Dr. William (Bill) Dodson

And that statement is always one of the big disappointments for most of my patients who hope that someday it's going to go away and they're going to be neurotypical.

Doesn't happen.

On your 18th birthday, they don't give you a nice wrapped-up present.

Oh, goody, just what I always wanted, a new nervous system.

It doesn't happen.

So it's, you know, you're there, deal with it.

So...

It is genetic.

And you can also tell because it responds so well to two different classes of medication.

So in psychiatry, in the medications of psychiatry, we generally lump them into two groups.

One are the neurologic-biologic predispositions to certain conditions.

These are all big names in the diagnostic criteria.

But there's another large group

that come from what happened to you.

You're just an average person and you have adverse events, head injuries, brain infections, and of course, the big one, PTSD.

Now, it's the average person's response to either one catastrophic emotional experience or thousands of them repeated lifelong.

And that really is like

categorizes people with ADHD.

Delling, who was at the time the Chairman of Child Psychiatry at Harvard wrote a paper where he estimated that the average third grader, so starting eight to nine years old, has already heard 20,000 additional negative or corrective messages by the third grade.

I don't care who you are, but if you have 20,000 messages saying, sit down, stop that, stop visiting, what's wrong with you, you're too intense, basically just rapid fire, you're not okay, you're not acceptable the way you are, and you better change in a hurry.