Symptoms of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder

Video transcription

Hi, my name's John Bosworth. I'm a licensed mental health counselor in St. Pete, Florida. I'd like to discuss symptoms of adult ADD or adult ADHD. A lot of times, mental health practitioners and the general public will think that because somebody was diagnosed with ADD or ADHD as a child, that they're going to outgrow it. I hear that a lot, and I actually thought that at one point back in my undergraduate days because I heard a lot of the psychologists that I worked with say that, "Well, they'll outgrow it. Help them manage it through...you know, through their school years." But we're finding that adults with attention deficit, they...we don't really outgrow it as a child, but it manifests itself in different ways. Whereas a child might have trouble in school, the adult's going to probably have some kind of trouble staying on task or completing tasks at work. So you can kind of look at the same symptoms that a kid might have in school or in their life and kind of translate it to an adult life. So whereas a child might have trouble communicating with a peer or be irritable or aggressive toward a peer, an adult might withdraw or have a very hard time interacting or becoming intimate with people on a...you know, on a relationship basis. So in adults, the symptoms are really the same, but they're just in a different context or a different setting. And what I'd like to look at...there's an interesting tidbit -- a little fact-myth type scenario -- that I discovered, and I'd like to read that to you guys. The fact: ADD looks very much like a willpower problem, but it isn't. It's essentially a problem in the management systems of the brain. And I know a lot of parents that I work with and spouses of, you know, adults with ADD basically think, "Well, he's lazy," or, "He...you know, he just doesn't try hard enough." But we really know that that's not the case. We know that there's some chemical and definitely some mismanagement going on in the brain of somebody with ADD. So those are some of the symptoms of an adult with ADD or ADHD. My name is John Bosworth, and I'm in private practice in St. Pete, Florida.