Attention Deficit Disorder

In 1917 and 1918 there was a worldwide outbreak of encephalitis. Many children showed ADD like symptoms afterwards, leading doctors to further speculate that the disorder was the result of brain damage, resulting in perhaps the first names for ADD, Post-Encephalitic Disorder and Minimal Brain Damage. When it was later learned that these children were not brain damaged after all, the name changed to Minimal Brain Dysfunction.

In 1937 doctors first reported evidence that stimulant medication helped relieve the symptoms of hyperactive children. These reports were largely ignored until the 1950's, when there was a rapid increase in the use of drug therapy in psychiatry.

By the mid 1960's, stimulant medication had become a common treatment for hyperactivity. In 1960 Stella Chase and other researchers began to write about "hyperactive child syndrome," which they believed to have a biological, rather than environmental cause. In 1965 the American Psychiatric Association established a diagnostic category for what was now called Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood. In spite of the work of Chase and others, this condition was still largely believed to be caused by the child's environment, rather than being biological in origin. As a result, poor parenting was often blamed for ADD behavior.

Over the next 15 years, research began to reveal the neurological origin of ADD. One of the many who studied ADD in the 1970's was Canadian psychologist Virginia Douglas. She is credited with identifying four major characteristics of the syndrome: deficits in attention and effort, impulsivity, problems in regulating arousal levels and a need for immediate reinforcement. It was largely due to Douglas's work that in 1980 the American Psychiatric Association established a new diagnostic category, Attention Deficit Disorder With or Without Hyperactivity. In 1987 the APA revised the name to Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder. More recently, with growing awareness that hyperactivity need not be present for a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, the APA defined three distinct types of ADHD: Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type; Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, predominantly inattentive type; and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, combined type.

In the 1990's ADD research by the academic community, mental health care practitioners, pharmaceutical