The Love Connection

By Heather Heilman
Photography by Kathy Tarantola

Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell has been called a luminary in the field of attention deficit disorder, a worry guru, and the avatar of family connection. He is the author of seven books, a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and the founder of The Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health. He travels the country talking about learning disabilities and the importance of human connectedness. He has a wide, likeable face and a relaxed demeanor and seems comfortable in front of a live audience and a television camera alike.

But once he was just Ned Hallowell, a young man facing his first day of medical school with a bad case of nerves. He remembers sitting through three screenings of The Sting at the Joy Theatre on Canal Street on the afternoon before he entered Tulane Medical School's class of 1978. It was a great movie, but not that great. It was, however, a distraction from his worries.

He had a bachelor's degree in English from Harvard and had always wanted to be a writer. But he didn't want to starve in a garret somewhere. He wanted to have children and support a family. An uncle who was an orthopedic surgeon told him medicine could be really fun, so he took an organic chemistry course over the summer and decided he could handle the science.

Now he was a thousand miles away from the center of the universe. To him, that was New England. It was his large extended family and the exclusive schools where he'd been educated.

Ned Hallowell had spent time in another steamy Southern city before hitting the streets of New Orleans. But his experiences in Charleston, S.C., hardly served to endear the sweatier latitudes to his heart. When he was a child, his loving but troubled parents divorced. His mother remarried an older man, a literary alcoholic who moved his new wife and stepson to Charleston.

The worst things that ever happened to Ned Hallowell happened in that lovely, genteel town. His mother drank. His stepfather, whom he called "Uncle Noble," drank. When Uncle Noble drank he would beat up Hallowell's mother. One night, Uncle Noble woke Hallowell up at 3 a.m. so the boy could witness a high-stakes craps game being shot against the naked backside of his sleeping mother. Hallowell and his stepfather fought every day until he was sent away to boarding school back in New England.

In Ned Hallowell today, there is an astonishing lack of bitterness about his rough childhood. He says this is because, despite the discord in his family, there was no lack of love.

"I had a connected family. My evil stepfather was pretty evil, but my mom and dad loved me tremendously. They weren't up to the task in some ways, but they did the best they could. They gave me that sense of unconditional love that I think kids need more than anything else. Even though my mom was lost to her drinking and my dad was crazy, I never doubted they loved me."

Even so, like many young adults, Hallowell felt the need to put some distance between himself and his family. That's why he chose to go to medical school outside of New England. And while he didn't consciously choose New Orleans for its similarities to Charleston, the city provided an environment conducive to emotional recovery from the damage done in that other steamy Southern town.

"Coming to New Orleans was just a wonderful infusion of culture," he says. "The city embraced me in a way that was very healing. I established my independence. I got away from my family and was on my own. It was really a turning point for me. Since then I've become a much happier person."

He loved the whirl of restaurants, bars, parties, and Mardi Gras celebrations, and all the things that made New Orleans fun. But the moments that had the biggest impact on the young medical student took place in New Orleans' Charity Hospital. One hot August when the hospital's air conditioning had gone out, he was assigned to the delivery rooms. It was a busy season when the residents had their hands full with complicated deliveries, so medical students handled the more routine deliveries.

"I can't tell you what it's like when that baby comes out," he says. "At the moment of birth, it's miraculous. You feel a spirit entering that room. In the midst of blood and goo and all kind of confusion, there is this explosion. Everybody who's there can feel it. The whole room changes. There's this light that just comes into the room and you are delivering it for that mom and for that child."

Hallowell's faith in God had taken a beating when he discovered reason and skepticism in college. But now, in medical school, it returned.

"In medical school I began to get in people's lives in a real way. I began to see people overcoming suffering. And then as I began to practice I began to see these amazing changes in people's lives. Where did it all come from? I don't know. I believe in God. If I had to translate that into secular terms, it is the power of love."

Those shifts in the delivery room prompted Hallowell to consider becoming an obstetrician, but in the end he found his place in psychiatry. It was a natural fit for him, a former student of the humanities and the son of a father with bipolar disorder. "I really love to get into other people's lives," he says.

"I have a need for it, I soak it up."

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