Adult ADHD has become a new marketing tool for the pharmaceutical companies.  They conceived of the "disorder."  The USA DSM defines ADHD as appearing before the age of 7 years.  Some who have significant childhood ADHD may have it persist into adulthood, However,  many of those currently diagnosed in adulthood are experiencing symptoms for the first time.  It is very likely other causes such as stress, or hormonal changes that subside overtime are the underlying cause.

Often, effective stress reduction techniques can reduce or eliminate the symptoms described as adult ADHD.  We have seen anecdotally that the Transcendental Meditation technique improves symptoms such as memory problems, difficulty with organization, and other executive function issues for those who have been told they have adult ADHD.

Adult ADHD received much attention in the last WPA Madrid 2014 and it's not about pharmaceutical issue although i believe that it contributes in the recent attention but clinically those who received ttt are much improved and reported such change and according to recent criteria we don't interfere pharmacologically except with moderate and severe cases  

As Sarina points out, a proper diagnosis of adult ADHD should always include an assessment of possible childhood symptoms. Although the age limit has been raised to 12 years in the DSM-V, according to the specified diagnostic criteria you cannot diagnose an adult patient with ADHD if there were no symptoms present before that age. There are questionnaires that aid in identifying childhood symptoms (e.g. the WURS) and it is also very useful to look a old school report cards. 

Hello,

Sorry, I can't you help, because my investigations are with children. In Psychiatric Congress (2014 sep) in Madrid many works were presented, maybe some interest for you.

You have a big problem. But, exist treatment in literature about adult ADHD.

I think this is one of those areas that good people will beg to differ.  I have a significant body of research that I can show that supports Adult ADD.  And I was recently tested to great length and diagnosed with ADD myself.  In retrospect I can look back at least as far as High School and identify characteristics and behaviors that are clinically very similar to my adult experiences but since I did not have childhood hyperactivity and since I was very high functioning intellectually, the deficits were less destructive because I modified my behaviors to deal with the issues.  What was there all the way through development however were some of the interpersonal relationship behaviors that impacted my functioning in multiple arena's.  I now use a combination of pharmaceutical assistance during times of peak need and behavioral modification for long term adaptation.  If you want some research; email me at [email protected].

Hi Soheir

I found interesting this paper:

Bernd Hesslinger · Ludger Tebartz van Elst · Elisabeth Nyberg · Petra Dykierek ·

Harald Richter · Michael Berner · Dieter Ebert, Psychotherapy of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in adults. A pilot study using a structured skills training program. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci (2002) 252 : 177–184

Alexandra Castle,I am interested in the research you have on adult ADD. I recently decided to seek help from my Dr. because of severe attention issues that I believe have been present since I was a child, but undiagnosed because it just wasn't something parents thought of back then.

I have started using Adderall and I feel that it does help me quite a bit but perhaps I should look at some behavioral modification as well.

I have six children, three have ADD without hyperactivity. I self-diagnosed myself years ago when researching my sons ADD/BiPolar/Asperger/Anxiety issues... They get it honestly from both sides of our family!!

Stephanie:

I know exactly what you mean.  One of the instruments used to identify ADD in adults showed me positive for ADD on all questions except 1.  Believe it or not I diagnosed my daughter when she was in law school (the Bellingrath in my email etc is my daughter).  She was having such a serious problem with attention and concentration that she was afraid she was going to fail out.  Post diagnoses and treatment she got straight A's and graduated summa cum laude.  I am really swamped today but over the week end I will put together a list of studies and books and some workbooks you might find interesting.  I am also on Adderall.  I take extended release once a day but only when I know I have a great deal of detail work to get accomplished.  There are now three of us in the office and it is hysterical to listen to a conversation since non of us can stop interrupting.  We have started raising our hands like we did in elementary school. :)

Joseph

I enjoyed reading your reply a great deal.  When I was tested we did a lot of testing more than likely because the Psychologist who did so was psychodynamic in orientation.   He wanted to rule out anxiety as the basis for my symptoms.  I  was amazed, of course I was anxious.  You would be too if you had committed $220,000 and 10 years of your life to getting a PhD and couldn't force the detailed multivariate statistics and find all ;the missing comma's and periods your Committee kept seeing.  I finally got a stats consultant and a Clinical Psychologist Coach to help me through it and got it done, but It was a nightmare.  I gave up so many times.  Now after most of my life needing some form of treatment I have learned to behaviorally address some of the issues and have Adderall to deal with focus issues when I need it.  It isn't something that should be passed around like tic tacs but when I need it I really need it and my Psychiatrist and I monitor how I am doing every month.  

I will be interested to review the specific tests you use.  It does make sense that one size does not fit all.

So in addition to the tests you described, we also did a variety of memory tests, some of anxiety and the overburdened  MMPI.  Now I have to say that because my daughter and I do a lot of high conflict custody evaluation, there is a tendency in the courts to utilize the MMPI and even the Rorschach.  As a Developmentalist and Developmental Psychopathologist with a strong cognitive and behavioral bias, I loathe those tests because they simply are not predictive of individual behavior and the inter rater reliability for at least the Rorschacht is poor, even the newer versions of both.    I am loathe to make prognostications that have such huge implications for children and parents when there are "forced" responses and when the more accurate response is "none of the above" or somewhere in the middle or once in a while, which is what most of us would answer a good bit of the time.  

Hi all! What do you think about this hypothesis? Adult AD(H)D shows the same symptomes like (agitated) depression. In other words: AD(H)D is nothing but the infant manifestation of depression; infant and adult AD(H)D is depression without sad mood. After my "habituation-model" both "diseases" are caused by an unique mechanism: Overstimulation of the cerebral reward system. Further informations in my publications available on ResearchGate. 

I'd appreciate your critical comments. 

Data The cerebral reward-system as a regulatory circuit, habituat...

I don't know about the rest, but my ADD (no hyperactivity) isn't the "infant manifestation of anything never mind depression.  Other than when I was erroneously prescribed an anti psychotic when I was having trouble sleeping because my husband snored like a tornado, I have never in my life experienced depression symptoms that were not specifically and short term caused by environmental factors such as divorce, death of a pet, loss of a pregnancy etc.  My current symptoms don't even remotely resemble depression.  Just thought I would remind us all that we are talking about people not variables.   

Dear Alexandra Castle

I do appreciate adding your personal experience and really interested in helping ppl suffering from this disorder

I believe it is difficult to distinguish between conditions with addicted persons. For one thing someone who is ADHD often will self medicate when they are depressed. However, so will someone who is a manic depressive or Bi-Polar. ADHD in women is much harder to detect than it is for men because they behave contrary to what the traditional ADDer is said to behave. In my blog www.wordpress.com/furiesego I have some articles referencing these books. While I am not a clinician I have had ADHD for my entire life. It is not something that goes away however, it can be managed. Two of my children have ADHD one a boy the other a girl. Before I found out that I was ADHD and that my daughter was as well only my son was diagnosed. When I read "Driven to Distraction" by Dr. Halliwell I realized that I myself and my daughter bother were ADHD. I myself got tested and was verified. My daughter has not been tested because she is over the age of 18 and they would not allow me to set up an appointment for her. I am still waiting for her to get diagnosed. But she is the classic female ADDer according to Dr. Halliwell's book. I wish that teachers understood the condition better so they could advise parents to get their children tested. My daughter had such a horrible time in school. She would go from being an A student to having D's on a constant basis. All her teachers knew she could do the work and did not understand why she could not perform. In the book it explains it precisely how females present and my daughter was spot on. It is bittersweet that I have found this out because by the time I learned the difference between male and female my daughter had already graduated high school. She has no interest in going to college. Even though she has been advised by more than one person that she is way too smart not to. None of my children medicate themselves. They do not drink to excess. Mostly because we understand our own conditions and how to manage it without drugs. I think that a lot of patients who have the condition have no one to talk to about their condition. And by the time they know what is going on they are addicted to whatever vice eased their pain. This is where it become a long hard road to overcome and become well. They need a coach, and a clinician. 

I can really empathize with you regarding your daughter.  My eldest child is  unquestionably ADD but won't admit it for the world.  His academic record was mediocre all through school because once he got bored about midway through the semester he was done.  I used to actually sit beside him all night to make him finish papers he had put off till the night before they were due.  The first half of the semester he got straight A's.  He went to a boarding school ultimately that was based on the quarter system and got straight A;s all the rest of the way.  In fact he did so well, he actually attended the University of Vermont for some classes.  If we had been smart we would have recognized what it meant then and found a University based on the quarter system.  I have to say he is doing fantastically well now.  He works for a major major bank system and works from home so he works at his own speed and times.  And his work is constantly changing with short term deadlines  (he is a senior IT Developer) .  What my daughter and I have discovered recently is one of those AH HA moments.  We have both been under medication for some time now but still have issues.  One of the things we discovered is that there are social consequences.  Add'rs can often be fairly quick to get irritated.  We can jump to conclusions and of course interrupting others is a not uncommon trait.  More importantly we have discovered that while helpful, medication just gives you an opportunity to work on behaviors that particularly for Adult sufferers, have been there lifelong.  

An interesting possibility for research at least for adult onset in women would be to look at hormonal influences.  For some reason we have found an unusual number of ADD adult onset women lawyers (I am sure there are loads of other fields that have the same kinds of thinking and practices).  What has been most interesting is the % of them who have experienced Adult onset during and after menopause.  My Psychiatrist wasn't all that impressed other than to say that hormonal changes are influencers in lots of things at that time of life.  But I did a little research and there is some out there on hormones and ADD.  What my Psychiatrist did agree with was that the ADD was probably present in childhood even if there were none of the academic and extreme behavioral issues.  So my thought is to wonder if the reason for it all of a sudden becoming a problem at menopause was that estrogen and other hormones may offer a protection of some sort.  We also discovered that while all of us had attention issues, only a subset had hyperfocusing.  For those of us with hyperfocusing, it can really get interferring because you don't realize you have done it and skipped all sorts of tasks you should have done because you just spent 4 hours getting side tracked.  I would be interested in talking with anyone who has this symptom to see how you manage it.  We are finding that we have to set egg timers to stop the behavior.  

Just random thoughts.  All anecdotal, but would be interested in any research in this area.

Dr. Castle,

It is interesting that you ask this question on menopause and extreme  behavioral issues. I can tell you that being ADHD my entire life. I know that I have been now that I know what the hallmarks are of this condition are. I find that females do not have to be menopausal to pop off at the slightest irritant. You are either in a cloud of conditioned protection that has been self imposed to protect yourself or you just go off on anyone who makes you upset even to the slightest extent. I myself was in the cloud. There are literally times in my life that I do not remember. I don't remember how I paid rent, if I had a job, who I knew, and what actually happened. I know that while I was in elementary school I would do so poorly in class. But when it came to the standardized tests given I was at the top of list in terms of scores. I don't even remember taking the test. The only reason I know I took the test was because the teacher took me out into the hall and told me that she was going to fail me and hold me back, but because I had the highest score on the standardized test in the class she was going to let me move forward.

She told me that I needed to find out what the disconnect was that I couldn't perform in class. That was when I was in 6th grade. I was approximately 11 years old. That was when they considered those who could not sit still and those that talked too much trouble makers and they made examples of you. So I lived in a cloud. It wasn't until I was 23 that I started to see things a little differently in life and started wondering what I needed to do to make a life. Now consider this was when I could of had a free education but got so bored in class that I couldn't stand to be in class for longer than 10 minutes. And reading a text book was so torturous that I just stopped. There was no discipline because discipline never entered my mind. It was too busy running to the next thought. A series of one thought after another none actually making any sense or having any meaningful direction. So getting out of the cloud was difficult. I went to a vocational school. Did not like the jobs I attained from having gone to this vocational school. I was so completely bored. I joined the military and was constantly challenged. Never a moment to sit and think about the next thing. It was actually very good for me. It helped me see that discipline, even forced discipline was a good thing. If it had an end result that was a benefit to me.

I learned how to create discipline for myself use it to my benefit. I realized that if I could make it through being in the Army I could do anything. I'm still working on a degree but I am doing it. And I haven't stopped. I'm am still very much a squirrel but at least I recognize the squirrel when it appears. I know I am not the most professional sounding person in my writing. However, I do know the hallmarks of being ADHD now. And the more I learn about how it affects those who are afflicted with it I can speak to it. The most important thing for the ADDer is to slow the bus down enough to let the passengers off.

Whether you take medication, meditate, or use biofeedback to stop the bus makes no difference. It matters that it's being done in a way that meets the needs of the individual. And as far as anxiety goes. How can you not be anxious when you are an ADDer? The two go hand in hand. When you have no way to understand or control your own behavior does that not produce anxiety? It did for me. Learning to overcome fear of just the day to day life is so hard when you have no idea what is going on. ADD and ADHD is manageable. It is definitely something that will never go away. It is neurological and hereditary as well. From everything that I have learned about ADDer's they are usually very successful when they can control their condition and are allowed to be themselves. Especially when they are accepted by their peers. This is why an enormous amount of ADDer's are Actors. They get to do something different all the time and are usually challenged in a positive way. Some are temperamental but all are exceptional in their craft. Those who are not are generally not ADD. Consider the perception of the educators of William Bell and Albert Einstein saying they would amount to little or nothing. Look at Johnny Depp, Richard Branson, and a myriad of performers and entrepreneurs that were lost until they found their wings because they did what they wanted.  There are more ADDers that fall thorugh the cracks because they never reach that understanding. Or are forced to comply with society in behavioral and thought processes. Some can maintain a perception of being normal but are so anxious they tend to overdose on anxiety. They end up with so many physical and anxiety conditions that its almost impossible to come out of the cloud, or stop being angry. My research is based on my own life and that of my brothers, sisters, and children it has spanned over 50 years and hopefully will be more professional in its presentation as I get a better education.

https://furiesego.wordpress.com

Are you researching ADHD? I am interested in meeting other researchers who have done behavioral research on adults with ADHD, specifically excluding pharma solutions. My dissertation research was focused on adults with ADHD and their workplace experiences.

Jill