evolved souls that are being reincarnated, or we’re evolving as a species. We have these sensitive humans. There’s actually more proof for that than there is that ADHD is genetic. There’s no gene for it. There’s no group of genes.

They always say it’s genetic, but epigenetics, the field of epigenetics, has proven that you can turn on or off a gene in relation to the environment. You’re never predetermined to have ADHD. At most, predisposed, but it’s handed down more through the environment of a transgenerational family upbringing. If your father’s an alcoholic, it’s easier for you to become an alcoholic. There’s no gene for alcoholism, but there’s a gene for sensitivity. That’s a game-changer for me because it shows that if you’re a highly sensitive person, then look around the world. You are being attacked daily by noise and by speed. Like you said, competition, the grit, the grind, and the resilience. You got the Ivy League track and the pressure.

 

There is judgment and comparison.

There is all of it. Imagine that. Being highly sensitive, you’re going to react. Erica Komisar, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing, said that ADHD is a stress response. Dr. Gabor Maté calls it a coping mechanism. Same thing, essentially. You’re getting stressed out in multiple ways. You’re responding in a way that lets people know, “I’m not aligned here. I don’t like this. This doesn’t feel good.” We see it as a disorder. That’s how I see the whole sensitivity theory.

The piece I want to add to what you’re saying is that you were talking about the prevalence of sensitive people. I want to put in a vote here for exploring how many highly sensitive people have learned to suppress it and dumb it down. Essentially, variations on what you find are described in the book we mentioned, The Da Vinci Method. It is available for free in PDF if people want to look that up on the internet. It’s been out so long.

I have learned over the years, through my many years of therapy and personal work, that I’m one of those people who worked hard to suppress my sensitivities and my intuitions and to not share with people insights I’d gotten, intuitive hits, or my joy in exploring things like energy medicine and the non-physical energies that you can feel, but you can’t track them with your five senses. There are a lot of people out there who are far more sensitive than even they realize because they’ve spent decades suppressing it.

One great way to find out if you’re a highly sensitive person is, “Have you been told you have a disorder?” I’m generalizing, but I look at bipolar. I look at anxiety disorders and even OCD. There’s so much sensitivity in a person like that that they feel out of control, so they have to try to control it, or they feel like they need to be someone else. Like you said, there’s a fracturing going on. I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seems to me that what you laid out is absolutely true. There are so many people suppressing it because they’re going to be judged, or they’re going to be labeled. They think they’re not good enough, they’re too much, or they’re too sensitive.

Some of them are trying to escape punishment. Some of them are trying to fit in and get acceptance. There are a lot of different factors that might lead a person to want to hide their sensitivity.

You point out something great that I’m sure you see in your practice all the time. It is this concept of the people pleasers, for example. They try not to rock the boat. They try to please others. They put themselves last and put others first. Eventually, that becomes your personality or your way of being, and so you’re selling out on who you are. You’re not speaking your truth. You are quiet. Like you said, you’re constrained and suppressed. Eventually, that affects the body. There are a lot of disease that comes from people pleasing. Dr. Gabor Maté talks about that in his book, The Myth of Normal.

I just want to mention, while we’re on that topic, a wonderful new book that’s come out by Dr. Ingrid Clayton. Fawning is the title. The key point I want to make here is that this people-pleasing or fawning is a survival-level adaptive choice. It’s practiced when we’re younger to survive in an abusive situation. As we get older, it kicks in as an auto response. I don’t get the chance to intervene. It’s just happening.

It’s how your brain is wired over time.

It was an adaptive mechanism at one point in time. It was very useful.

Defining (And Redefining) ADHD And How To Take Care Of It

You bring up a good point here. I may have said this in our pre-interview. Somebody once asked me, “If you could sum up what ADHD is or what the cause of it is or the source, could you do it in one word?” I know it was a trick question or a “Don’t give me all your BS. Just give me one word.” I was like, “I don’t know if I can,” but then I sat with it for a few days. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard not so much audibly, but something said to me, “Unsafe.”

I was like, “That can’t be it. That wouldn’t be it. Would it be?” I remember putting it on a big whiteboard. I left it there for a few more days. I was like, “I get it now.” A young human being feels unsafety. It could be because of one big traumatic event, or it could be over time, a background humming of unsafety. It could be through trauma. It could be abuse. It could be a rough birth. It could be many things, but a new human that is so fragile will, at some point, feel unsafe and then react to that. If it’s continuously unsafe, they will continue to react. Like you said, it wires their brain. It’s an automatic stress response.

Whenever I ask people that I coach with, at first, I go, “Tell me about all the traumas that you can think of in your child’s life.” They go, “We don’t really have any trauma.” I always say, “Just because there’s no drama doesn’t mean there’s no trauma.” They go, “What do you mean?” “What about a rough birth?” “Yes, we did have it.” I go into specific categories of trauma and stress. Suddenly, they realize, “There’s a lot.”

That’s my whole point. People hear unsafe. They go, “No, my child’s safe. We live in a safe neighborhood.” That’s only one part, the physical safety. There are so many other ways of feeling unsafe, especially for a new human. I just wanted to point that out because what you mentioned, it’s clear that we have these automatic responses. They become our wiring. We think that’s who we are, and we can’t change it, but that can all be rewired.

It is at times rewired. I was left thinking, as you finished those last sentences, that I want people to understand that I don’t have all the answers around this stuff. I do have 51 years of experience in the field. What I am aware of is how unproductive the system has been. It’s like what Robert Whitaker points out in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. If these medications and the system for dealing with what we’re calling mental illness or problems were so good, you would not see the dramatic increase in the number of people filing for mental health disability that we have witnessed in this culture.

I can point to that and say I hope there’s something better. I’m willing to explore it. I’m willing to play with different ideas. I’m willing to understand that all of these labels are made up, just like all of our words are made up. I can step out of that, putting the experts up at that level of minor deity, this MD, and say, “Wait a minute. Let me see how it fits for me,” be willing to explore open-mindedly, and watch, “If I try this, what kind of results do I get?” I can go further.

I love that, and I love that you mentioned Bob Whitaker. I’ve talked to Bob many times. He was on my podcast. He was a great supporter of me in writing my book and gave me some feedback. He is a great guy. Mad in America certainly is a website for parents to check out. It’s a little heavy. As a parent, if you go in there, it can be heavy, but there are some great articles there. I agree with you. The labels that we’ve created are like a chair. I always use it as an example.

I’m sitting in a chair. It’s called a chair. It used to be called maybe a sitting device. When the first native or caveman sat down on a tree stump, he might’ve said, “Oh.” It feels good. They called it an ‘oh.’ Eventually, it changes over time, just like the ADHD label has changed. It used to be minimal brain dysfunction. It used to be ADD. Now, it’s ADHD. There are many names. That alone should tell us it’s a label. It can be changed.

It’s not carved in stone.

For example, on my walk, I was thinking what I would call ADHD, as a joke. I’d call it the obedience deficiency syndrome, ODS. That’s a label. What if we changed it suddenly to ODS? If somebody would still say, “I have ADHD,” you’d be like, “Actually, it’s been changed. You have ODS.” You’d say, “I have ODS.” That alone shows the idiocracy of the whole thing, that you don’t have the thing. You’ve just taken on a label to label yourself. Is that a label you want? Is that a descriptor? I can never say his name. We talk about Dr. Emoto, who did the water experiment.

Masaru Emoto.

You can call him a pseudoscientist, but that proves that what we label something with affects the structure of, in this case, a human. How you carry yourself and how you think of yourself affects your cells, your makeup. Everything is affected by the label.

 

There is the energy that resonates in the mind of the person who uses that label.

Like you said, the sixth sense, all of it, is affected in a way. You vibrate. You have a different frequency.

The Main Problem With A Standard Neuropsychological Evaluation

I’m chomping at the bit here to add another example and get your input on this. I was in this very office. A gentleman, and we’ll call him 40 years old, comes in. He’s functioning well in his life. He is intelligent and has a good-paying job, but something’s on his head about how he might have attention deficit disorder. He decides to go to a place that does psychological and neuropsych testing. He goes in self-referred and says, “I want to get tested to see if I have ADHD.”

Here’s a young person. He’s only 40 years old. That’s young. He goes into that system and pays his good money to get an evaluation, to sit in a room for 4 to 6 to 8 hours of testing in two different settings. It’s an enclosed room with no windows. It’s all of these external factors that go into how he’s performing on that test. He gets this write-up. He comes in. He sits over here on the love seat in my office and says, “Yes, just as I thought. I’ve got this ADHD thing.” I said, “Okay.” I’m smiling like I am now.

He goes, “What’s so funny?” I said, “Let’s think about this for a minute. In all of that testing, did they ask you about your childhood? Did they ask you about the impact of being raised by an abusive alcoholic? Did they ask you about how loud your internal dialogue is? Did they ask you about how negative that internal dialogue is? Did they ask you about how many times during the day you get distracted by your own negative internal dialogue thoughts about, ‘I’m not doing it right,’ or ‘What’s that person thinking?’

Did they ask anything about that or evaluate that in any way?” He goes, “No.” Here’s a set of test results that say, when it comes to manipulating blocks or answering a series of numbers that you were asked to remember, or all of the other tests they have, in this very specifically quiet climate-controlled room with no distractions, that’s how you performed.

What do they call that, an EEG?

No, it wasn’t an EEG neurofeedback. It changes over time, but we used to say a standard neuropsychological evaluation, which would have a battery of tests. They’re usually manipulating blocks or paper and pencil or reciting back what they’ve heard.

I’m asking because I went for the documentary. I went to the Amen Clinic, Dr. Daniel Amen.

For the brain scans?

Yes. I didn’t do the brain scans. Here’s why. Two things. First of all, in the brain scans, they inject you with a small dose of radioactive material that travels to your brain so they can image it. I was like, “I’m not doing that.”

That won’t hurt you at all. No problem.

By the way, are you sure the radioactive material in your brain doesn’t actually add to stressing the brain, which then gets picked up as an image that shows that you have ADHD? It was too weird for me. I did the EEG neurofeedback. I’m sitting there in a dark room. I’m not in life doing life. They’re like, “Yes, you have a mild version of ADHD.” Besides the point, also, for those of you who are thinking that brain scans can prove that there’s ADHD in the brain, it’s not true. First of all, the DSM also doesn’t recognize it as a valid method of screening for ADHD, which is debatable to say that the DSM is the DSM. Still, it’s not a valid method. It’s compositing. It’s not one image. It’s not live. You’re not out in the world.

Those people who are most honest about it are very careful in the words they use to share the results with you. This pattern in your brain is similar to people who have reported something or been diagnosed with something. When you pull it all apart like we’re doing now, what does that mean that they were diagnosed with? Somebody labeled them. That was all. They didn’t take blood and say, “Here’s German measles. We can give them this to combat German measles.” It’s not a definitive thing. It’s different from person to person.

Here’s one thing I remembered that escaped my mind earlier. I forgot what podcast it was, but it was a conversation they had about emotions and how nowadays we’ve taken emotions that are actually natural, that are needed for us to heal, process, and experience the world in a natural way. We’ve taken, for example, the emotion of sadness. We call it depression. What’s sad is that there are teenagers now out there in the world who, when they feel any sadness, go, “I feel depressed.”

You’re going to feel sadness. I do. I’m sure you do. Again and again, there’s grief. There’s sadness. Eventually, we’ll say, “There’s a pattern of repetitive sadness. Yes, it’s depression. You have depression.” That’s what we’re doing. Even a stress response is a stress response. It’s not ADHD. You can call it that. Wouldn’t you want to find out why you respond that way to stress? There’s going to be stress in life. I’m sorry. There’s going to be sadness. There’s going to be anger.

As people like to point out in other deeper spiritual teachings, the pain that we experience, the discomfort that we experience in life, is a part of our lives. Suffering doesn’t need to be. Suffering is the layers of thoughts and judgments on top of the pain or the thinking that I shouldn’t be having this sensation of pain or discomfort. That’s the suffering that we add on top of it.

The pharmaceutical industry sells you a medication to end the suffering. I 100% agree with you. What you laid out is what we’re doing. If we make people believe that they’re actually suffering, then we can sell a pill, but if we make them believe that they’re just experiencing human emotions, that everyone does.

The healthcare industry creates suffering or makes people believe they are suffering so they can sell them pills. Share on X

They have good information for them that can be used as a Geiger counter or compass in their lives to choose a different course.

I always say it’s like the red flags or the check engine light. If you have a fever, we can’t just sell you medication for the fever to make the fever go away. We do, but why is there a fever? That’s a smaller, minor version of ADHD. Why do you behave that way? We can sell you a pill to sit still, focus, get the homework done, and get good grades. Wouldn’t it behoove us, instead of putting a piece of duct tape on the check engine light, to open the hood and see what needs some fixing? What could we do to optimize this? We don’t do that.

For the most part, in our medical profession, we’re not working with the body. When you have something like a fever, instead of the wisdom of the ages, which says, “Here’s a body response. It must be doing this for a reason. Let’s support the body in doing this so it can throw off whatever it needs to throw off or whatever,” our medical model currently is, “Let’s suppress all symptoms.” Especially in the realm of psychological and psychiatric issues, it’s not a good model.

I always sum it up. I say Western medicine is good for emergencies. Most of the things we’re treating with stimulant drugs or even medications, pharmaceutical drugs, are not emergencies. A headache is not an emergency. ADHD is not an emergency. All these things that we treat, we’re told if you don’t do something about it now, you’re going to mess up your life, you’re going to die, or whatever. It’s not true. Let’s say you’re in battle. Unfortunately, we still have war. If you’re in a war and you get shot, you need some medication to survive. That’s, to me, the perfect application for Western medicine. That’s maybe 3%, 5%, or 10% percent of what our medical profession attends to. The 90% is just selling. Like you said, they’re selling us pharmaceutical drugs.

Rather than having us move into a different lifestyle, which would eliminate the cause and then alleviate symptoms in that holistic way.

That’s mic drop. That’s what we could do. We could change the field of medicine and obviously science as well, to reflect that, and be like, “What if we did this?” There’s no money in it.

It’s the biggest drawback to the system change. That’s why I like the offer that you’re making. If people have had a recent diagnosis for themselves or one of their children in the last couple of months, you will arrange to get them a book if they contact you. It is because what you’ve distilled in this search and this research that you’ve done might be very valuable for them and help them make a decision that they’re going to like the consequences of better.

Dealing With The Side Effects Of ADHD Medication

I agree with you, too. There’s no judgment. Somebody decides to medicate. Even if they’ve already made up their mind that they’re going to medicate, but there’s part of them that’s like, “We want to do other things in parallel,” please let me know. Get the book because the book isn’t about not medicating. It’s about knowing. Here’s a cool thing that I want parents to know. I don’t know if cool is the right word, but a simple way for an important point is that parents often do research on the side effects of ADHD medications.

Not only is the information hard to get out there, because it’s always cherry-picked, hidden, and manipulated, but let’s say I’ve done some research. About 10% of people with ADHD have reported severe side effects, things that make it hard for them to function in life. You could say, “That’s only 10%. The chance of my son or daughter getting sick or having severe side effects is 10%. That’s not a big deal.”

Here’s the thing. It’s actually 50/50 because you don’t know if your son or daughter will be part of the 10% or the 90%. You’re still playing Russian roulette. You had three bullets in a six-shooter. If you know that, if it’s a 50/50, you’re going to be a little more cautious about medicating. That’s what I’m trying to get across. It’s not 10% and 90%. It is 50/50.

It is that way statistically, but you, your life, and your children are not a statistic. It’s an individual who’s either going to have a bad reaction to this medication, almost no reaction, or a good reaction. It’s a coin toss as to whether or not, when you take that medication, you’re going to get neutral, bad, or good results.

Here’s the thing that I did that I recommend to parents. It makes sense to me. Nobody’s ever had an argument against it that made sense to me to not do it. I would say to parents, if you’re going to medicate your child for ADHD, I invite you, yourself, to take that medication for 2 to 3 months, daily, first. Even if you don’t have ADHD, you can get a diagnosis. Trust me. I know this is a crazy suggestion, but I did this for my documentary.

If a child will be medicated for ADHD, parents should take the medication first for two to three months. Share on X

I had myself diagnosed in an online service. It took twenty minutes. I got medication shipped to me 48 hours later to my door. I tried Ritalin, Adderall, and Vyvanse. I tried six different drugs. I had to manipulate the system a little bit because I needed to do that. What I found is that after two weeks of trying Adderall, and Ritalin was a little milder for me, I was like, “This is insane.” I was grinding my teeth. I was, as my ex-wife called me at the time, often a prick during the day.

I was so in overdrive that I crashed in the afternoons. I had sleep issues. I had many issues. I was like, “I am not giving that to my then-eight-year-old son. There’s no way.” I knew, not only intuitively, that these are intense drugs that we give our children. If you can do that, I would say try it yourself first and then see if you still want to give it to your child.

I’m not in a position to do the same thing. I interviewed Dr. Lila Massoumi, who was a functionally medicine-trained psychiatrist. One of the things she said in the interview was that she has been on almost every medication that she would be called on to prescribe for one of her patients. She wanted that experience.

Can I just say, why would you not? How can you prescribe drugs to someone else?

I’ll tell you why not, because I don’t want that in my system. That’s a good litmus test. If I say, “Sure, come on. I’ll try it,” then maybe it’s okay for me to do. If I go, “Wait a minute, do I want that? I don’t have the same label,” and if I’m worried about what it’s going to do in my system, why am I not worried about what it’s going to do in my kids?

Addressing ADHD By Healing Transgenerational Trauma

The other thing I want to do before we run completely out of time here is applaud you for, and bring up the topic of acknowledging the parental role in the family system in which a child might behave in such a way that they get the label. I was deeply moved and heartened by your revelation in the interview with Dr. Roger McFillin that you recognized the marriage wasn’t perfect. The family environment wasn’t pristine. There were these unspoken dynamics and powers. You want to give a little talk on that, please?

I’d be happy to. I’m an open book. I checked in with my ex-wife, my co-parent, about that. She said years ago, “Please share what you need to share.” There’s nothing hidden. The key point here is transparency. I realized that, first of all, I wasn’t very present, emotionally aware, and emotionally present with my first son, Kai, who’s the one who got diagnosed. That’s one thing I realized. I was absent. I was one foot out the door always, because I was restless. I was looking for fulfillment in life. I wasn’t present that way.

His mom, I don’t want to label her as a workaholic, but she loved working and got a lot of value from that. She was just busy. She built the company from scratch. She is an amazing woman, powerful, and creative. She knew how to build a company, work, and have employees, but she was so busy. She worked up until three days before birth, at her desk, working with a pregnant belly. Again, there’s a lack of presence there in a sense as a parent, not just before birth and during pregnancy, but also after birth. Our marriage was on the rocks, which isn’t even the right term.

We were so disconnected, partially because I had infidelity in my life. I own that. I’ve become transparent with that. I had a full disclosure. I worked on my own addiction around that, around sex and love. That was a long process, still is. Again, it’s a trauma. I’ve had my own traumas as a child. I brought that energy into my family, into the space with my children. There was general stress in the household.

At the time, we had a nanny who would help out. We would just give our kids to daycare and a nanny. There have also been studies now that what we do in daycare. What we do is sleep training. All these things, again, stress, stress, stress. It’s our firstborn, so everything was heightened. All of these things, eventually, I was able to take responsibility and say, “I can see how I was being at the time contributed to this unsafety, my son feeling unsafe, having a stress response, and needing to cope with that. That wired his brain in a certain way.” Is it my fault? No. Did I do something wrong? No.

Is it something you can take responsibility for and change? Yes.

His mother does that, too. We take 100/100. It’s not 50/50 or 20/80. The way I showed up just wasn’t the best that I could be at the time, and it’s okay. I’ve forgiven myself. I continue to, but I can see how that would influence the wiring of the brain of a child. I always invite parents to say you go first. There’s nothing wrong with your child. Your child’s not broken. If you heal your transgenerational trauma, process and heal that, you’re going to see a different child, even if you don’t do any work on the child. That’s my claim.

 

You mentioned sex and love addiction. I feel compelled to mention Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, All the Way to the River. Are you aware of that?

I know about the book. I haven’t read it, but I know her and her story.

It is not an easy book, but it is a good book for somebody who thinks they might have a sex and love addiction.

For people, sometimes, that’s a hard term to swallow. Thanks to her. Also, Louis C.K. was on a podcast. He owned his own sex addiction. It still has a weird flavor in society’s perception or mind. All it is is what we call a God-shaped hole. It’s a hole in our heart or soul that we’re trying to feed, whether it’s sex or love. You can go into cigarettes, alcohol, food, or gambling. All of those things are addictions and are coping mechanisms that we try to fill this hole with, but the hole itself cannot be filled with any of that. It doesn’t matter what it is. I would say to people that start with yourself. Find out what you are addicted to.

We’re all addicted to something. It could be extreme sports. It could be coffee. It could be work. I can’t say all, but most of us are addicted to something. Once we go to work on healing that, it all goes to the same core. It’s just healing a childhood trauma wound. Once we do that work, our children change. I’ve seen it. They do change.

I have years of experience working with Dr. Michael Ryce. His useful definition for addiction is the compulsive use of any substance, any food, any person, or any activity for the purpose of numbing out to an internal pain or blocking myself from seeing and acting from my highest guidance. In this practical way, this gives us a way to start working with people, ourselves, and others, without the stigma of a disease.

It’s an adaptive process. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s an attempt to solve a problem. What’s the problem? I have an ache inside, I feel empty, or I feel I’m not good enough. Where’d that come from? Like you’re talking about, it’s the accumulation of adaptations from past traumas. What’s a trauma? It’s the download of energy and beliefs that I take in as I go through an event in my life that I feel is too much for me to deal with.

That is beautifully said. The saying I have is, “Addicts are not addicts because they’re born addicts.” No one’s born an addict. I believe there are no bad apples. There’s just the stuff that happens to us, how we react, what environment we’re in, how the brain gets wired, and how you then cope with things. Addiction is very natural, to be honest. Again, it’s not a disease. I’ve always had issues with twelve-step programs, calling it a disease. I get what they’re saying, but I don’t believe it’s a disease. You’re just struggling with the unhealed trauma.

You’ve mentioned Gabor Maté a few times. I’ll quote him when he talks about people coming and asking, “Why all the alcohol? Why all the drugs?” He says, “Please ask, why all the pain?” There’s that same understanding that without the pain, there wouldn’t be this activity, behavior, or drug usage to numb you out to the pain.

We could say the same thing here when it comes to ADHD. Why all the impulsivity? Why all the hyperactivity? Why all this? You can ask, “Where’s the pain?”

Dr. Tim’s Personal Experience With Trauma

Let me share with you my little story to help explain trauma. We have two boys. They’re identical twins. They’re in a good family. They come home from school one day. The thing is, Johnny has always known, and he thinks about it day in and day out, “My mom always tells the truth. I can always rely on my mom.” They hit the door one day after kindergarten. There’s a plate of Oreo cookies on the kitchen table. Johnny yells out, “Mom, can I have a cookie?” She says, “Boys, you know the routine. Go upstairs, unpack your bags, lay out your homework, wash your hands, come down, and then you can have a cookie.”

As I mentioned, they’re a good family. They dutifully go upstairs. As they come back down, they hit the third step from the end, from the bottom. Johnny looks over and sees an empty plate of cookies on the kitchen table because the preteen and teen siblings came through like a tornado and ate all the cookies. Johnny’s life is never the same. “My mom lied to me.” He’s frozen there with the horror of the empty plate of cookies.

Is the empty plate of cookies a trauma? Not for Jimmy, who’s never focused on how mom always tells the truth and shouts out, “Mom, they ate the cookies. Can I have an apple, a taffy apple, or a piece of candy?” Johnny’s life is never the same after that because he downloads from that experience. “My mom lied to me.” That foundation of what he relied on for a sense of safety in the world had been shattered.

It’s a great example. You make a good point here that no child experiences an event the same way. I get a lot of parents who say, “My neighbor’s kids are of the same age, same class, same sports, same this, same that. They don’t have ADHD.”

I know those parents. They’re loving. They’re not abusive. I’ve been in that house. I’ve never seen anything abusive go on. If it’s a significant mismatch between what the child hopes for, needs, or wants and what the parents can offer, it ends up getting downloaded into the child as a traumatic experience or a series of them.

There are so many variables. There are thousands of variables. You can’t compare any human with another human. We do it in statistics. We go, “These people and these people.” We can’t do that. When we talk about the term normal, normal is the norm. The norm is a scientific phenomenon. It’s a straight line through the curves. That’s the norm. That’s the middle.

It’s a made-up thing. When you wave your finger like that and say it’s a straight line through the curves, what’s real is all the data points on the curves. What the scientists and researchers talk about is this thing they do with mathematical formulas to come up with the median, mean, or mode. They talk about that as though it’s a real thing. It isn’t. It’s just another label to describe a flow and a tendency. It isn’t definitive.

If you look at the waves up and down and the data points, that could only be 226 people that they’ve tested. How many people are in the world? There are billions. To then say, “Studies show that this is true for all humans with it,” no. I know what you’re trying to do. You’re suggesting something, but that’s not the truth. That’s not a real experience for a kid, 16 years old, in Tibet, who doesn’t even know what ADHD is. It doesn’t even exist.

Why A Perspective Shift Can Lead To A More Fulfilled Life

Let me attempt to wrap this up since we’re going along here. Is it appropriate to say that what you and I are trying to offer people is a different way to look at their life experience, rather than simply buying into the medical model and following what the so-called experts give them, which almost always is accompanied by a pill or a procedure? Rather than say that’s bad or wrong, what we’re trying to do is help people understand there are a lot of other factors that go into whatever behavior comes out of any person. There are a lot more options for looking at it and finding solutions than you’ll find at your medical doctor’s office.

Absolutely. I agree with you. I love what you said earlier. You said, “I don’t have all the answers, or I don’t have the truth.” I don’t either. I will use this example. You mentioned the perspective shift. When you have a traumatic experience, you react a certain way to the experience. The experience isn’t the trauma. It’s how you interpret it, or process it, or what you do with it. Let’s say you’re an angry person. You’re always angry. That’s just who you are. Eventually, you take medication to be less angry.

The experience itself is not the trauma but the way you interpret or process it. Share on X

Where I come in, and I believe you as well, is that we say, “You got this issue. You’re thinking of maybe medicating it or doing it in a mainstream narrative way. We have a suggestion. Are you open to a perspective shift?” We basically explain that you can be angry at this event as a result of an event, or you can choose not to be angry. You have a choice. If we were to explain it in many different ways, suddenly, maybe they would go, “You know what? You’re right. There’s what happens, and there’s what I make it mean. What I make it mean is what gets me upset, not what happens. If I change what I make it mean, I’ll be less upset. I’ll try that.”

They try it. Eventually, they’re less angry. They don’t need medication. All we’re trying to do here is to say, “Are you open to a perspective shift that might even benefit you or your child, such that you can live a more fulfilled life?” If I can do that with my message in my book, and if you can do that for your show and your work, we’re doing a good service to people.

With the number of people I’ve worked with over the years, their life situations would be good evidence for how medicine isn’t the real answer. The absence of medicine isn’t the real problem. In situations like with a seven-year-old boy whose parents are divorced, and they’re living separately, the one parent decides we need to medicate, and so gives attention deficit disorder medication to the child whenever the child is at that parent’s house.

In an effort to cope with unacceptable behaviors that are happening, I don’t want to whitewash this. It’s not like the seven-year-old at that house was a model citizen. There were problems. In an effort to deal with them, the parent gave medication. The other parent never experienced those behaviors from that same seven-year-old. Whenever the seven-year-old is at the other house, he doesn’t get the medication and doesn’t have the acting-out behavioral problems.

In a situation like this, if there’s push comes to shove, or people say, “The experts are getting involved. It’s going to court because you won’t give the medication that the doctor has prescribed,” I could see it. If you’re saying, “The kid is acting out crazy over here when they’re not getting medication. The kid is behaving well, fitting in, and doing well in school over here when they’re on the medication,” I can see the rationale for trying to work with the parent to nudge them towards medication, but we’re having the opposite here. What better evidence? There’s something in the environment over here that the child is being forced to cope with. The coping mechanisms are what have been labeled ADHD.

The last example I always give is when parents say, “We give them the lowest dose. We don’t medicate on weekends, holidays, and weeks off.” That right there is proof that it’s the environment.

Get In Touch With Roman

I’m standing up and cheering. That was really good.

This was an awesome conversation. I appreciate this.

I greatly appreciate your being willing to take the time to talk with us here on the show. How do you prefer people reach out to you?

It is very simple. ADHDIsOver.com is the website. There’s a feature to contact me. That’s as simple as that. Like I said, I will offer a free book to any parents or families going through a recent diagnosis. If you want to buy it, it’s on Amazon. ADHD Is Over is the name.

I will be among those who put stress on your publisher to produce another book in the near future. If I haven’t already pre-ordered, sometimes, I do because I know there’s an interview coming and I pre-ordered a book, and then I forget to check if it’s come in. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I look forward to the documentary when it’s finished.

Thank you, Dr. Tim. Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.

It’s been a delight.

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Roman Wyden, an award-winning filmmaker, entrepreneur, and life coach, has established a multifaceted career marked by diverse and impactful projects. His creative portfolio includes the Eleanor Roosevelt award-winning documentary, Ageless Wisdom, the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival winner, Deface, and critically acclaimed short films such as Asparagus, Max, and Ricky Limon. He has also directed the feature films Quail Lake and Seven Days and produced high-quality narrative content for multinational clients like Chrysler, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and the VA. Roman is developing the documentary ADHD Is Over, which aims to address what he perceives as a one-sided and incomplete narrative surrounding ADHD.

Additionally, he is the creator and host of the ADHD Is Over podcast, where he has interviewed leading experts in the field, including Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Bruce Lipton, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Erica Komisar, and Dr. Stephen Porges. In addition to the ADHD Is Over project, Roman is a certified conscious parenting coach with a particular focus on empowering parents of neuro-unique children to lead more authentic and fulfilling lives. He understands the unique struggles and triumphs these families experience. He’s driven by a deep desire to offer personalized guidance and unwavering support.

 

Important Links

• Roman Wyden on LinkedIn
• ADHD Is Over
• ADHD Is Over
• Radically Genuine Podcast with Dr. Roger McFillin | 203. ADHD Myths Exposed
• EP225 – Why Robots Don’t Need Adderall on YouTube
• The Da Vinci Method
• The Myth of Normal
• Fawning
• Anatomy of an Epidemic
• Mad in America
• Understanding Integrative Psychiatry With Dr. Lila Massoumi – Journey’s Dream
• All the Way to the River

 

About Roman Wyden

Roman Wyden, an award-winning filmmaker, entrepreneur, and life coach, has established a multifaceted career marked by diverse and impactful projects. His creative portfolio includes the Eleanor Roosevelt Award-winning documentary Ageless Wisdom, the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival Winner Deface, and critically acclaimed short films such as Asparagus, Max, and Ricky Limon. He has also directed the feature films Quail Lake and Seven Days, and produced high-quality narrative content for multinational clients like Chrysler, Proctor & Gamble, Kimberly Clark, and the VA.

Currently, Roman is developing the documentary ADHD IS OVER, which aims to address what he perceives as a one-sided and incomplete narrative surrounding ADHD. Additionally, he is the creator and host of the ADHD IS OVER podcast, where he has interviewed leading experts in the field, including Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Bruce Lipton, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Erica Komisar, and Dr. Stephen W. Porges.

In addition to the ADHD IS OVER project, Roman is a certified conscious parenting coach, with a particular focus on empowering parents of “neuro-unique” children to lead more authentic and fulfilling lives. He understands the unique struggles and triumphs these families experience, and he’s driven by a deep desire to offer personalized guidance and unwavering support.