Jason Salotti
9 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2015–2025
2:51:44 · 1.1M views · Jul 13, 2012
Dr. Russell Barkley's roughly three-hour lecture on ADHD for parents of affected children. It explains what ADHD is and how the ADHD brain differs.
Repeatedly called the best way to understand ADHD, and recommended to anyone before commenting on it.
18 comments from Hacker News
I encourage everyone to watch this before they comment on ADHD: this video While it won't make you an expert, it will perhaps help you understand what it is people with ADHD suffer through. There are bad doctors and bad policies out there which are being resolved. They don't diagnose young children anymore even if it seems likely since some children will "catch up" and stop exhibiting symptoms. This is the source of many teens and adults today that discover that once they stop taking medication they don't need it. As our understanding of the disorder grows so does our ability to accurately diagnose it. That said, while I can't speak for the person you replied to that shit is incredibly frustrating. Your empathy is unusual and appreciated but regardless of the rate of misdiagnosis you are not a doctor and are admittedly entirely ignorant about it. I can't emphasize enough to those reading this that no matter how much you might doubt it, the people who work in this field do in fact know more about it than you do and making an armchair diagnosis or questioning a doctor's diagnosis does nothing but make you look like the kind of know-it-all that really knows nothing while maligning someone who has to read ignorant comments like yours in every damn discussion on the internet where ADHD comes up. I know it's easy to think you've got all of the answers when understanding complex problems comes naturally but these doctors don't spend nearly a decade or more in school sitting around with
ADHD is terribly misnamed, and doesn't usually manifest as physical hyperactivity in adults. It's an executive function disorder. This means things like time blindness – difficulty conceptualizing and persisting tasks into the future, and difficulty keeping short term goals in mind. I think about it like packet loss, but for intent. With healthy executive function, one's goals and intents are persistent streams that can be held on to like a train track. (This is based on other people's description of how their mind works – I would consider that ability a superpower). With ADHD, the tracks will just fall out like a trapdoor every so often – sometimes every few seconds. You have to reinitiate the connection, but because the thing that failed is the same thing that remembers what to connect to, I have to reestablish what I want to do in the first place, and it's usually not the thing I was doing before. So I end up shooting around in semi-productive bursts, unable to see things to completion. The other counterintuitive thing is hyperfocus – people with ADHD periodically experience the inverse. I spent nearly every waking moment in the last 3 days working intently on a software project I'm interested in. Short bouts of intense concentration (especially if you don't feel in control of their application) do not mean you don't have ADHD. They could mean the opposite. Here's the best explanation I've ever seen of the subject: this video
One important thing to note for people reading this is that hyperactivity doesn't always persist into adulthood with the other symptoms or is greatly reduced and is often turned inward (mental fidgeting). As far as your firings go, if you haven't watched this video and/or read this doctor's books they really help with understanding exactly what you're dealing with: this video It's long but worth watching at faster playback speed and in manageable chunks. Key takeaways: "Attention deficit" is less of a symptom and more of a measurable consequence of other symptoms: Impaired inhibition/impulse control, excessive irrelevant activity and impaired persistence (think discipline). Once you understand why you fail you can start addressing or working around your gaps, particularly the ones that any medication you may be on fail to address.
I also like the idea that it would be better labeled, “intention deficit disorder”. Dr. Barkley’s talk completely altered my understanding of the disorder. I always knew I had it. My life roughly paralleled the author’s. After failing out of school, I found workarounds that got me through the second time (thanks to extremely supportive parents). This video, combined with my wife’s urging, caused me to find a legitimate doctor who specialized in it (he’s ADHD too), and get treatment. I was already doing well with my coping mechanisms, but my life took off like a rocket with treatment. If anything in the article or the comments resonates, I would watch this ASAP: this video
Yep. ADHD is not a problem of perception, it's a problem of motivation. A problem of inhibition. "ADHD is a failure to direct behavior forward in time." "They are best thought of as executive deficits, not attention deficits." For anyone who wants to really understand the disorder (even those who have it and think they have a good grasp on it) Dr. Russell A Barkley, PhD is a great place to start. In particular this video, "Essential Ideas for Parents": this video If you have ADHD I can't recommend his books enough.