This article has not been medically reviewed. It is written for qualified healthcare professionals as a starting point for further research and should not be acted on before you consult the primary sources and apply your own clinical judgment.
Harold Robert MeyerThe ADD Resource Center · www.addrc.org · Reviewed: Sept. 28, 2026 · Published: September 29, 2026 Your first 30 days, in order: what to do this week, what to hold off on, and what to have in place by day 30. You walked out with a diagnosis, and maybe a prescription, a handout, … Read more
A woman in her late sixties gets a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, finally explaining a lifetime of scattered focus. Her prescriber starts a low dose of a stimulant. She’s also taking a blood pressure medication, a statin, something for sleep, and an antidepressant her internist added two winters ago.
Synopsis Explaining ADHD to the Ignorant: 10 Ways That Actually Land / September 27, 2026 / Harold Robert Meyer · https://www.addrc.org/ Most arguments about ADHD fail because they answer the wrong underlying claim. This piece separates the five most common objections – it isn’t real, it’s bad parenting, it’s laziness, everyone has a little of it, and medication is a crutch – and gives a matching, research-grounded response for each, plus guidance on recognizing when a conversation isn’t worth continuing. Topic: Advocating (secondary: Communication) Audience: Adults; Parents & Caregivers Keywords: stigma, performance disorder, heritability, personal contact, misconception
Harold Robert Meyer The ADD Resource Center · https://www.addrc.org/ Reviewed August 30, 2026 · Published September 26, 2026 How to prepare for your child’s ADHD psychiatry appointment so you leave with answers you can actually use, plus a free printable check-off list to take with you. In the psychiatrist’s waiting room, most parents are holding … Read more
What Caused Your ADHD? What the Research Actually Says — and What to Do With That / September 16, 2026 / Harold Robert Meyer · https://www.addrc.org/
This piece addresses the self-blame and parent-blame that often follows an ADHD diagnosis by summarizing what the research identifies as causal — heritability of roughly 74 percent from twin and family studies, 27 genome-wide risk loci from a 2023 GWAS, a narrow set of modestly contributing prenatal and perinatal factors, and measurable subcortical brain-volume differences — then pivots deliberately to what the diagnosis calls for now: confirming the diagnosis, starting evidence-based treatment, and building daily structure, regardless of which mix of factors produced the condition.
A child’s ADHD diagnosis is linked to a real, measurable rise in parental divorce risk, most concentrated in the years right after diagnosis – but well-designed studies show the mechanism is parental stress and loss of parental self-efficacy, not the diagnosis itself, and both respond to behavioral parent training and targeted couples support.
Human memory prioritizes living things: animate words and images are attended to first and recalled better than inanimate ones, a robust finding in free recall. The animacy advantage disappears when learners invest deliberate effort in the inanimate items, which points to encoding effort as a mechanism. Children with ADHD supply effort on demand less reliably and need stronger reinforcement to sustain it, so they are the students who lean hardest on memory’s free default. No study has tested animacy in ADHD directly; this piece bridges the two literatures as inference and gives educators and clinicians practical moves – put an agent inside inanimate content, attach explicit and sufficiently strong value to the items that must be remembered, position the living things already in the room, avoid animate cues in paired-associate drills, and calibrate expectations by age.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) describes a real, well-recognized pattern of intense, fast-onset distress after perceived rejection or criticism, common in ADHD — but it is not a DSM or ICD diagnosis, has no validated instrument, and its leading pharmacologic treatment (alpha-2A agonists) was publicly questioned as ahead of its evidence by the term’s own popularizer in 2024. This piece distinguishes the peer-reviewed rejection-sensitivity construct (Downey & Feldman, 1996) from the newer clinical term “RSD,” incorporates a 2026 qualitative study and the current emotional-dysregulation literature, and lays out how the pattern is actually evaluated, treated, documented, and billed.
When one parent minimizes a child’s ADHD-related difficulties as normal (“tough love,” “just like I was”) while the other describes significant daily impairment, clinicians face a family split that resists ordinary diagnostic explanation. This piece reframes that split as expected rather than a credibility problem: even parents living together and observing the same child show only moderate-to-good agreement on symptom rating scales, and a minimizing parent’s own recognition in the child may reflect a real, unrecognized case in themselves rather than denial. Four concrete moves are offered – shared independent rating scales, naming the disagreement openly without taking a side, asking the minimizing parent directly about their own history, and negotiating one narrow measurable trial rather than a wholesale philosophy change – aimed at protecting the clinician’s alliance with both parents while the family works toward a shared, evidence-based account of the child.When one parent minimizes a child’s ADHD-related difficulties as normal (“tough love,” “just like I was”) while the other describes significant daily impairment, clinicians face a family split that resists ordinary diagnostic explanation. This piece reframes that split as expected rather than a credibility problem: even parents living together and observing the same child show only moderate-to-good agreement on symptom rating scales, and a minimizing parent’s own recognition in the child may reflect a real, unrecognized case in themselves rather than denial. Four concrete moves are offered – shared independent rating scales, naming the disagreement openly without taking a side, asking the minimizing parent directly about their own history, and negotiating one narrow measurable trial rather than a wholesale philosophy change – aimed at protecting the clinician’s alliance with both parents while the family works toward a shared, evidence-based account of the child.
Harold Robert Meyer Reviewed: September 15, 2026 · Published: September 15, 2026 For students and young adults with ADHD, a well-timed lie can genuinely work, once. Here’s why it’s harder to repeat than it looks, and why the cost of getting caught outlasts whatever it was supposed to fix. You didn’t finish the paper. You … Read more
