Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

Mate shares several childhood photos in which he looks “far away” and his mother has a yellow star on her chest. He describes the period of his infancy; he was born in 1944 in Budapest as the child of Jewish parents. When he was two and a half months old, Hungary was occupied by the Germans under the command of Adolf Eichmann, who would later be directly responsible for the near eradication of Hungarian Jews, killing over two thirds of them in death camps. Maté has kept his mother’s diaries from this period, during which his father was in a forced labor camp. He examines these accounts in the context of understanding his mother’s anxieties during the first months of his life. He recounts a story in which his mother complained to a doctor about her infant’s incessant crying, to which the doctor responded that all his Jewish patients had crying babies. Maté says that these babies absorbed their parents’ anxieties.

Maté’s maternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. His mother became despondent after they were taken, and she later said that Maté’s presence saved her life by giving her reason to live. A few months later, the deportations ended, but the Hungarian Jews were rounded up into segregated houses.