Dr. Russell Barkley

I mean, it's just enormous.

I know I read all research every week on Fridays published in the world, and it's 35 to 40 articles a week

so do the math on that it's 1500 to 2000 papers a year are now coming out on this disorder so this is no myth it's very very well researched it's got a tremendous amount of evidence for its validity and neurobiology and genetics and life course and risks so it's an incredibly well understood disorder but we didn't really get into it i would say until the late 1960s early 1970s

when people started to take it seriously.

Well, yeah.

We had children who, if they survived, this was the von Economo's encephalitis that swept through following the First World War, and it took over Europe and then spread here.

It left people with a lot of secondary symptoms.

injuries to their brain if they survive, because the virus attacked the brain.

And it left children with altered personalities, altered abilities, reduced mental capacity.

But one of the hallmark symptoms was hyperactive behavior, incorrigibility, lack of self-control.

So you had children's personalities literally changing overnight, which the disorder actually back then was called post-encephalitic behavior disorder.

Then they eventually realized you could get it from other brain injuries and it became brain injured child syndrome.

And then people said, well, wait, there are other children with these behavioral problems, but we don't have evidence of brain injury.

They then called it minimal brain damage.

And then it became minimal brain dysfunction, MBD.

And only in the 1960s did people say, wait, wait, wait, stop talking about causation.

because we really can't peer into the brain to see if there's damage there for most of these kids.

Let's just focus on their behavior.

And that's when it became hyperactive child syndrome.

So it was really in the 60s when the shift moved away from etiology, like it's gotta be a brain injury, which we still thought, but couldn't prove.