Dr. William (Bill) Dodson

I'm loathsome.

You just really go down the rat hole.

Now, it's experienced as a rejection.

I have tried so hard, so long, with everything I have, only to be told it's wrong, it's unacceptable, it's immediately cast aside without any appreciation of how hard people with ADHD work.

just to get through life.

So again, I would draw a distinction between this approach, where you see people with ADHD as being good, normal, intact people who are dealing with something that's just extraordinarily strong, and the way that people who are devotees of executive function deficit view it.

I think one of the reasons why executive function deficit theory has failed so completely is that its basic premise is wrong.

Executive function folks view people with ADHD as really just being neurotypical people, but they're damaged, they're deficit, they're broken, and they need to be fixed.

And

they seem to have absolutely no awareness at all of how hostile and off-putting that is to people with ADHD.

And the fact that, again, in all their studies, less than 50% of people have an executive function deficit.

And yet they want to explain ADHD strictly in terms of executive function deficits.

Can't do that if more than half don't have them.

The other thing is all the therapies that they tried have failed to show, and here's the standard, any detectable lasting benefit to the core features of ADHD.

It just hasn't worked at all.

So that's why I'm a therapist.

I work with people.

I tend to see them as good people who are dealing with something that nobody's given them any instruction at all about how to deal with it.

If you get any ideas, it's from other people with ADHD who have written books, written articles about what the experience is.

If you look at all the useful stuff that you probably looked at, it wasn't scientific papers.