What’s New in Our Understanding of ADHD?

What a difference a decade makes.

Today, the disorder those letters represent – attention deficit disorder, more commonly known now as attention deficit/hyperactive disorder, or ADHD – is the subject of what seems like almost daily coverage in newspapers, magazines and even on TV.

“Many more people are aware of attention deficit disorder now,” says Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., a psychiatrist and nationally recognized expert on ADHD who is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School. When Hallowell wrote his best-selling book Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood through Adulthood in 1994, most people hadn’t heard of the disorder, he says. “On the other hand,” he adds, “most people are still misinformed about what it is. While they have heard of it, they don’t know what it is and they have many misconceptions and preconceptions.”