Good afternoon, everyone. It's Dr. Niagara again with our next episode of Psychology Unplugged.

As always, a pleasure speaking with emailing. Talk with you guys.

It's, again, a really blessed opportunity to be able to do this on a weekly basis and try and give as much practical and clinical information as I possibly can.

All right, today's topic, one that is frequently encountered in neuropsychology and psychopharmacology is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

One distinction that I want to make very clear is there is no such thing as ADD.

It is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, predominantly inattentive type,

predominantly hyperactive type, or combined presentation where you have both inattention and hyperactivity.

That is generally the most severe form of ADHD now a common referral question is

uh or or a statement made by a patient's i i can't concentrate all right well there's an over

reliance from my perspective on symptom rating scales.

Do I use symptom rating scales?

Yeah, absolutely, to kind of get more of a distinction of what is the patient

supposedly experiencing and what symptoms are they endorsing.

But from a diagnostic perspective, I think the only valid, reliable, and judicious approach

to delineating a diagnosis of ADHD is to actually test the attentional systems.

And we break attention down into simple attention,

complex attention, and sustained attention.

The more problematic type of ADHD is not from a severity of behavioral dysregulation, where you have, you know, if you think about back in school, the most annoying kid who couldn't sit still, squirming, fidgeting, those kids get the attention of teachers, of nurses, of pediatricians early on.

And maybe there's a higher likelihood to have ADHD,

but it's the individuals with the inattentive type

that I find to really suffer and struggle the most.

So the reason for that is there's no overt manifestation.

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