SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Although ADHD has been recognised for more than 100 years, many people still see it as essentially a behavioural problem, says Dr Thomas E Brown, a clinical psychologist and head of the Clinic of Attention and Related Disorders in California in the USA.

He says people with ADHD don’t suffer from behavioural problems so much as from chronic problems with focusing their attention, organising their work, sustaining their effort and using their short-term memory – all of which are managed by the executive functions of the brain.

One of the things he often hears people say is that everyone has ADHD sometimes. “All the symptoms characteristic of ADHD are similar to problems that everyone has sometimes, but not everyone has the severity of impairment required for an ADHD diagnosis,” he says.

“For individuals diagnosed with ADHD, those problems must be significantly more persistent and more impairing than for most people of similar age and must seriously interfere with many aspects of their daily life.”