Dr. Julia Schechter

I am a clinical psychologist and an associate professor at the Duke University School of Medicine.

And I also lead our Duke Center for Girls and Women with ADHD.

Why'd you choose to focus specifically on girls and women with ADHD?

So as a clinician, you know, what I was seeing is that girls and women who were coming into the clinic were just a little bit more complicated and they didn't seem to fit the description of ADHD that I'd learned about in graduate school or kind of saw more often in the clinic.

And the vast majority of research has used predominantly male samples.

So our research understanding of ADHD is based on mostly male, mostly white samples, right?

And so that has really centered our clinical understanding of the condition on this more male presentation.

Also, what we know is that this kind of trickles into the way that the public understands ADHD.

This myth of it being a boy disorder is really pervasive and continues.

So we often do see differences in the way that ADHD presents in girls compared to boys or men and women.

One of the main things that we see as differences is that girls and women tend to have more of those inattentive symptoms of ADHD.

So things like a lot of distractibility or having trouble staying focused on a task

or disorganization, those kinds of things.

Boys often have more of those hyperactive and impulsive symptoms that we can see with ADHD.

So things like a lot of difficulty remaining seated, a lot of restlessness, running and climbing, their symptoms tend to be more overt.

That is not to say that girls cannot have those hyperactive impulsive symptoms, but we tend to find is that they're kind of less

of the ants in your pants kind of energy level and often have more kind of hyperverbal behaviors or more talkative.

So that's kind of one of the main things is that these boys tend to have more of those kind of in your face kinds of symptoms compared to girls who have more of the internalized experiences.

The symptoms that girls often experience

aren't leading teachers to call home.