Sometimes it makes me want to cry when a patient tells me all of my life I
thought I was stupid because I couldn't keep up with other people I never knew
that I had a problem a real problem that could be helped.
Well a ADD is a real problem that can be helped and that's what I'm going to talk
about in this video. I'm dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist and
this is part of a series that I'm actually going to be doing on attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. People will use the term ADD which is
the same thing it's just easier to say. So that's what I'm gonna say but it
really is the same thing. In this video I'm talking about ADD as a bona fide
neurological disorder. ADD is considered a neuropsychiatric disorder which means
it has both mental and behavioral manifestations, but it's also associated
with malfunctioning neural circuits in the brain. We still don't know exactly
the places in the brain where the circuits are malfunctioning, but we've
seen enough evidence to conclude that there's definitely a disconnect between
the way the brain functions in your frontal lobes and your posterior or back
part of your brain. The frontal lobes are responsible for what's called executive
functioning. This is stuff like planning working memory emotional control and
organization. The main cause of ADD is genetic, so if you have a parent with the
disorder it doesn't automatically mean that you will have it, but you have a
greater risk of developing it. Another cause is what we call prenatal or
perinatal insults we call them but these are things that can happen during
pregnancy or even during the birth process. Some examples of this are things
like cigarette smoking during pregnancy, using alcohol during pregnancy or even
having a traumatic birth that results in loss of oxygen. An interesting cause that
I saw was maternal anxiety during pregnancy. Not sure why that's the case
but other things like infection illnesses after birth those are also
associated with developing ADHD. So all in all ADHD is seen as a problem that
occurs during brain development both before and after birth. Here's a study
that showed that there's a three year lag in brain development in children
with ADD. Kids with ADD have lower brain volumes until around age 16. So this is
something real. It's not just bad behavior or laziness. I saw a parent of a
college student who had been struggling most of her life in school, but by the
time she got to college it had become really bad and she was starting to fail classes.
So I prescribed her medication. Her mother came to talk to me because she
didn't believe her daughter needed to take medication to do well in school.
She felt like she just needs to buckle down and get it together. Furthermore she
felt like this was something that we only see in America and they don't she
doesn't have - there's no such thing as ADD in her country. Well my
response was, your daughter has a problem and you can either let her get
treatment and thrive or let her fail because you don't believe that this is
something real and it's only for Americans. So her daughter took the
prescription. She didn't immediately start taking the medication though
because she didn't have the support at home. She didn't feel good about taking
it when her parents really weren't behind her on that. But after enough F's she
finally started taking the medication. And she told me that after she started
taking it it was like someone just turned on the lights. A completely
different learning experience. So finally she was able to
attend long enough to take in the information, process it
and then retrieve it later when she needed it. And that's what a normal
thought process is. But when someone has ADD, there's interruptions in that
train of thought that make it hard for them to process information the way
they're supposed to. I use this illustration because I think this is
unfortunately the sentiment of many people. I think it's even more apparent
when the main manifestation of ADD is hyperactivity. It's very easy to just
look at that as a child without home training. ADD begins in childhood and
usually the symptoms show themselves somewhere around school-age. You may
notice hyperactivity in your toddler, but this can be hard to distinguish between
variations in behavior at that age. So it'll become more obvious when the child
starts school and there's more requirements with learning and more
requirements with following rules. About two-thirds of children continue to have
ADD symptoms into adulthood. The brain chemicals involved in ADD are include
norepinephrine and dopamine and I'll talk more about symptoms in other videos
but broadly speaking it's defined as inattention, hyperactivity and
impulsivity. These symptoms look differently in children than they do
adults. In children they usually show up as trouble keeping up with their
schoolwork or having behavioral problems. Some children only have the attention
problems and they're not hyperactive. With an adult, you can see frequent job
changes, work problems, marital problems, more speeding violations and car
accidents than you would with people who don't have ADHD stay tuned for an
upcoming video on symptoms that look like ADD but aren't really ADD
Thanks for watching