Mayor of Fidget City & Captain of Procrastination

One of the first official references to what we now call ADHD was made by G.F. Still in 1902 when he dubbed it “moral deficit disorder.” This rather judgmental interpretation of ADHD behavior will be familiar to anyone who has been on the receiving end of these sorts of assumptions. This may even have come from well-meaning family members and teachers looking for an explanation for the ADHD person’s seemingly self-destructive actions. In the 1930s, ADHD was renamed “minimal brain damage” and later “minimal brain dysfunction.” (Not really getting any better, huh?) It wasn’t until 1968 that the official diagnostic bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-II, called it “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood,” highlighting the hyperactivity and missing the entire group of people with only inattentive symptoms. The first studies demonstrating that ADHD persists into adulthood began to come out in the late 1960s, followed by the first published empirical studies on the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD in adults in the late 1970s. In 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III called it “attention deficit disorder” and included two subtypes: “with hyperactivity” and “without hyperactivity. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III-R was published in 1987 and changed the name to “attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,” making the hyperactivity a key feature. Three years later, the first newsletters targeted specifically at ADHD adults (ADDendum and ADDult News) began publishing, followed shortly thereafter by the first book for the public, Lynn Weiss’s Attention Deficit Disorder in Adults: Practical Help for Sufferers and Their Spouses (1992). The first journal article focusing on psychotherapy for adults with ADHD was published in 1994. This goes a long way toward explaining why ADHD adults (probably undiagnosed) often had such a hard time finding therapists who could go beyond traditional psychotherapeutic techniques and give them the kind of help they really needed. There just wasn’t much information out there. It wasn’t that long ago that I finished graduate school (1997) and I barely heard anything about ADHD in adults.