Original subtitles

When Heidi asked me to come up to speak to you, an invitation, by the way, for which

I'm grateful and honored, I thought, what am I going to say to what is largely, I believe,

a group of parents and loved ones of people with ADHD? And so she wanted me to do something

a little new and a little different, and I sat down and I said, you know, what ideas

would I want any family that we had seen in our clinic to understand by the time we had

finished working with that family, by the time we'd finished the evaluation and the

counseling of that family, what would be the 30 take home ideas? I tried to reduce it to

10, by the way, but that's just not possible. And 30 was even a bit of a struggle. There's

another 30 I left out. But I think of these as sort of the touchstone ideas that a family

needs to understand if they really are going to appreciate both the nature of this disorder

in a child and what it means for the raising and management of that child successfully.

So we're going to have some fun with this because I've not done this presentation in

this way ever before, and you may advise me never to do it again. We'll see. Obviously,

the first idea is to know the disorder, and we begin at a very elementary stage of this

disorder. This is a developmental disability. That is the first thing you need to understand.

A disability of what? There are two psychological traits that are not developing in this child

on time. So let's clarify that. A developmental disability means that you are showing age

inappropriate behavior. It doesn't mean that your behavior is pathological. It just means

it's not appropriate for your age. So understand one thing. ADHD is different from normal in

a quantitative way, not a qualitative way. Developmental disorders differ from psychopathologies.

A psychopathology is a gross aberration in your behavior that we can recognize at any

age if you are bipolar, if you are schizophrenic, if you have major depression. We don't need

to adjust the criteria for your age because those are grossly abnormal conditions. Autism

would be another one. Those are not developmental disabilities. A developmental disability is

a delay in the rate of a normal trait. What distinguishes this child from other children

who don't have the disorder is the degree of the delay. They will go through the same

stages that others would go through in normal development, but not at the same time. And

when these traits reach their ultimate maturity, which by the way is your early 30s, the person

with ADHD will be leveling off at a degree well behind that of where the general population

has leveled off in that trait. So delay does not mean lag. It doesn't mean temporary. This

is a chronic lag in the development of these traits. But the important thing is that the

difference between this child and other children is quantitative. It is like someone sitting

next to you who is shorter or taller. It is like someone who is more athletic or less

athletic. These are not qualitative differences. They're quantitative. So that is what separates

your child from others. The degree of the delay is the distinction. I say this because

so many trade books written for parents have argued that ADHD is a qualitatively different

one. Your child is a little hunter and he has to go to school with farmers. Your child

has a gift that other children do not have. This is nonsense. This is utter gibberish.

There never was nor will be any science that would support those ideas. ADHD is not a qualitative

different state of humanity from other people. It is much more like being better or worse

at writing, taller or shorter in your height, better or worse at language. Those are quantitative

differences. That's important because otherwise we stigmatize these people as coming from

a different planet. You know, one is from Venus, another from Mars to popularize or

to take up a popular view of gender differences between men and women. But you get the point.

People with ADHD are not different from normal other than in the degree of the delay.