How Our Understanding of ADHD is Changing – Dr. Thomas E. Brown Audio

A new perspective on ADHD

Although ADD/ADHD has been recognized for over 100 years, it has usually been seen as essentially a behavior problem. Yet many people with ADD/ADHD suffer not from behavior problems so much as from chronic problems with focusing their attention, organizing their work, sustaining their effort, and utilizing short-term memory.

Dr. Brown offers us a new perspective on this disorder, one based on current clinical and neuroscience research, where ADD/ADHD is essentially a problem with executive functions, the cognitive management system of the brain.

His model answers many of the questions people have about the validity of an ADD/ADHD diagnosis, including how a child or adult with ADD/ADHD can focus very well on a few activities that intensely interest them, yet be unable to focus adequately on most other tasks of daily life. It explains how ADD/ADHD often looks like a weakness in willpower, but isn’t.

Dr. Thomas E. Brown is Associate Director of the Yale Clinic for Attention and Related Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. He is the author of the groundbreaking, recently published A New Understanding of ADHD in Children & Adults: Executive Function Impairments (Routledge, 2013) and the prize-winning Attention Deficit Disorder: The Unfocused Mind in Children and Adults. (Yale Press).  Dr. Brown was the editor of ADHD Comorbidities: Handbook for ADHD Complications in Children and Adults (American Psychiatric Press).  He is also the creator of the Brown ADD Scales (Pearson).  Dr. Brown has presented symposia and workshops throughout the US and in 40 other countries. His website is: www.DrThomasEBrown.com