Similar to other mental health conditions, there is a formalised definition of what ADHD is. There’s a few things just to pull out from that, you can find the definition for yourself if you look up ADHD DSM-5, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders.
But ADHD has got two components. We’ve got the attentional component and we’ve got a hyperactive component, and that’s what makes up the name ADHD – which is Attentional Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. What we’re looking for then is a challenge in regulating attention. People often think about ADHD as when someone has no attention, but that’s not true because they can have hyper fixations of attention on particular things.
So the question is not the lack of attention, but rather the regulation of attention – where does my attention go? And then we’ve got the hyperactivity part, which is more often seen in males who have a diagnosis of ADHD, and that refers to sort of impulsive behaviours and difficulty in regulating one’s own movements.
What we think in ADHD is hyperactivity – what it’s actually trying to do is to arouse the nervous system. So in ADHD, perhaps the brain itself is not aroused enough. So because it’s not aroused enough, it’s trying to make itself go back up to that level of functioning that it wants to have. It does this with the hyperactivity, because when you’re hyperactive, you’re sending a lot of signals to the brain, the brain says now I’ve got back up to that level of activity that I want to have.
What’s interesting is that ADHD looks different in different people. Some people might have more of an inattentive type, and other people might have more of a hyperactive type. This difference has to be accounted for because when it comes to diagnosing, looking, and assessing ADHD – it could look different. But, there are some commonalities that are important to consider in the definition. So typically what we’re looking for in ADHD is that these difficulties with attention, and hyperactivity, have been there since childhood. Because what the clinician is trying to do is rule out any other disorders that may have happened in adulthood, that could have been caused by something else.
So, we typically think of ADHD as a developmental experience that people have and so part of understanding what it is, is to look at how it develops in young people. If it maintains over the long term, then perhaps what we’re looking at is something like ADHD. But if it’s a spontaneous expression of difficulty in paying attention, or regulating yourself in terms of being hyperactive, that’s happening suddenly in adulthood – then that sort of points to a different disorder which helps us to know what ADHD is, when we compare it to what it is not.
