Brainstorms: Understanding and Treating Emotional Storms of ADHD from Childhood through Adulthood

By H. Joseph Horacek and Joseph H. Horacek

Book Overview

Neurophysiologic disorders that impair normal learning as well as social and emotional development afflict at least 5-8 percent of the school-aged children in this country. Significant symptoms often persist into adulthood and many people struggle for a lifetime, never understanding what continues to hamper their functioning. Brainstorms examines questions surrounding the possible neurobiological underpinnings of the emotionally hyperactive and hyperreactive components of ADHD and related disorders. These 'pre-psychological' substrata may, for example, be fundamental to what we think of as temperament. Here is where the regulation of selective attention and the filtration of noise reside, along with the neurosystems behind energy, sleep/wakefulness, and emotional intensity.The 'firecracker temperament' often associated with certain subtypes of ADHD is quick to heat up and just as quick to cool down. Episodes of dyscontrol, involving anger or any other strong emotion, can present the most challenging aspects of managing ADHD in people of all ages; on the other hand, what takes shape in one person as a handicap may be a welcome burst of creativity and inspired vision in others-such as Mozart, Edison, Hemingway. Exploration of the many paradoxes of these brainstorms is the business of Dr. Horacek's very different, very necessary book.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765700808
• ISBN13: 9780765700803
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Jason Aronson
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Outstanding Resource!

This book cover all aspects of the ADD / ADHD child. Good recommendations on meds. for different types of ADHD and why.

concise yet thorough discussion of ADHD and its management

I read a borrowed copy and was ordering my own book within 24 hours. Both as a professional working with "at risk" children and as the mother of a child with a psychobiological disorder, I whole-heartedly recommend Dr. Horacek's book. In a spare 211 pages he gives perhaps the clearest most readable discussion of neuroanatomy and neurotransmitters I have encountered. He covers medical management and includes a fascinating glimpse of drug manufacture and marketing, the FDA, and the quandry faced by medical practitioners (hence insurance companies and consumers) in labeling a collection of behavioral symptoms. This book's cost might give some pause, but in my experience one would have to combine 2 or 3 other less readable texts to approximate the content of this single volume. It's an ideal purchase for those who want to know "why".