Customer Reviews

ADHD in Adults: What the Science Says

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The previous reviewer, Jon, said it all. Adult ADHD is real. You will learn all you need to know about it by reading this amazing book, culminating decades of rigorous study and clinical expertise.

Researchers such as authors Russell Barkley, Mariellen Fischer, and Kevin Murphy are the reliable anchors in a storm-tossed sea of ignorance, lassitude, indifference, and outright chicanery and propagandizing regarding adult ADHD.

Their studies are stunning for their elegant design, careful execution, and solid results. The text is well-written and profound, even to non-clinicians. When it comes to interpreting certain human behaviors, it will turn all your paradigms upside down and then inside out.

I cannot imagine any physician or therapist in this country--no matter what the specialty--not reading this book very carefully. Because untreated ADHD cuts across too many issues for any healthcare provider to remain unaware. These issues include higher risk of traffic and on-the-job accidents, substance use, and poor health habits that can lead to the chronic diseases that so afflict this country, including obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.

ADHD is thought to affect from 10 to 30 million adults in the U.S. alone, depending on how broadly the criteria are applied. Yet only 10 percent of that lower figure is diagnosed--and even fewer in treatment.

Too often, ADHD is misdiagnosed as depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder, substance use disorder, attachment disorder, and the list of personality disorders goes on--most of which carry poor prognoses. Consequently, too many people suffer in frustration, piled on with moral judgments or plied with the wrong medications or therapeutic interventions that often make ADHD worse.

It's time to join the 21st Century regarding a brain condition that affects so many people, and this book, in my opinion, leads the way.

Gina Pera

Dr. Barkley's newest book offers the professional or the well educated lay reader an in depth review of the latest empirical findings on ADHD in adults. It is not a self help book although it may be helpful to a well informed ADHD patient or family member. Two major longitudinal research projects form the core of the book and each examines how this disorder looks as adolescents move into adulthood. Each chapter is followed by an executive summary of the major points. For the reader not steeped in the nuances of research projects this is necessary to avoid getting lost in the detailed findings. The final chapter also nicely summarizes the implications of the research for our best current theoretical model of the disorder and for its treatment. I am a clinical psychologist and Dr. Barkley's body of work in the area of ADHD is an example of what is best in clinical psychology. This work is another in a long series of notable achievements.

This new book by authors Barkley, Murphy, and Fischer has, for the first time, given me the confidence to believe that, for adults with ADHD, a new day has dawned, a new light is shining, and the thick fog of shame may, over time, be blown away.

The door has finally slammed shut for the skeptics, the uninformed, the misinformed, the mal-intended, and the ignorant health care professionals and "experts" who, unless they buy a copy of this book and study its contents, will find that their days treating adults with ADHD are numbered.

I appreciate this amazing resource, and feel the utmost respect for the three authors who have devoted their lives and considerable talents and skills to not only wade through and organize the dark morass of books, clinical studies, scientific papers, surveys, interviews, and journals that already existed, but to add to this mix their own ground-breaking and desperately needed perspective and conclusions regarding the incredibly important and massively misunderstood subject of adult ADHD. Thank you. Jon Teger

This is the sort of incredibly impressive work that only these three authors would ever attempt. They collect and analyze an unbelievable amount of data to create the most detailed, thorough, and informative study of ADHD in adults ever published. Even if you don't read it straight through, it is an excellent reference and resource. Each chapter ends with a summary and clinical implications, so readers can quickly find the take home message, if they don't have time to read every word. The authors have taken the study of ADHD a giant step forward--and set the bar for all lifespan research.

--Ari Tuckman, PsyD, MBA
Author of Integrative Treatment for Adult ADHD: A Practical, Easy-to-Use Guide for Clinicians

A very insightful look into the UMASS study and the Milwaukee study. A fascinating look into the impact of ADHD across the lifespan. Highly recommended.

Stephanie Moulton Sarkis PhD NCC LMHC
Author, Psychotherapist, and ADHD Expert

Adult ADHD is a difficult and controversial subject in mental health. The diagnosis is compromised by a number of barriers not present in the well-documented childhood literature, such as more comborbid symptoms, fewer external observers such as parents and teachers, drug-seeking by clients, adaptations which hide some of the important features such as internal restlessness, different kinds of impairments, and different symptomatic criteria required for the diagnosis.

The only way to deal with these and many more problems is to do careful studies comparing patients to matched control groups, as well as follow patients over many years while comparing them with a good matched control group. These are incredibly demanding types of studies to accomplish, and to date no such combination of studies have been available.

However, Barkley and colleagues thoughtfully planned out the strategy for firmly establishing the characteristics of the adult with ADHD, as well as the long-term consequences awaiting those younger patients followed into adulthood. The result is a masterful account of two studies, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal. Put together, these two studies comprise an enormous body of data. The detailed analysis of these studies in separate papers would be daunting, but largely unavailable to a wider audience of non-specialists. This book is designed with the intelligent non-specialist reader in mind, but it does not lack the essential details to make a clear and cogent understanding of the realities of adult ADHD. This is a monumental contribution, and the most important source of information we have about this otherwise controversial subject. There is no better way to learn what we know about adults with ADHD. Other popular books lack the insight, skill, and credibility conveyed by this book.

In their book, "ADHD in Adults," Barkley et al. discounts the importance of clinical observation in understanding ADHD and believe that scientific controlled studies are the only reliable source of information in understanding ADHD. By doing this, the authors fail to recognize the substantial limitation of scientific studies when it comes to ADHD. They fail to recognize that the ADHD brain has two distinct operational modes and acts completely opposite depending on the mode in which it is in. It will act one way when it finds a task or activity uninteresting, boring, or unstimulating to it and it will act completely opposite when it finds a task stimulating, interesting, exciting, or adventuresome.

By failing to recognize this, the authors fail to recognize the limitation this places on the ability of scientific studies to capture all the characteristics of ADHD. In order to capture the operation of the ADHD brain when involved in a task or activity that is interesting or stimulating to it, the study must capture ADHD subjects while they are performing a task or activity that is interesting or stimulating to each individual ADHD subject. But, it is extremely difficult for scientific studies to accomplish this. I have read many scientific studies on ADHD and I have yet to read one that has assessed whether the study was conducted while the ADHD subjects were engaged in a task or activity they found stimulating or not. Without this assessment, scientific studies are doomed to the study of the ADHD brain when it is in the status of performing a task or activity that is uninteresting or unstimulating to it. If these studies cannot capture ADHD subjects when they are involved in a task or activity that is interesting to each ADHD subject, they will completely miss how the ADHD brain operates when it is absorbed by something it finds interesting or stimulating. They will completely miss all the abilities of an ADHD brain to hyperfocus, to be creative, to be innovative, to be imaginative, to be highly analytical, to think outside the box, to multi-task, to remain calm in stressful situations, to exercise sequential thought, to become highly organized, to absorb immense amounts of information in very short time spans, and to perceive and remember even the most minutest of details. They will completely miss the dichotomy of the ADHD brain.

What Barkley et al. fail to recognize is that scientific studies cannot be relied upon to undercover this other side of ADHD and that the only way to truly understand ADHD is by using scientific studies, clinical observations, and the knowledge that exists within the brains of those who have ADHD. The failure of Barkley et al. to recognize this not only undercuts the validity of their book, "ADHD in Adults," but, more importantly, it demonstrates that they really do not understand ADHD. To them, if something cannot be confirmed by scientific studies, it does not exist. But, whether something exists or not is not dependent on the existence of a scientific study confirming it. Scientific studies are dependent on "existence," "existence" is not dependent on scientific studies.

Written by an ADHD brain.