Article January 3, 2005 Issue

PAY ATTENTION! [GOD'S LOVE—'EXTRA-STRENGTH']

By Gail Gilliland

When I heard Bob Dylan was going to be on 60 Minutes one recent Sunday, I had to watch. I remember one summer when his "Nashville Skyline" and Judy Collins's "Wildflowers" were the only albums I played for three straight months. Now he's on the short-list for the Nobel Prize for Literature for his songwriting. But leave it to Bobby. He sat there in front of the camera and refused to accept the adulation of all the fans who've called him "the prophet" for 40 years. Instead, he implied that his talent was a divine gift that he barely understood himself. If you ask me, there's a man who deserves a prize.

My tuning in to watch Bob Dylan turned out to be fruitful in another way. Before his segment came on, I saw another one about the new drugs that are being offered to adults who suffer from ADD—attention deficit disorder. In recent years, sometimes at the urging of overworked schoolteachers, parents have had the option of administering prescription drugs to children who are severely distracted from paying attention during classroom activities or from finishing their homework. Lately, however, this program reported, the pharmaceutical companies appear to be targeting adults as well—an estimated eight million of them. One company even offers a simple six question quiz to help people determine if they might have ADD.

When the program listed the symptoms, I found them all too familiar. As a child, I could never sit still at school. I cried one year when my third-grade teacher in Atlanta wrote on my report card: "Nancy-Gail is a wiggle worm. I only wish I had her energy!" And apparently, even when she could get me to sit still, I preferred to look out the window at the trees and birds and flowers instead of listening to what she was saying up in front.