I think the new ADD commercial is bad. They portray ADD as if we're totally scattered in our thinking. They make it seem as if it is stressful for us. In fact, we’re not scattered in our thinking at all, we jump from one thought to another as our brains please. We don't usually think about things we don't want to think about, but rather we think about things that we enjoy thinking about -- we just happen to get bored of one thought faster than most people and move on to something else but it's certainly not stressful, is it? It feels more like day dreaming about important things rather than paying attention to what’s going on around you.

I know I have ADD, but that commercial doesn't portray ADD at all in my opinion. The commercial is about a stressed out person that is bouncing about thoughts much faster than we do, and it also seems like the thoughts the person has are confused thoughts. I think about scattered things, but never get confused or stressed out, does anyone else?

I'm wondering if the commercial is more about selling their new medication to more than just ADD folks. Does anyone else get this feeling?

interesting thoughts...I saw the commercial online - at the sight. don't watch much tv, so I haven't seen it yet on the air. I agree with what you said in your first paragraph though - I'm not stressed out about all the thoughts floating in my head - but sometimes I stress myself out because I can't ignore certain thoughts & I just want myself to SHUT UP, but can't, or I realize..."damn - I wasn't paying attention AGAIN" which can be stressful too

I think the commercial was quite realistic. My mind often wanders like that when I'm bored. One thought triggers another...

Yes, she was at a boring meeting but I think most non-ADD people can sit at those meetings and when they begin to drift off are able to bring themselves back. Many of us ADDers just get lost in our thoughts.

I havent see the commercial. Which company is doing it? Straterra would be my guess? Without seeing it, its hard to have an opinion about the commercial itself, but I do think it could be both positive and negative. On the one hand, any "out of the closet" exposure can be good, in that more people seek diagnosis and treatment, and there is a reduction in overall stigma. On the other hand, any portrayal of the ADD experience as one type of experience could pigeon hole us into one catagory...as does any label. So, as in most things in life, its a touch of good and a touch of evil, and one must hope the good outweighs the bad.

And yes, as in all the other commercials I've seen about people with addiction, depression, anxiety, panic, the commericals always depict scenarios of significant dysfunction. That is a marketing strategy, to get the attention of the worst case prospects and their significant others. Overall, I think people are more open about discussing these disorders now, so it may be that commercialism has had a positive impact on our consciousness about "mental" disorders, albeit to make a buck, which just proves making a buck is not always bad.

PS - no I don't like that language - mental disorders, but thats the mainstream speak, right?

Jon

It can be viewed online at http://my.webmd.com/content/article/66/79690.htm?z=4199_00001_2207_IN_25

Well, that is a freaky commercial, and I hate to say it, but it does a pretty good job, albeit a little exaggerated, of getting across what my mind is sometimes like. Scary huh? Its not always depressing, but it can be. Naturally they don't show the good side, of being creative, and imaginative, and fun, but that is not what the commercial was intended to do.

I wonder how non-ADDers will react to it? And I wonder how the closet case undiagnosed ADDers will react?

Thanks for the clip Tara

Jon

I don't want others thinking that my ADD is like that commercial because it isn't at all. I'm an engineer so my "scattered thoughts" are usualy about different problems I like to solve in my head -- which isn't a bad thing, it's just that It's hard for me to focus on one problem at a time. I'd rather skip around and think about many different things at once. When I take my medication (Adderal XR) I'm able to focus more of my attention on single tasks rather than trying to multitask all the time.

I saw the commercial just a day ago.... At first, I wasn't paying attention to it....lol...Figures :rolleyes: I do agree about not liking the way it makes ADD look like.

I day dream, drifting away in my own world of thought, not always seeing or hearing what's going on around me...

I stress over being late, saying something stupid,forgetting to pay bills and my quick angry outburst, that only my family gets to see(lucky them)....

I think to others I look more spacy or nervous, than stressed the way it show in the commercial.........But I could be wrong

I personally think the commercial in question does the ADD/ADHD community a disservice. I think it misleads and distorts what people with ADD/ADHD experience, and in fact, could make it more difficult for employees with ADD/ADHD. Don't forget...employers see this commercial too.

Originally posted by healthwiz
Naturally they don't show the good side, of being creative, and imaginative, and fun, but that is not what the commercial was intended to do.




Of course they don't show the positive part of having AD/HD. If they did Stratterra would not be making any money off of it.

Originally posted by BIG
I personally think the commercial in question does the ADD/ADHD community a disservice. I think it misleads and distorts what people with ADD/ADHD experience, and in fact, could make it more difficult for employees with ADD/ADHD. Don't forget...employers see this commercial too.

Yes you're absolutly correct. That commercial is definitely not what employers should be seeing because it doesn't reflect what we are going though with ADD. In fact, my ADD doesn't hinder my work performance at all, in fact, it probably helps it because of my ability to hyper-focus. I'm lucky in that my job (software engineering) is also what I enjoy doing the most so I'm hyper-focused at work most of the time.. My ADD affects me more at home where I don't feel like cleaning up messes I make, doing boring work around the house, etc.

I've read & spoken to enough ADDers to know that almost everyone seems to have ADD a little differently than the next person. I'm sure that commercial has some people down to a tee and others it is way off base.
I could relate to most of what the commercial was portraying, and when I saw it my first reaction was that I hoped it assisted non-ADDers around me to better understand where I'm coming from. But then, my boss has already come to terms with my ADD and accepts the good with the bad

That's great CNW....you have a boss that not only knows about your ADD but accepts it -- the positive and the negative? You're porbably in the minority....regarding this issue....a lot of us have not been so lucky....to have had such acceptance from employers...LUCKY YOU:) Welcome to Forums, by the way....:)

It's not to say that I am not a constant source of annoyance to her, but she does at least try to be understanding. I have had many jobs in the past where this was not the case.

I've never told an employer before being hired that I am ADD, in fact telling them is a last resort for me. I am unsure if the commercial would really do any damage should an employer see it. Most people have already drawn their conclusions.

What I was most happy to see I think was that the topic of adult ADD was FINALLY being brought up! Most everything you see is usually about kids!

Originally posted by CNW 400
What I was most happy to see I think was that the topic of adult ADD was FINALLY being brought up! Most everything you see is usually about kids!

To that point, I must agree. Countless are the times when I have heard someone exclaim "But isn't ADD a children's disorder?"

Its great to finally have some coverage for all of the ADDults in the world, but at what expense?

As the commercial depicts, many of us work. Is it fair to characterize every ADDer as feeling/thinking the way the main character is portrayed? What about how the boss reacts in the commercial?

If I didn't know much about ADD, I would have taken away a pretty negative impression of people with ADD from that commercial...to the point where I might start to question who in my organization might have ADD...especially those that were the daydreamers or not performing well.

At least they could have shown a before & after meds/treatment comparison of the person with ADD. This would at least have demonstrated that we can perform just as well (if not better) when we address our ADD.

The more I think about this commercial, the more it bothers me.

Just one man's opinion.

Have to agree- if I were an employer, I wouldn't hire an ADD person based on that commercial. Why would you? That commercial makes us seem borderline crazy.

Very true, at what expense? What about all the people with ADD in America with jobs who are going to come under scrutiny and be misjudged? What about all the creative daydreamers responsible for the big ideas who might not be responsible for making sure the project is on schedule? If you get rid of the ADDers you get rid of a huge segment of the brain pool, especially the creative imaginative pool.

The commerical does us little service. ADD is not a mental illness, yet they depict it as such. ADD, in my view, is a way of thinking, that is more adapted to creation and less adapted to ordinary scheduled tasks. Our brains are more adapted to wandering, tht is true, and where we wander is sometimes most wonderful. Some one in society must wander, or we would always travel the same roads, and there would be no inventions and no progress. We would all live in a box...or maybe in a cave.

So as wanderers in a very complex society, with little room for wandering, and much emphasis on industialized schedulized living, we seem out of place. However, we are only out of place in this time period, in this structure of work and organization. The true value of the ADDer has not yet been realized in the overall picture, yet they theorize that almost every great invention we use everyday can be attributed to a man with ADD.

Our time will come, when ADDers are not only respected, but environments will be adapted to suit our needs for creativity and mental wandering. Drugs will come out to help ADDers squeeze themselves into the scheduled task lifestyle of the larger culture, as needed, but there will be a push to keep ADDers in tasks that currently don't exist, which will be fully adapted to the ADDer mind.

Until then, we don't need any of this mental illness imagery of the ADDer. They could have shown the ADDer at work, doing something magnificent, and then turning to her schedule and being totally unscheduled, or forgetting a phone number, or losing keys or forgetting something, so it could be seen that they are responsible for great projects yet have trouble with small things, and how frustrating the small things can become.

We need to protest this commercial in my opinion.

Jon

We must all realize that the real reason for this commercial is for the Ely Lily the makers of Straterra to make money it's not to promote awareness of AD/HD.


This is the same company that was running radio ads earlier this year geared towards parents of children with AD/HD. The webiste address that was given was something like welcometoordinary.com


They are pulling at our heart strings. Watching the commercial made me think about when I was in school and day dreaming and how awful it was to be called on by the teacher and not hear what she had asked.

The commercial was more in keeping with anxiety attacks than ADD in my opinion.But we ADDers are capable of having a normal conversation for goodness sake!

When I'm not anxious, yes, I'm scattered. Thoughts are never-ending and I'm disorganized and forgetful.

Anxiety causes things to spin completely out of control. It can make it impossible to perform socially or other ways.

I like the IDEA of there being a public announcement (even as a commercial) about Adult ADD/ADHD. But I think any one of us here could have given them a better description of what it feels like to live with it.

Charliegirl

I have to agree with charliegirl, TV is NOT an educational tool, no matter it's potential as such. It is a marketing tool with "entertainment" (dubious) as the bait. TV hypnotizes. I remember when younger watching TV with my brother and when the commercial came on, not being able to remember what we were just watching.

When you sit still and your eyes are not moving, that tells your brain it is time to go to sleep, making you very suggestible.

There is a lot of evidence that the brain does minimal work while watching tv, and there are some debates about its longterm effects on our brains. One effect has been a drop in the ability to read, since the directing of tv has gone to rapid changes in scenes, childrens expectations and toleration for the pace of a scene change often does not match up with the pace of a good book. Good books dont change scenes in milliseconds. Watch music videos though, which literally change scenes in a second or less. Childrens brains adapting to that changing pace of information without any brain effort find reading to be too difficult and too boring according to articles I read years ago. This might not be true, I think it was mostly in theory. However, we are having a crisis in dropping reading scores nation wide, especially in Florida, where some 13% of children can't pass the reading section of the FCAT to get to 4th grade.

There was a recent study which took place over a longitude of 20 years which studied violence in adolescence/young adult years, versus hours of television watched as a child. It did not take into account the type of tv watched, just the number of hours. Those who watched more than 3 hours a day of tv as children had a huge increase in probability for being arrested for violence later in life, this was expecially true for males.

The implications are that children need to be doing activities with their time, socializing, playing with each other, playing games, talking, etc, or their social progress might get stuck in the batman or john wayne thought patterns, and resolving conflict the way they see it done on tv. Three hours seems to be the limit, at which point anything over 3 hours daily indicates a child is getting no other social stimulation. A tv is a poor substitute for social stimulation, parenting, friends, and mentors. Thats my read on it.

Jon

You know, I had forgotten until I read your post that there has been a nationwide decline in children's test scores since television was invented. I sent that article to my brother when he had his first kid.

Any thoughts on how much TV George Bush watched?

To continue the "children's reading abilities" tangent.....

I happened to come across a book while I was still teaching reading--or maybe I found it because I was part of a reading teachers' book discussion group, come to think of it--that discusses the "evils" of TV on young brains. The name of the book is Endangered Minds, and as I'm at work right now, I can't state its author. I want to say it's David something, but I could be totally pretending that.

It's been several years since I read it, but I do remember the author blasts Sesame Street as well as video games. I believe it begins by discussing the processes of the brain involved in learning language (and therefore learning to read). It's an extremely interesting book, if not a bit scary.

The problem with some of these "experts" and their reports are they are taken too literally and taken to extremes. It tries to say "this equals that", and although it may sound like a good theory, does it truly have any basis for fact?
That's one reason why persons with ADD have been on a merry-go-round. When I was in school no one knew about ADD. The "experts" tried to put all kinds of labels on my problems, one of which included watching TV.
My seven year old grandson watches what may seem like a lot of TV, especially during the summer out-of school months, but I think it's important to ask too what kind of TV is being watched?
He many times prefers shows about dinosaurs, nature & animals or outer space to watching cartoons.
Sometimes more mind enrichment can be gained by watching TV than interacting with peers, and less violence behavior can be learned watching television than attending some schools.
The post above mentioning the President of the United States is a good example. If it's implying what I think then the next logical step would be to conclude that the hijackers that killed thousands of innocent people in New York & Washington must have watched a lot of TV, as did those who sent them. Yet most of them probably didn't even have a TV when growing up.

CNW - no- that was just a little Bush joking, not to be taken seriously or literally. It does matter what we let our children watch, I agree. TV can be enriching, I agree. But kids have also stopped playing outside due to the potential of kidnap or attack, and they tend to be inside with the "boob-tube". Anything in excess is not a good thing, and the study I mentioned is basically saying that over 3 hours a day, on a regular basis, could be the point of excess, based on their findings. That does not lead to 1:1 correlation, so we can't say Johnny watched 8 hrs of tv a day and is going to be a killer. It may have implications though, that we can use in studying our society, at large. Personally, I am limiting my chilren's tv, for many reasons, including lack of control over the content, obesity in children, lack of exercise in children, my belief that childrens' brains are turning into soggy mushrooms as they sit there watching that square box....I don't know, the whole thing is creepy, kids not playing hide and seek outside, and sitting inside absorbing hours and hours of tv. Thats not how I grew up. I was outside playing all the time. My mom had to call my name out to the neighborhood and I would come running home for dinner or bedtime.

Ah, the memories...lol

Jon