Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann is the author of six books on Attention Deficit Disorder, and the pioneer creator of the Hunter/Farmer theory of ADD. His most recent book Healing ADD: Provides breakthrough skills and techniques using NLP and other methods to heal from growing up a Hunter in a Farmer's World

This new book from one of the foremost experts in the field of ADD contains a foreword by Richard Bandler, and focuses on how NLP and similar techniques can be used to heal ADD. The author presents simple methods involving visualisation and positive thinking that can readily be picked up by adults and taught to children with ADD. Those with ADD will learn to see their lives and the world around them differently. A series of instructions guides readers through transformational exercises that enable them to see, hear and feel their own past behaviour in a new and empowering way.

ADD: A Different Perception has become a classic in the literature on ADD and psychiatry in general. It challenges our medical and cultural assumptions that all deviations from the "norm" are "defects," and offers a new perception of ADD, grounded in the new science of Evolutionary Medicine, that posits ADD may have many positive and beneficial aspects. In fact, Hartmann asserts, having ADD in the gene pool was both essential to the survival and success of early humans, and is one of the driving forces for change, invention, and innovation in the modern world.

Thom Hartmann’s books have been written about in Time magazine and he has been on numerous national and international radio and TV shows, including CNN, and BBC radio. He has been on the front page of The Wall Street Journal twice, has spoken to over 100,000 people on four continents over the past two decades, and one of his books was selected for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. A best-selling and award-winning author, he is also rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, and a licensed and certified NLP Practitioner and NLP Trainer.

Over the past twenty years, he has worked with hundreds of ADD and hyperactive children and adults. In 1978, he and his wife Louise opened the New England Salem Children's Village (NESCV), a residential treatment facility for children on one hundred and thirty-two wooded acres on Stinson Lake in New Hampshire. The Children's Village is based on the family model of the international Salem program located in Germany.

As executive director of NESCV for five years, Hartmann worked with numerous psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers and courts, and hundreds of children and parents. He taught parenting classes, helped train child-care workers, was co-founder of the New Hampshire Group Home Association, and worked closely with that state's governor to develop programs for children in crisis.

NESCV specializes in providing previously institutionalized children with a family model, non-institutional setting, and works, usually, without drugs with children who have nearly all been in some form of drug therapy. It was the subject of three major reports on National Public Radio's All Things Considered afternoon news program, as well as feature articles in Parenting, Prevention, East-West, Country Journal, and over a dozen other national publications and newspapers. In 1998, NESCV will be opening The Hunter School, a residential school for ADD/ADHD children (for more information, call 603 786-9427).

From 1972 to 1978, and 1987 to 1991, he taught concentration and meditation techniques through a series of weekly classes, and spoke on these subjects at numerous conferences in the United States and Europe.

As a journalist, Hartmann spent seven years as a radio and television news reporter during and immediately after his college years, and has been published over two hundred times in more than fifty different national and international publications, ranging from the German version of International Business Week and The Christian Science Monitor, to Popular Computing. His monograph about dietary intervention in the hyperactive syndrome was published in 1981 in The Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, and one of his short stories won a national award. One of his books (Think Fast!) was selected for inclusion in the permanent exhibit on information technology in medicine at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

The founder of the Michigan Healing Arts Center, and a student of "alternative" medicine, he received a C.H. (Chartered Herbalist) degree from Dominion Herbal College, an M.H. (Master of Herbology) degree from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in Homeopathic Medicine from Brantridge in England (his Ph.D. thesis was published in a national-circulation magazine in the United States, and these degrees qualify him to practice homeopathic and herbal medicine in England, Canada, India, and several dozen other countries). He  completed a residential post-graduate course in acupuncture at the Beijing International Acupuncture Institute, the world's largest accredited acupuncture teaching hospital, in Beijing, China, in 1986. He is also a certified and licensed NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) Practicioner and Trainer, and rostered as a Psychotherapist by the State of Vermont.