ABSTRACT

The term ADHD looms over society as a confusing misnomer, a relic established decades before modern brain-imaging techniques allowed scientists to plumb the condition’s true and deeply complex nature. Yesteryear’s experts, by focusing primarily on the most obvious outer sign of physical hyperactivity, concluded that children with ADHD “outgrew” the condition, because hyperactivity usually lessened as the children matured. “Hyperkinetic reaction of childhood” first appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in 1968, but it represented only a narrow definition of what the 1994 DSM-IV-TR would recognize as a much more complex condition.