Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention

by Katherine Ellison

Overview

Once a mother and her pre-teen son discover they're both clinically incapable of paying attention, how will they stop bickering and move forward together?

"A story of love and persistence... Buzz will teach. charm, and bolster you."

--Edward Hallowell, MD, author of Driven to Destruction

When Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Katherine Ellison and her twelve-year-old son, Buzz, were both diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, they realized they had more than just an uphill battle ahead-they were facing a cliff.

Ellison, inquisitive and driven by nature (even while grappling with the storm of ping-pong balls in her head), hunts down every possible approach to supporting a child with ADHD, from neurofeedback to nutritional supplements.

BUZZ will not only make you laugh out loud but also provides insights on every page for parents seeking answers for how to provide the best help for their particular child.

What answers does an award-winning journalist track down when the story she's investigating is her own parenting?

Read BUZZ today to find out!

"Long after reading this smart and tender memoir, I am still rooting for Buzz."

-Kelly Corrigan, author of THE MIDDLE PLACE and LIFT

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798986168067
Publisher:	Ink, Inc.
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Pages:	326
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist, former foreign correspondent, writing consultant, author of four books, and mother of two sons. Her most recent writing has focused primarily on neuroscience and the environment.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Predicament: "Understand Me!" 1

It's Personal

Chapter 1 History: Stuck on Input 15

Chapter 2 Emergency: Crossing Lines in the Ritalin Wars 36

Chapter 3 Biology: The Anatomy of Distraction 53

Chapter 4 Relationships: The Cookie of Peace 77

It's Cultural

Chapter 5 Society: Attack of the Chronophages 99

Chapter 6 Education: The Rules of Engagement 117

Chapter 7 Add-Vocacy: The Strength in Numbers 134

Is It Curable?

Chapter 8 Wired: Braving the New World of Neurofeedback 153

Chapter 9 Meditation: "No One Ever Died of Restlessness" 172

How About Reframable?

Chapter 10 The White Contender 195

Chapter 11 Knots To Undo 207

Epilogue: What Else Worked 217

Notes 227

Select Bibliography 277

On Methods and In Gratitude 279

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

…although Ellison can find no magic bullet, her book offers an instructive, if scattered, guide for parents of "certifiable" problem children as they navigate the "data storm" surrounding attention disorders.
—The Washington Post

Nora Krug

"An absorbing, sharply observed memoir."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Ellison (The Mommy Brain: How MotherhoodMakes Us Smarter, 2005, etc.) writes about her life on the ADHD battlefront.

When the author's son Buzz entered second grade, her world began to collapse as he became more unmanageable at home and in school. Forced to admit that something was seriously wrong, Ellison heeded school authorities who were urging her to seek psychiatric help for her son, despite her initial reluctance to medicate him. Not only was her son's behavior becoming increasingly uncontrollable, but she realized that she was exacerbating his problems by her tendency to fly off the handle when provoked. She wondered if he inherited his ADHD, "the hallmark obsession of our frazzled era," from her, and she examined her career, which was filled with "heady success" but built upon "constant cravings for conflict and caffeine" and marred by a number of careless blunders. After both she and her son received a positive diagnosis, Ellison decided to spend a year exploring a range of treatments—medication, therapy and family counseling, meditation, biofeedback—to fully understand the pitfalls of her interaction with her sons. Although she is no longer an opponent of medication, from which her son benefitted, she is still critical of the failure of the one-size-fits-all public-education model, made more problematic by staff cutbacks and increasing class sizes. Despite the fact that she did not find a silver-bullet cure, Ellison sums up her year as positive: Buzz has had fewer outbursts at home and at school, and she has learned to slow down and not react negatively to his provocations.

An absorbing, sharply observed memoir.

Kirkus Reviews