Ologies with Alie Ward
Attention-Deficit Neuropsychology (ADHD) Part 1 Encore with Russell Barkley
24 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How can you identify if you have ADHD?
Oh, hey, it's me in 2025. And as we gear up for some new episodes in January, and we take a week or so to travel and see our families and do some resting, I wanted to re-air an encore of Allogy's most popular episode to date. I've heard from literally hundreds of you that these episodes and experts have changed, maybe saved your lives.
It's the 2022 ADHD episodes with the world's foremost researchers and communicators about ADHD. Also, I reached out to Dr. Barkley asking if there was any research he wanted me to include as an update. And he said, nothing earth shattering to note. Feel free to run the episode again. So here we go. Listen, re-listen, and send it around. Hi, it's the gnat stuck to your lip gloss.
Allie Ward, ADHD, it's here. It's here. Take a minute. Just breathe. This is exciting. Here we go. Okay. Who does one get for an ADHD episode? You ask me, your internet dad, when there are so many doctors and researchers and bloggers and TikTok coaches out there. Who do you get? You start at the top. The guy. You get the guy who has written more books than I can count.
I literally was trying to count them and I had to stop and eat a granola bar. I was fatigued. But you may know him by the ADHD Bible, Taking Charge of ADHD, which just released a new expanded, fresh as hell updated edition in November. I have it. It's great.
He also wrote 12 Principles for Raising a Child with ADHD, When an Adult You Love Has ADHD, Professional Advice for Parents, Partners, and Siblings. He is to ADHD what Oprah is to talk shows. The gold standard. So not only has he been a professor of psychiatry and neurology, a clinical professor of psychiatry, and is cited in nearly every modern paper on ADHD, but he also takes it to the streets.
And by that, I mean YouTube. His lecture videos are swiftly paced and have views in the millions. People in the comments are crying in relief. I was so nervous. We reached out. He obliged. We recorded. My palms sweat. I decided this needs to be a two or maybe a three-parter.
So next week, we'll talk to a few more experts, including Jessica McCabe of How to ADHD, Renee Brooks of Black Girl Lost Keys, and Jayla Osborne, who's a researcher at University of Michigan. But we'll dive right in. But first, quick thanks to everyone who supports this show at patreon.com slash ologies. You can join for a dollar a month and submit your questions.
Thanks to everyone who passes this episode along and who subscribes and who leaves reviews knowing that I read them all. Like Connor Cook, thank you for leaving the review. They say they were introduced to ologies via a keynote that I did at the Texas Science and Engineering Fair a few years back. And their review made me cry. They said... They used my advice to show up like you belong.
And they say that stuck with me as I struggle with social anxiety and doubt myself at every turn. And last week I interviewed for a position in a plant pathology lab and I chanted that piece of advice in my head and walked through that building like it was named after me. And I was just told that today I got the job. So congratulations on that, Connor. That's great. Full circle moment.
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Chapter 2: What are the main causes of ADHD?
So we go from a couple hundred papers in 1960 to 400,000. Wow. as of a few years ago. I mean, it's just startling to go to Google Scholar, enter ADHD in its precursor terms, and do the math. 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.
And you mentioned something about the flu pandemic and survivors of. Was there some reason why there was a correlation made there?
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. to let's just focus on behavior. So hyperactive, inattentive, impulsive behavior became the holy trinity of ADHD. And we stopped speculating about etiology for a while because we didn't really have a lot of hard evidence other than by inference.
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Chapter 3: How does ADHD affect emotional regulation?
And so, you know, have a look at Danny. And you can also go over to the website How to ADHD. Jessica's got a great website over there as well.
And stay tuned for Jessica McCabe of How to ADHD in a special part two next week, along with Renee Brooks of Black Girl Lost Keys, who also runs an online support group for Black people of marginalized genders. And that's called the Unicorn Squad. So we'll be chatting with both of them and also Jayla Osborne of Black and Neuro, who is an ADHD researcher.
So I'm telling you, this is why this episode took so long. It was too exciting. I kept adding more and more things.
So these are just resources that get it. And when you see them, you say, oh, my God, that is me in spades. You know, like Danny has an illustration where she said it's either now or not now. And she's got a light switch. That's it. You know, that's her concept of time is now or not now. And if it's not now, I don't care. And if it's now, I'm all over it. Yeah. so I can hyper focus on it.
So she has a diagram of what it's like to have a conversation with her. And the diagram for the typical person is, I started A and I want to explain this and I get to B. And it's a straight line. Hers looks like a maze of all over the place, getting distracted, talking about irrelevant things, can't remember what we were describing, have to ask you what we were talking about.
you know and so she's just everywhere and that is so typical of adhd so all of that is to say that people who get diagnosed first of all the diagnosis alone is therapeutic because it takes it takes you out of the realm of moral judgment and puts it in the realm of neuroscience. Up until then, you thought you were a bad person. You were a layabout, ne'er-do-well. You were lazy, unmotivated.
Your mother was right. You just failed to launch. We just can't get you out of here. And you buy that. You become so demoralized
about yourself because everybody else is succeeding and here you are stuck in quicksand and you can't seem to get from A to B. And so you start blaming yourself and you literally buy into the societal stigma that there's something wrong with you in terms of your personality and your morality and your self-discipline. You just have no willpower.
When you get the diagnosis, it's now in the realm of neuroscience and you get it. You are experiencing a neurodevelopmental disorder or disability. And that alone to me, that mindset becomes very therapeutic because you didn't cause this. You're not choosing to be this way. You can't get up and smell the coffee tomorrow and become a different person.
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Chapter 4: What role does genetics play in ADHD?
I keep teaching this to students and young faculty. You do nothing when you publish a paper. You do a great deal for humanity when you go out and meet with the people who have this problem, and share the science, disseminate it. And you change lives that way. And yet, my colleagues don't value that. They value the publication, the scholarship.
Whereas if you write a trade book, if you give a lecture, like my lecture on YouTube, it's over a half million people. So, disseminate the science. The upside for me has been just the excitement of the discoveries. Every time I think I'm getting bored, a paper appears, like the one yesterday, on the...
delay in functional connectivity in the brain and the areas of the brain and what that means for their symptoms and explaining the disorder and what it might mean for new treatments for us. You know, to me, that's just, it's so incredibly exciting to an inquisitive person like myself to keep seeing these discoveries coming along.
Thank you so much for the way that you do disseminate it. Your books are incredible. They are the Bible when it comes to ADHD.
Well, I got to thank Chris Benton, my co-author. Chris, you know, she's my she's my writer. She she makes it sing. You know, I just I bring the science. She brings the the way to deliver it.
So ask experts some amateur questions because as you heard, they want to share it. And besides, we're all going to die one day. You might as well just ask questions. I hope this episode is a springboard into greater understanding for you. So next week, more experts, more folks with ADHD and people who study ADHD. Just you wait. You do have to wait though, about one week. Okay.
Now, if you need more info now, though, you can get yourself to a bookstore and obtain Taking Charge of Adult ADHD, second edition. That's by Dr. Russell Barkley. Just came out with a brand new updated edition. There's so many links to his books and studies we mentioned and other resources, including his videos.
And you can find those at AllieWard.com slash ology slash ADHD or at the link in the show notes. Russell's website is russellbarkley.org. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. Smologies are shorter, kid-friendly, and classroom-safe episodes of Ologies that you can find in their own feed, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, wherever you get your podcasts.
Erin Talbert, Admin Theology's podcast Facebook group. Emily White and Aveline Malick make our professional transcripts. Kelly Dwyer does the website. Keeping our brains on time is scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth. The astoundingly responsible Susan Hale, managing directs the whole show.
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