When I was a child, our priest preached a sermon every year on how we are to pray. He illustrated his point with the absurd example of a robot programmed to recite a prayer over and over. "This," he explained, "is not prayer."

From this, my childish heart took away the lesson that for prayer to "count," I had to "mean" every word of it. And since it was tied to the forgiveness of my sins, I figured this went double for penance prayers said after confession. So I would sit for long periods in the pew, obsessing over my concentration on every single word of my three Hail Marys.

The importance of the moment of consecration as the climax of the Mass was also impressed on me, so I figured that it was critical to focus on it. To be distracted from it was surely a sin.

This was long before anyone -- least of all me -- knew that my mind is more distractible than the typical person's.

For those of us with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), perfect focus on prayer is simply not possible. (I don't know how possible it is for less distractible types, for that matter.) It is entirely natural for one's mind to drift right at the apical moment of consecration. I now think in different way about prayer.

• First, turn your mind and heart to God. This is the most important thing. God understands if your mind wanders; he created it that way. What is important is that your will chooses prayer even if your attention does not always obey.
  
• If you are reciting a prayer, consider its topic and theme first. Try to focus on that, rather than on the individual phrases.
  
• Use a physical object to focus your prayer, such as a Bible or rosary. The sensory feedback from holding it in your hands will help you focus. (Why do you think the string of beads used for the rosary has always been popular?)
  
• Likewise, praying with your body as well as your mind will help with focus. Kneel while praying. Or pray during physical activity -- I had some of my most fruitful meditations in college, when I would pray while walking to class.
  
• Pray unscripted, rather than reciting a prayer. A spontaneous conversation with God will occupy all your attention, and you can let it wander wherever it will. If you are new to this type of prayer, simply talk in your mind as if he is listening -- he certainly is.
  
• If you find yourself anxious about your mind wandering during the liturgy, relax and remember the words of the prayer said during the Mass immediately after the Lord's Prayer: Keep us free from sin, and protect us from all anxiety. Trust that if your mind and heart are turned to him, God will not blame you for human weakness.

• All About Catholic meditation
  
• Forum discussion on concentration during the rosary
  
• Centering Prayer: How not to pray
  
• Quietism heresy: What happens when you remove all distractions
  
• Protect Us From All Anxiety: Meditations For The Depressed, a book by William Burke

This post has been moved to my other blog, The Road to Black. To post a comment, visit the link.


Here is the list of sponsors of The Baby Borrowers as of May 22. Let us see how many of these companies we can harry into dropping their sponsorship. Contact as many as you can, as many ways as you can, as often as you can to express your disapproval. Be firm, but please remain calm, detached, and polite. Rational voices are far more effective than hysterical ones.

This post has been moved to my other blog, The Road to Black. To post a comment, visit the link.


There are some television programs that are evil.

Most of these skulk at the fringes of the mainstream, available only on subscription channels, sometimes not available at all except on DVD or the Internet. In general, this blog ignores truly evil shows.

There is one evil show that I cannot ignore. On first impression, its cutely alliterative title, The Baby Borrowers, made me blink and say, "No, they didn't."

They did.

When I first heard about the show a few months ago, I tried to put it out of my mind because it hits very close to my emotional life as an adoptive mother. But I cannot put it out of my mind. As a member of the adoption community, I have a stark perspective on this program, for it recreates the most tragic parts of the complexity that is adoption.

The book The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier helped open eyes on the fact that separation of a child from her mother is always a tragedy. The parts of Verrier's position as it relates to The Baby Borrowers are devastating:

Every child who is separated from his or her biological mother will experience abandonment and loss.... There will be a difference between the environment of security and safety of being with the mother with whom an infant was prenatally bonded, and the anxiety and uncertainty of being with biological strangers (who [the child perceives] may also leave at any time).... The experience was real. That he does not consciously remember the event should not detract us from this truth. It wasn't a concept to be learned or a theory to be understood; it was a traumatizing experience....

Sudden removal from their parents and placement with strangers for long periods of time is from a baby's point of view no different than a kidnapping.... Babies do not have the mental capacity to anticipate the return of a mother who has gone.... As traumatic as this experience will surely be for these babies and children, the effects will not end when they return home.

I hereby hold Michael Medved accountable for his Townhall.com post on American DNA. Also hereby held accountable are the psychiatrists he cites, Peter Whybrow for his book American Mania: When More Is Not Enough and John Gartner for his book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America. I have not read the books, but I have read Medved's article.

Gartner's thesis is that many historical American figures (he profiles nine of them) were "hypomanic." Apparently he is using this term apart from its usual meaning as a pathology of Bipolar II Disorder, redefining it as a personality trait that has lead to material success achieved by these men (yes, they are all men), who include Christopher Columbus, Andrew Carnegie, John Winthrop, Alexander Hamilton, David O. Selznick, and Craig Ventor. The reviewers indicate he has further defined this personality trait as uniquely American, which if correct, mars his book with a deplorable bit of nationalism. Analyzing the psyches of people long dead is always tricky business, even when one is not reinventing psychiatric terms and concepts.

Amazon.com was kind enough to let me view a page from the book, which describes Carnegie's passion for philanthropy (p. 164). You can't judge a book from a single page any more easily than by its cover, but it does seem a far reach to link philanthropy with mania. It would be interesting to see how Gartner justifies this thesis.

Whybrow's thesis troubles me more because, according to reviews, he generalizes it to the gene pool of the entire U.S. population. He links it to a particular allele in the dopamine reward system, which he asserts has a higher frequency in America than elsewhere due to self-selection. Specifically, he argues that individuals with this allele crave material rewards and are more inclined to seek them out actively than individuals without the allele. Since the immigrant ancestors of today's Americans presumably shared a desire to seek material success in the New World, Whybrow assumes they must have possessed this allele, which has been passed down to us. Further, he blames this allele for American materialism.

The speculation is interesting, and reminds me of Edward Hallowell's speculation that America's relatively high rate of ADHD is due to similar self-selection among immigrants. But leaping off this speculation and blaming America's cultural flaws on genetic heritage disturbs me. What about the materialism of Europe and Japan? I wonder if Whybrow has statistics as to the frequency of the allele in question in different world populations.

Curiously, Medved takes what Whybrow (judging from the reviews) considers a negative trait and recasts it as a positive one. It seems inevitable that racial politics would eventually come into a discussion like this, but I am surprised that it came from the usually-measured Medved himself. His same post also notes that African slaves did not have these (desirable, in his view) genes -- but tries to cover up this racist potshot by adding that there are a lot of African immigrants in America today, who presumably do share the gene. Nice try, Mr. Medved, but you can't make such an egregious statement "okay" by backpedaling.

Politicizing the issue even further, Medved's final argument is that a "welfare state" (right-wing-ese for a state with social programs to take care of its population) wouldn't work in America the way it does in Europe because Americans just don't have the genes for it. Now speculation has degenerated into virtual incoherence. Maybe Medved just has too much good old American hypomanic craziness to sound rational 100% of the time.

For further blog reading:

• Is Having Depression or Bipolar an Advantage? (World of Psychology)
  
• Is Bipolar Disorder a Dangerous Gift? (World of Psychology)
  
• "Once Diagnosed, Never Underdiagnosed", on whether bipolar disorder is a gift (Furious Seasons)
  
• Kenyan Runners and a non-genetic explanation for their dominance in running events (Gladwell.com)
  
• James Watson, six months later, still apologizing for remarks he denies having made about the inferior intelligence of Africans (Scientific American blog community)
  

In the post on health care in prisons, MileHiMama asked, "[D]oes ... the government [have] to provide healthcare, or simply ensure unencumbered access to it?"

What constitutes an encumbrance to health care? EMTALA removes the encumbrance of pre-qualification based on ability to pay, but only in emergencies. Most doctors' practices are not affected by EMTALA because they do not provide emergency care.

Medicaid covers people below a certain income bracket. Medicaid recipients have access to routine and preventative care, but people above this income bracket have no guarantee of receiving such care, unless they have health insurance.

Some of these uninsured cannot afford to pay cash for routine care. I see three options for those people: borrow the money, poach from another part of the budget (such as food or transportation), or go without routine care. Do these people have unencumbered access to non-emergency care?




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