Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Puder, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching residents and medical students.

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Dr. Michael Cummings for another episode

on psychopharmacology and just general psychiatry and wisdom on ADHD.

So today we are going to be going through the diagnosis of ADHD, the treatment,

some of the biggest gaps that people have in their knowledge of ADHD,

and yeah, Dr. Cummings, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I'm pleased to be back,

and indeed I will attempt to pay attention. So let's start out by posing that question I did when I first came in.

What are the biggest gaps that people have in your mind that they need to learn in terms of ADHD?

I think probably the first gap or first need that people have is to be careful in making the diagnosis.

ADHD has at times been a fad within psychiatry and has been over diagnosed.

Children are inherently more active and less attentive than adults are.

So people need to pay attention to the criteria in terms of failures of attention and overactivity,

and impulsivity need to be of such magnitude that they truly cause distress and social dysfunction or academic dysfunction,

or in the case of adults, work dysfunction in order to qualify for the diagnosis.

You were telling me one third of people in Orange County at one point were diagnosed or treated?

At one point, the LA Times published an article that opined that one third of the children in Orange County suffered from ADHD.

I suspect, frankly, that's not true. The better done, more rigorously diagnosed,

studies suggest that prevalence in children is somewhere between six and eight percent.

...