[ADHD Explained: A 28-Minute Primer]
[Understood for learning & attention issues]
What we know as ADHD,
[Thomas E. Brown, Ph.D. — Associate Director,]
[Yale Clinic for Attention and Related Disorders]
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—or
some people still call it "ADD," attention-deficit disorder—
has been recognized by some doctors
since way back in 1902. But from 1902 until 1980,
it was all about little boys who couldn't sit still,
couldn't shut up, and were driving everybody nuts.
It was just behavior problems.
The name of the disorder was changed
a number of times. There were different formulations.
But it was all about behavior problems.
Since 1980, which is when they first changed the name
of the disorder to include the words "attention deficit,"
we've realized that this is not so much
a behavior problem but far more a problem
with the brain's management system—
its executive functions.
And we also learned that there are many people
who have ADHD who've never had
any significant behavior problems.
And that even for those who have,
that's usually the least of it. It's the attention problems
that tend to make more trouble for people,
particularly as they get a little bit older
and more is expected of them
for being able to manage themselves.
One thing that's important to be clear about
from the very beginning is that ADHD has nothing to do
with how smart a person is. There's some people
who have this who are like super, super, super smart.
Others, high average, middle average, low average, slow.
I treat people for this who are like university professors
and doctors and lawyers and big shots in business.
A lot of people who are regular folks.
Some people have trouble doing the basics.
You could be anything along the IQ spectrum
and still have ADHD. It has nothing to do
with how smart you are. The other thing to know
is that this is a problem—a set of problems—
that include a wide range of characteristics,
and what I'd like to do today is to describe for you
some of the characteristics of what we call ADHD,
give some examples of them, and then talk a little bit
about what we know about what's involved
in the brain in the course of ADHD.
One thing that's important is that people—
one of the main things that people with ADHD
complain about is trouble staying tuned.
That when they're listening or reading or working
on something, they get part of it,
but then it sort of drifts off, and then they're back,
and then they drift off, and it drifts off again,
and then they're back.
They have difficulty staying tuned.
It's similar, in a way, to the problem you have
with a cell phone where you're in an area
where you don't have good reception. You can get
part of it, and then the message keeps fading in and out.
The other thing is that they often have a problem
with being distracted. Like anybody else,
they see and hear things that are going on around them.
They have thoughts going through their head.
But most people, if they have something they've got
to focus on, can push that stuff out of the way and focus
on what they've got to do. People with ADHD—
it's real hard for them to do that. They'll be sitting
in the classroom trying to listen to what's going on,
or perhaps they'll be in a meeting or sitting down
trying to read something or write something,
and somebody drops a pencil, and they have to sort of
check and see, where did the pencil go?
Then they'll be back on task again
for a couple of minutes. Then they're thinking
about some TV show they saw the night before.
And then they're back on task again for a minute,
so they're thinking about some conversation they had
with somebody two hours ago. And then they're back
on task again for a few minutes, and then they're looking
out the window like anybody else will from time to time,
but they're likely to sit and watch the squirrel go up
the tree a little longer than somebody else
and be checking out the traffic and the cloud formation,
the guy who's mowing the lawn.
Then they're back on task again for a few minutes,
and they'll be thinking about what they're going to do
when this is over and how soon is this thing
going to be over anyhow. I've got things I've got to do.
And what am I going to have for supper tonight?
And I wonder what's on TV tonight?
All these things are coming in all at one time,
and it's almost like you're trying to watch TV
and you've got four different stations all coming in
at the same time on one channel, and it gets kind of hard
to separate the signal from the noise.
But the thing that's puzzling about this,
that really makes it very difficult for people to understand,
is for people who have ADHD, it's like that
almost all the time, but not always.
Everybody I've ever seen who has ADD—
and that's a lot of people—has a few things they can do
where they have no trouble paying attention,
no trouble focusing.
Let me give you an example. Sixteen-year-old boy
I saw—he was the goaltender for his school's
ice hockey team. And it just happened
that the day his parents brought him in to see me
was the day after his team had just won
the state championship in ice hockey, so they're bragging
a little bit at the beginning about how great he was
in the tournament the day before. And apparently he was
a very good goalie. They said when he was in there
playing hockey, he missed nothing. He knew
where the puck was every second of a fast game.
Totally on top of it. The kind of goalie every team wants.
Smart kid. Tested way high up in the superior range.
Wanted to get good grades. Was hoping to go
to medical school. But he was always in trouble
with his teachers. And what they'd say to him is,
you know, once in a while you'll say something
that shows how smart you are.
We'll be talking about something. You'll come in
with some comment that's really very perceptive,
and it's quite impressive. But most of the time,
you're out to lunch. You're looking out the window.
You're staring at the ceiling. You look like
you're half-asleep half the time. You don't even know
what page we're on. And the question they kept asking
him was, "If you can pay attention so well
"when you're playing hockey, how come you can't pay
attention when you're sitting in class?"
Here's another example. A lot of times parents will bring
in kids for me to see, and they say, "You know,
"the teacher says this kid can't pay attention
"for more than five minutes. We know that's not true.
"We have watched her play video games.
"And she can sit and play those video games
"for three hours at a time and not move.
"And the teacher said she's easily distracted.
"That's nonsense. When she's playing those games,
"she's locked on that screen like a laser,
"and the only way you're going to get her attention
is to jump in her face or turn off the TV."
So again, it's like, you can do it here.
Why can't you do it there? Now, it's not always sports
or video games. There's some people with ADD—
they're not good at that stuff. They might be into art,
and they're sketching and drawing and really getting
into it. Somebody else, when they were little,
they're creating engineering marvels with LEGO blocks.
And then when they're older, they're taking car engines
apart and putting them back together
or designing computer networks. But everybody
I've ever seen who has ADHD has a few things
they can do where they have no trouble paying attention,
even though on almost everything else, they've got
a lot of trouble paying attention. And if you ask them
about it, you say, "What's with this? How come
"you can do it here and you can't do it here, here,
and here?" Usually what they'll say is, "It's easy.
"If it's something I'm interested in, I can pay attention.
If not, I can't." And most people hear that and they say,
"Yeah, right. Congratulations. That's true for anybody.
"Anybody's going to pay attention better for something
they're interested in than for something they're not."
Which is true. But here's the difference.
People who don't have ADHD—if they've got something
they've got to do and they know they've got to do it
and it's important, they can usually make themselves
pay attention, even if it's pretty boring,
just because they know they have to do it.
People with ADD—it is incredibly difficult for them
to be able to make themselves pay attention
unless the task is something that's really interesting
to them, not because somebody told them
it ought to be interesting, but just because it is interesting
to them for whatever reasons. Or if they feel like
they have a gun to their head and something
very unpleasant is going to be happening very fast
if they don't take care of this right here, right now.
Under those two conditions, no problem.
They can focus very well. Anything else,
it's really difficult for them to focus.
But the problem is, this is not something
that's under voluntary control. It makes it look
like it's a problem with willpower. "If you can do it here,
why can't you do it here, here and here?"
But it's not a problem with willpower. It's a problem
with the way the brain is wired. All the characteristics
of ADHD, which I'm going to be describing here,
are things everybody has trouble with sometimes.
It's just people with ADD have a lot more trouble with it.
So in that sense, ADHD is not an all-or-nothing deal
like pregnancy, with, either you are pregnant
or you're not pregnant. There's nothing in between.
It's more like depression, where everybody
gets bummed out once in a while. But just because
somebody's unhappy for a couple of days doesn't mean
we're going to diagnose them as clinically depressed.
It's only when those depressive symptoms are persistent
and pervasive and making a lot of trouble for them,
we say, "Yep, that's a depression.
We ought to do something about it."
So all the characteristics of ADHD are problems
everybody has sometimes. It's just, with people
who have ADD, they just have a lot more difficulty with it
more of the time. And the problem is,
it is not under voluntary control.
It's not something you can do with willpower.
But let me tell you about some of the other things
which we see with people with ADHD.
One is they often have trouble getting organized
and getting started on things. For many, it's difficulty
organizing their stuff—their backpack, their desks,
their notebooks, their filing system, their living space—
bigger mess than most other people most of the time,
unless somebody else is helping them take care of it.
Other people have no trouble at all with their stuff.
They have a lot of trouble with their time and their work.
And what they'll tell you is, "If I have a bunch of stuff to do
"at one time, it's really hard for me to look at it and say,
"'OK, that should be first. That should be second.
That should be third.'" But even when they get
their priorities straight, which often doesn't happen,
they tend to have a lot of difficulty getting started.
Another piece of it that you'll often hear about
from people with ADHD is, they'll say they have
a lot of difficulty in regulating their sleep
and their alertness and being able to keep up the effort
to finish things in a reasonable time. Many complain
that they have trouble getting to sleep,
and what they'll tell you is, "I often stay up a lot later
"than I really want to or should because I've found
"if I try to go to bed before I'm really, really exhausted,
"I just can't shut my head off. I just keep thinking of stuff.
"And so I stay up late reading, watching TV,
"surfing the net, or whatever until I'm just exhausted.
"Then I fall asleep fine. But the problem then is I tend
"to sleep like a dead person, and I have a hard time
"resurrecting myself in the morning. And if I don't have
"somebody around to help me get myself out of bed
"in the morning, I'm very likely to be late to whatever it is
"I'm supposed to do or possibly sleep through
"the whole thing. I just keep hitting the snooze button
or just turn the clock off altogether."
During the day they're usually all right as long as they're
on their feet moving around or talking a lot.
But if they have to sit still for very long to listen
or to read or do paperwork, the eyelids start getting
kind of heavy. Another thing that often happens
as a problem with people with ADHD
is they have trouble staying with a task,
that they may start it reasonably well,
but they have a hard time then keeping up
the effort to finish it in a reasonable time.
I had a track star from the university, a runner,
who came into my office one day, and he said,
"My mind's a great sprinter,
but it's a lousy distance runner."
He said, "If the task I have to do is something
"you can do in one quick chunk, you just go all out for it
"and then you're done with it, I'm fine. But if it's
"something where you can't do it in one quick chunk,
"it's a longer-term project, if you have to chip—
"keep chipping away at it day after day, that I have
"more trouble with. And my approach to that
"is either hurry up, slapdash, get the thing done,
"or, why don't we just set this aside and wait
until it becomes a little more of an emergency?"
Everybody has trouble with deadlines sometimes.
People with ADD, it's almost like they can't get started
until it's becoming an emergency.
Another thing that often persons with ADHD have trouble
with is writing. I'm not talking about penmanship, now.
I'm talking about taking ideas and putting them
into sentences and paragraphs. Because what people
say is, often, "I've got a lot of ideas for what I should write
"for this essay I'm supposed to write
"or for this term paper, but it just takes me half of forever
"to be able to get the sentences and paragraphs
"put together so they make sense. I'm either changing it
or it's just disorganized." They have difficulty
organizing their thoughts and being able to get the words
out in a reasonable way.
Another piece of this—it's not part
of the official diagnostic criteria for ADHD,
but it's certainly something that a lot of people with ADHD
are concerned about and complain about—
is that many times they have difficulty managing
their emotions. But I need to give you a few examples,
because it's not the same for everybody.
Salesman I saw one time came in and he said,
"You know, I was in the diner yesterday late afternoon
"having a lunch. I'm in a pretty good mood, sitting there
"eating my sandwich. The guy in the booth behind me
"gets his sandwich. He's chewing too loud.
He's going chomp, chomp, chomp." He said,
"There was something about that noise
"that was driving me nuts. It was as though
"a computer virus had gotten into my head
"and just gobbled up all the space,
"and that's all I could think about, was that noise.
"I'm sitting there with my fists clenched, seriously thinking
"about getting up and smacking this guy in the mouth
because he was chewing so obnoxiously loud."
He said, "I didn't do it. I didn't want to get arrested.
"But if I'd been at home, I would have been yelling
at somebody or I would have walked out of the room."
He said, "Then it was strange,
"because after a few minutes, he's still making
the same noise, but then it didn't bother me anymore."
He said, "Stuff like that happens to me a lot
"where there'll be some little frustration, the kind of thing
"that most people on a scale of frustration would say—
"that goes from zero to 10—would say, that's a zero
or a one, maybe a two at the most. For me," he said,
"it can be like a seven or an eight or nine."
He said, "Sometimes I make a big fuss about it.
"A lot of times I don't say anything. But I feel this surge
"of anger where I feel like punching somebody
or breaking something. And then usually it's over with."
But he said, "It's not always that way."
He said, "Day before that, I'm in the office. I'm walking
"down the hall. A friend of mine who works
"in the other department's coming around the corner.
"He's walking toward me reading some papers
"as he's walking. And I hadn't seen him for a long time.
"So as we approached each other, I stopped and said,
"'Hey, what's up? How you doing?' I figured we'd stop
"and chat for a minute. And he looks up, says hi,
puts his head down, keeps right on walking."
He said, "Now most people would blow that off
"in a minute and figure he was in a hurry.
He's got to get to a meeting or something. We'll talk later."
He said, "Not me. Happened at lunchtime. I got nothing
"done for the rest of the day. I spent all afternoon
"thinking to myself, 'Did I do something to annoy him?'
"Or maybe I did something to offend somebody
"in his department and they're all angry with me.
"Or maybe I'm just the kind of person that nobody likes,
"and nobody would tell me about it.
But I couldn't get it out of my head."
Other people, it's not like that.
They get an idea in their head of something they want
to do or something they want to get
or something they want to buy, and all of a sudden
that wish takes on such strong urgency that the feeling is,
I've got to have it now. And it almost doesn't matter
how expensive it is or how inconvenient it's going to be
for them or for somebody else, or whether they're using
time and money now for this that they know they need
for something else tomorrow that's more important.
There's just this relentless push, and they will keep that
up until either they get it or they hit a brick wall.
But even if they get it, they're not that happy,
because usually by then they're off on something else
they want. Other people, it's not like that,
but they worry a lot. Like one woman talked about
how she was driving down the expressway.
She's in the left lane. She said, "I'm in the left lane.
"I've got the Jersey barrier to my left, an 18-wheeler truck
"on my right. We're cruising about 65 miles an hour,
"and this truck starts to pull over a little bit.
"He didn't get in my lane, but it got me thinking about
"how big his truck was and how small my car was.
"And pretty soon I'm thinking to myself,
"what would happen if he didn't see me and he pulled
"over and squished me against the Jersey barrier?
"And soon I'm not just thinking about it. I'm running
"a very vivid movie in my head, imagining exactly what
"it would look like if that truck came over
"and smashed into my car, crumpled the car,
"sharp pieces of metal were sticking into me,
"I'm bleeding to death, the car's getting dragged
"along the Jersey barrier, the truck jackknifes,
"cars and trucks behind us are hitting us repeatedly,
"there's this massive traffic jam, takes a long time
"to get the rescue squad out to cut me out of the car.
"By that time, I've bled to death. They have to call
"my family and tell them I'm dead. And all this
"while I'm trying to drive the car 65 miles an hour
down the road." She said, "Stuff like that happens to me
"all the time. There'll be some little thing, and I think,
"what would happen if this happened?
"And everything's going all right, and I'm thinking,
"what would happen if this happened or what
"would happen if that happened? And pretty soon
I'm not just thinking about it. I'm into it."
Now, it's not like anybody with ADD has all this stuff.
But many will have one or some combination
of a couple of them. But what they have in common
is that computer virus in the head thing, that the emotion,
whether it's the hurt feelings or the being annoyed
about something or, "I've got to have it now,"
or, "What would happen if?"—comes and just sort of
gobbles up all the space in their head,
and it's very difficult for them to put it in perspective,
to put it to the back of their mind and get on
with what they've got to do.
Another thing that's very important for people with ADHD
is their working memory. If you ask folks who have ADHD,
"How's your memory?" Often they'll say,
"I've got the best memory in my family. I can remember
stuff nobody else can remember." And they give you
some example about some movie they saw 10 years ago.
And they can tell you every detail of the entire storyline
of the movie they saw once 10 years ago
and haven't seen it since.
Or somebody else will say, "Yeah, I went
"to the Super Bowl five years ago. I can still describe
for you almost every play they ran during that game."
Or somebody else will say, "I've got 450 songs
"in my head, all the music, all the lyrics,
all the verses that were popular back in the '70s."
But even though they might be very good
about remembering some things like that
from a long time ago, if you ask them about something
that happened just a couple of minutes ago
or yesterday, often they can't tell you.
The problem with memory with ADHD is not
with long-term storage memory.
It's with short-term working memory.
It's what you depend on when you go into the other room
to get something and you're standing there scratching
your head wondering what in the world
you came in here for.
Or you're working on a project. You go downstairs
to get something you need for the project, see something
else that's interesting or something else that needs doing.
Soon you're up to your elbows in project number two,
having totally forgotten you were in the middle
of project number one upstairs
and it was kind of important to get it done.
Students complain—they'll be in class. Teacher asks
the question. They'll raise their hand. They've got
a good answer for it. Teacher calls on somebody
else first. You have to wait while this other kid
says her shtick. Then the teacher comes back and says,
"Yeah, what were you going to say?" It's like
totally clueless. Not only have I forgotten what
I was going to say, but what was the question again?
Or they'll read something and understand it perfectly well
at the moment that they read it. They read
a few more pages, stop for a second, and realize
their eyes have gone over every word and they haven't
got the foggiest idea of what they just read.
Or—this really bothers them—they'll study for a test
the night before the test. They'll go over it and, quiz them,
they've got it. They go into class the next day
thinking they're going to get a good grade on this,
and all of a sudden the big chunk of what they knew
the night before has evaporated. Can't pull it out
of their head when they need it.
But then a few hours, a few days later,
something jogs their memory and it's all back again.
It's not that they didn't have it. It's they couldn't retrieve it
when they needed it. Or you're getting ready
to go someplace. You think of five things you need
to take with you. Half an hour later, you're walking
out the door. You got one of them. Can't remember
the other four to save your life. It's where you have to hold
one thing in your mind while you're doing something else.
That's the kind of memory problem that people
with ADHD complain about.
Another part of this is managing action. You know,
it's certainly true that there are some people who,
even as adults, are very restless and antsy.
It's like they always have to have some part of them
in motion. And there are some who are very quick
to jump into things, even as adults. And certainly
there are many kids who have this sort of thing.
But the fact is, many people with ADHD have difficulty
slowing down when they need to slow down
and speeding up when they need to speed up.
Often they have difficulty in monitoring their actions.
They'll sometimes speak out of turn and not take
into account what the effects are going to be
of talking out and saying what they're saying.
Or they'll jump into something without thinking about,
"What's going to happen if I do this?"
But all these things I'm talking about—the problems
with memory, the problems with difficulty
in controlling actions, the problems with regulating
emotions, the problems with regulating alertness
and sleep, the problems with being able to focus
and shift focus when you need to—all these things
constitute the range of difficulties that people with ADHD
complain about. And remember, all of these are things
everybody has trouble with sometimes.
It's just that people with ADD have a lot more trouble
with them. So the question is not,
does it ever happen, but how much does it happen?
How much does it interfere with the person's being able
to do the things they have to do in their daily life?
Now, how does it happen? Why is it that some people
have this—so much more difficulty with these things
than other people do? The evidence shows that it seems
to be mostly inherited. Out of every four people
diagnosed with ADHD, one of them has a mom or dad
who's got it, whether they know it or not.
They never used to diagnose this very well.
Even today, it gets missed a lot. The other three,
if they don't have a parent who has it,
usually they have a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt
or a cousin or a brother or sister. One of their relatives
will have it. Although often, it's not recognized.
There are some people who have this where you can see
it from early childhood. There are some others
where you don't see it much in the early years
of their schooling, but then when they begin to move
into middle school and they don't have that one teacher
who can help to keep things organized for them,
now all of a sudden they've got to keep track
of what's going on in several different classes
and homework for different courses and moving around
from one class to another.
They have a lot more difficulty managing it.
There's some whose parents are so effective in building
a scaffolding around them that you don't even see
the problem until they get up into high school
where their parents are not that much aware
of what they need to do, or they may move out
of the house and move off to college or get involved
in some work where the parents can't help them,
and you begin to see then that they have a lot of trouble
organizing themselves and doing what they need to do.
So we don't always see this in early childhood.
Sometimes it doesn't really appear until adolescence
or early adulthood. But the fact is that those
are usually the hardest times, I would say probably
for most, middle school, high school,
first couple of years of college or going out
in to the work world. Those are the times
when most people with ADHD have the most difficulty
with it. Because those are the times when you have
the widest range of tasks you have to do with the least
opportunity to escape from the ones
you're not that good at. If you're lucky, as you move on,
you can focus more on the things you're good at
and let somebody else do the other stuff
that you're not that good at.
And some people function quite well that way.
But the fact is, these are problems that can cause
a lot of difficulty, not just in school, but in the way
people get along with other members of their family,
the way people manage their social relationships
and the way they manage their jobs.
And what we need to do is to be able to design a way
of helping them to work with their strengths
and working around their difficulties.
But I think in order to be able to really appreciate this
fully, it's important to understand what's going on
in the brain that underlies these difficulties,
which I've just been describing.
The brain is about two and a half pounds. About that big.
In there, you've got 100 billion neurons.
Those are the cells that make up most of the brain tissue.
It's hard for most people to imagine a number as big
as 100 billion, but here's a way you can do it.
Think about pixels on a TV screen.
Imagine a 17-inch TV screen or monitor screen
for your computer. On that screen,
you'd have about 200,000 pixels. Now imagine
if we then went to the Freedom Tower in New York.
It's almost 100 floors high.
And take 17-inch monitor screens and set them
side by side, bottom to top, all the way up one side,
all the way around, so this entire building
is totally covered with 17-inch TV sets,
and turn them all on, and add up all those pixels
on all those screens in that entire, huge building.
You would then have enough pixels,
if you added them all together, to show
how many neurons one person has in their brain.
Now, these neurons—they're very, very tiny.
You have to look at them under a microscope.
But they come in different sizes and shapes,
but they all work on a branches-and-twigs system,
something like this. And if you isolate any one of them,
you'd find that there are over 1,000 places
where it's connecting and interacting with the ones
around it. But the thing that's amazing about it is,
the whole system works on low-voltage
electrical impulses, and it is not wired
together for anybody. That's true for those with ADHD.
It's true for every one of the rest of us.
They are not directly connected. Let me show you
what it looks like. If you can imagine
these tiny, tiny connections that are so small you need
a microscope to see them. Look like a couple
of mushroom heads butted up against each other.
And then there's a space between them
which is thinner than a piece of tissue paper.
So when there's something that's coming in
from the brain, electrical impulses traveling along here,
it has to jump this gap like a spark plug.
And there are little receptor buttons on the other side
here that it has to connect with. And if it comes in
strong enough … ccckkkoo. It goes on
to the next connection and moves on from there
to wherever it needs to go. If it doesn't, it just fizzles here.
But the other thing we have here is there are
little bubbles on the side. This is where
they're coming from. This is where the chemicals
are manufactured. The brain makes
50 different chemicals to help carry messages
back and forth. And there are two of them that control
most of the things that I've been describing in ADHD.
So what's happening when that electrical impulse
comes is it releases microdots of that chemical.
That's what crosses the gap and hits these receptors.
It works like a spark plug. And then if it hits
the right threshold, it moves on. And then on this side,
there's some little cells that work
like little vacuum cleaners that go scha-week
and suck back the chemicals and reload the system.
Otherwise, it would be just locked open all the time.
We think what happens with people who have ADHD
is their brains make these chemicals the same way
everybody else's brain does. But they simply
do not release and reload them effectively.
And the other thing we know is that for eight
out of 10 people who have ADHD, if you give them
the right amount of the right medicine, the system
can work better. For some, it's huge how much it helps.
For others, it's substantial, but it's not huge.
For others, it helps a little but not that much.
And two out of 10 it doesn't work at all.
But the fact is, though this is indeed a chemical problem,
the medicines we have for ADHD cure nothing.
It's not like you have a strep throat, you take an antibiotic,
and it knocks out the infection. It's more like
my eyeglasses. I have a problem with my eyes.
I can't see well. If it I'm looking at typewriter-size print,
it just looks blurry to me. If I put these on,
I can read it as well as anybody can. Take them off,
I'm right back where I started. The glasses do not fix
my eyes. They just help me see when I've got them on.
And the same thing is true of the medicines
we use for treating ADHD.
But it's also important to recognize that medication
is just one aspect of the treatment that's important
for somebody with ADHD. And there are many ways
in which we help people with ADHD by helping them
to learn skills, by helping them to use some technology
and strategies to be able to deal with whatever
they have to deal with in school or on the job
or in their family and social relationships.
And it's most effective to be able to first of all
have a very good evaluation, to understand exactly
which problems with ADHD this particular person has
and then to have the team of—if it's a child—
the child and the parent, and the doctor, in consultation
with the educators and teachers that are working
with them—to try to assess what are the strengths
of this child. That's our beginning point.
What are the difficulties? And what plan can we put
together which will allow us to be able to build on
those strengths and help the child or the adult learn
about ways of dealing more effectively
with their difficulties so that they can succeed
and reach their full potential.
[More to Explore on Understood]
[Video: How Is ADHD Diagnosed?]
[ADHD and Emotions: What You Need to Know]
[5 Things Not to Say to Your Child About ADHD]
[How ADHD Affects Kids' Sleep—]
[and What You Can Do]
[Understood | for learning & attention issues]
[U | understood.org]