Dr. Russell Barkley

And so they have a life that's filled with half-completed projects and goals they could never reach and accomplishments everybody else is able to do and they can't do or they struggle to do.

And so it really gets very demoralizing by the time you're a teenager or an adult

Because all these problems are piling on year after year as other people get each of those executive abilities, you get another deficit.

So by adulthood, you have at least seven or more problems with self-regulation that other people don't have.

And it leads to a whole swath of downstream problems

in major life activities that people just don't realize adhd is one of the most impairing disorders we treat in an adult outpatient basis uh and and people think it's just some trivial little problem that a cup of starbucks is going to solve have you seen the way clinicians classify it and i understand it's a deficit it's a disorder is it looked at as a disability more so accommodations can be made or how is that language changing

Well, the clinicians call it a disorder because that's our term for anything that creates excessive, persistent, and severe symptoms that lead to harm to the individual.

So there are two criteria.

First, you have to have serious and persistent symptoms that go well beyond your age range.

and your sex, your gender.

So second is it must be producing impairment, harm.

You must be suffering.

The environment must be kicking back so that you're experiencing hardships.

And when those two criteria are met, you have a disorder.

So that's the clinical term.

Now, the government, however, invented the concept of disability.

So the government comes in and says, how disordered are you?

Are you disordered enough

that we would consider you to be disabled in various major life activities, like school or work or self-support, or by self-support, I mean that you can dress yourself and bathe yourself and support yourself and so on.

So, you know, the term disability is really a government term for whether or not your disorder rises to the level that you deserve accommodations, support, Social Security disability, ADA accommodations, IDEA school accommodations, and all these other things.