Dr. Ned Hallowell's Wonderful World of Different: ADHD and Beyond

Today’s guest is Mike Govino, a man who has been dealt some difficult hurdles in life but has come out smiling on the other side. Mike’s journey began on a rough start, beginning with his mother’s experience with trauma regarding his father while Mike was still in the womb. Thus, Mike believes he was prone to having genes for addiction, autoimmunity and cognitive issues, which did show up later on. His mother, suffering from alcoholism, lost custody of her children over their father, who had a large religious congregation and was later revealed to be a pedophile. Mike and his father didn’t get along, so he found himself in the wrong crowd by 11 years old. Emotional neglect and lack of nurture from his mother geared him towards anxiousness.

Mike’s involvement with the wrong crowd as an adolescent led him to using and selling substances, specifically opiates. It was actually this money that he used, later on, to buy his first house after becoming sober at the age of 25. Today, almost 19 years later, he has not touched an opiate since. While Mike was detoxing himself, his father’s story came out in the newspaper. Though he had quit using opiates, Mike was struggling with alcohol addiction and began attending AA meetings with his mother and has been clean off all substances since 2004.

Mike shares his revelation that the body holds our trauma and ultimately makes us more susceptible to illness, disease, etc. When he was 26, a doctor told him that his entire colon was ulcerated. He left the colonoscopy with hoards of medications and managed to get himself in remission. On a backpacking trip throughout South America, Mike contracted a parasite. He speaks of the connection between our gut and brain. His system was so sensitive and inflamed that he couldn’t even be in an everyday environment. Rather than following the advice of traditional medicine, Mike began seeking forgiveness of those in his past, changing his diet and practicing mindfulness to turn the corner back to the path of wellness. Now, Mike is a certified holistic health coach. His ideal clients are people in recovery from addiction and want to experience deeper healing.

In today's episode, Dr. Hallowell introduces an exciting new guest, Terry Matlen. Terry's personal experience is extensive, as she has not only lived with ADHD, but raised a daughter with it, and helped tens of thousands of women struggling with it. She currently has 36,000 followers on her Facebook page dedicated to helping women with ADHD. Terry finds that the best textbook for learning and leading is the experience of people with ADHD, and her Facebook page bears out this persuasion. The group developed slowly over several years as a platform for women to connect with others who understood them, and has become a thriving community of people who are able to share in a safe place and find that they are not alone.

In today’s episode, Dr. Hallowell is joined by Michael Thompson, a PHD Psychologist who is now a bestselling author of 'Raising Cain' and 'It’s a Boy' and consultant to independent schools. They open the episode by introducing today’s topic question, which is has the pandemic traumatized today’s children? Michael shares how this has been a very common question in recent days and begins to uncover his own research in the answer to it.

In today's episode, Dr. Hallowell speaks to a student from his own former prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy. 18 year old Justin Rigg was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia himself at a young age and has learned to utilize these diagnoses rather than just cope with them. Giving us an inside look at what his daily life is like, he shares his experiences, both on and off campus, at one of the most rigorous prep schools in the country.

Today, Dr. Hallowell invites listeners to a special episode - one in which he gets to introduce a master clinician! While many reputed experts in children's therapy, psychiatry, and mental health excel in theory but not in practice, today's guest is a surpassing expert in clinical practice. This guest, Dr. Victoria Waller, has been seeing children for more years than Dr. Hallowell can count, and is the author of a soon-to-be-released book on the topic of helping children with learning differences. The book is aptly named Yes! Your Child Can, and it is a great resource to find on-the-ground facts to guide the process of helping kids who are struggling with learning.

Kirsten Carder is the host of the I Have ADHD podcast. She helps adults with ADHD create the life that they've always wanted in her coaching program, Focused. She has been living life with ADHD and accomplishing everything she set her mind to, and now she's dedicating her life to helping other adults with ADHD do the same thing.

Dr. Hallowell invites several guests to present a different form of diagnosing a difference, including discussion of an exciting new tool for screening for ADHD: the Virtual Reality Attention Tracker!. This wearable device is a project of Cognitive Leap, a digital mental health company exploring innovative ways of applying the latest technology to the diagnosis and treatment of all kinds of conditions. Jack Chen is the CEO of the company and overseer of the VR Attention Tracker project, and he joins the podcast today along with his colleagues Skip Rizzo, a professor at USC, and Aram Ma, the principal investigator of the project.

Bryan Rigg is a military historian with a Phd from Yale and the author of 4 books. But at the start of life Bryan struggled, his then undiagnosed ADHD causing him lots of difficulties. After diagnosis, a teacher who took time to understand and support him made all the difference and helped him on the path to a successful and rewarding life.

The week’s guest is Jennifer Knopf, President of the REED Charitable Foundation based in Florida. The REED Foundation trains public school teachers to support children with dyslexia and other reading challenges. Jennifer was motivated to start her work through the experience of supporting her own son in his struggles with reading and spelling. Her first venture was a free community education event which was a huge unexpected success. Listen in to hear how her work grew from there.

Dr. Hallowell chats with Bob Broudo, retiring headteacher of Landmark School which specializes in supporting students whose brains work a little differently. Bob has spent a lifetime helping young people learn, and showing that there is much more there is to intelligence and creativity than smart and stupid. Listen in to hear them discuss how attitudes to neurodiversity have changed over the last 50 years and how much more needs to be done for everyone to understand the strengths of different.