I was completely fine with the article until the author compared nonperfectionists to Homer Simpson. How insulting. I guess I should compare perfectionists to Frazier, or Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, or Monk to be equally as insulting to the author, who must consider herself a “healthy perfectionist.”
I believe everyone has some things that they “obsess” over. I like my gardens to be weed-free, but if they are not it is usually because I lack time to maintain them—and I can still sleep at night. I will try to make my drawings and paintings perfect. I love to sew and want my embroidery to look beautiful. My husband will spend hours on a presentation but not on a home maintenance project. My children both have things that they are “picky” about. I think “healthy” is being picky about the important things and letting the rest go.
Kathleen Stauffer
via e-mail
A Matter of Wiring
It is my view that the theory presented by Christof Koch in “A Theory of Consciousness” [Consciousness Redux] is incomplete science at best and philosophy at worst. Any study deserving to be considered science must be at least testable. My view is that the definition of integration as meaningful connections between pieces of data is arbitrary and requires more specifics to be scientific. The transistors inside a microprocessor may have a limited number of connections between the registers (memory locations), but software provides nearly unlimited possibilities for sorting the data. The same could also be said for the performance of the human mind, using the reasonable assumption that our brains are more or less constant between individuals and that it is our innovation and experience that count.
Dave Rauschenfels
Minneapolis
Evolving Treatment
“Do ADHD Drugs Take a Toll on the Brain?” by Edmund S. Higgins, raises a question about the root causes of secondary symptoms or conditions in patients with ADHD.
In my experience of more than 45 years as a psychologist, often working with ADHD individuals from preschoolers to senior citizens, I have observed cases in which patients develop anxieties and depressions as a result of a mismatch between their medical treatment and their developing brain. As they accumulate life experience or deal with short-term stressors, their medication regimen may need adjustment. Unfortunately, practitioners may see the anxiety or depression and treat it as a new problem, without exploring the underlying developmental causes that may be related to the primary ADHD.
Treatment of ADHD entails understanding its impact at all life stages. A child may fail a class, not do homework or drive unsafely, and exploration could reveal medications falling below therapeutically effective levels at such times. Once their treatment is “fine-tuned” to reflect these changes, the difficulties may resolve without adding another diagnosis or class of medications.
Teaching individuals self-monitoring and medication scheduling is imperative. We should be cautious about adding a second diagnosis to anyone with ADHD before current treatment has been evaluated from a developmental perspective.
Gust Jenson
Menomonie, Wis.
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5 Comments
Add CommentThe popularity of imperfectionism keeps idiots in charge
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcellent points
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome elders do a lot to keep complex issues untangled and remain approachable to grandchildren while their midlife aged children as parents might be more suspect among their peers for dubious or imperfect behaviours. Without a will to understand highly personal values and ethics, the focus on what is right and wrong may at times be in the hands of social workers who may be more manipulated by our offspring than ourselves.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerfection is a dream word for the human mind. It is a search for the ultimate/unlimited with the limited capacity. If God is an agglomeration and congruence of the laws of nature, even He is not perfect because his laws are protected by a system of adjustment and readjustment that keeps the laws ever-young and strong. How then can man be perfect with all the inherent frailties endowed by nature to lead him towards realisation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have seen lots of people who pretend to be perfectionists. They are considered the odd-outs. It is so because those who judge them are themselves devoid of that same foresight. No two persons are alike. Hence no two people will be ideally tuned in to that conviction. They could adjust for social, political and other reasons. But inherently they are not convinced.
If man was perfect, he would not be born with so many imperfections. Hence, I would rather say that man is an endeavour towards perfection, a perfection he never reaches. But he rests satisfied with the little he has achieved in his lifetime. Even as happiness, perfection is a process not an achievement.
We all learn from many different people and in many different ways. To say that one or the other is more important is foolish. We all choose the patch we walk and make changes along the way. There is no one fact for any of that.
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