Dr Edward Hallowell   Hello, my name is Edward Hallowell M.D. I’m a  Psychiatrist, a Child and Adult Psychiatrist. I’ve   been in practice for some 40 years. My specialty  is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,   ADHD, which I have myself. I also have  dyslexia and both of these conditions are   tremendously misunderstood. People think of them  as crippling and disabling, but they need not be   at all. They can be absolute assets if you learn  to manage them properly. I often say to people,   “I’m not in the business of treating disabilities.  I’m in the business of unwrapping people’s gifts.”   When come – someone comes to see me, I say,  “Let’s see how well we can unwrap your gift,”   and that reframing makes all  the difference in the world. And so, in the time we have today, I want to drill  down on the positives that go with ADHD, not to   deny the negatives. They’re well-known and, you  know, the various problems ADHD, and dyslexia for   that matter, can create, no doubt about it. The  prisons are full of people with undiagnosed ADHD,   the halls of the addicted, the unemployed, the  marginalised, the depressed, the underachieving.   So, yes, indeed, ADHD can be a terribly difficult,  crippling problem to have, but what most people   don’t know is that it can also be a marker of  talent, be a springboard to greatness, really. For example, the – in the – this era of COVID, the  man who invented the polymerase chain reaction,   the PCR, famous PCR test for COVID, that  really, in many ways, since the double helix,   the biggest advance in biology, led to all kinds  of innovations around DNA testing and whatnot,   that man, Kary Mullis, who’s in heaven now,  but he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for   that discovery. And he had major league ADHD, a  phenomenally interesting man and quite eccentric   American Chemist, but won the Nobel Prize,  had ADHD. And in Britain, Richard Branson,   you know, one of the great entrepreneurs in  aviation and philanthropy, ADHD. You know,   in our country, another innovator in the world of  aviation, David Neeleman, founded JetBlue Airlines   and then went on to found a whole slew of other  airlines, also has ADHD. The list goes on and on.  Wherever you find a tremendous creative  energy, talent, you’ll find ADHD,   and that’s what most people don’t know  about, because this condition emerges   out of the medical model and what do we Doctors  do? We treat disease, we specialise in pathology   and so, what the general public tends to know  about ADHD is the pathology. You don’t go to a   Doctor because you’re feeling so well. You go to  a Doctor because you’re in pain and you need help,   and so, that’s what these children  – that’s the context in which these   children are seen and their parents have  it presented to them that way, as well. Now, I mention children, but this condition  can – stays with you into adulthood and I   see probably the – most of my patients now  are adults. When I started, back in 1981,   they were mostly children, but then we  realised this condition does, indeed,   continue into adulthood and so – and the  biggest undiagnosed group are adults,   particularly adult women. And so, probably  the majority of my patients now are adults. As I say, I have the condition myself and so, I  understand it from the inside and what I want to   show you is how wonderful it can be. As I say,  not for a second denying that it can be the   opposite of wonderful, it can be pretty awful,  but if you handle it properly, what can this   condition be? Why can Nobel Prize winners have it  and self-made billionaires have it, and leaders in   you name a field and I’ll tell you someone who’s  a leader in that field who has this condition? At its heart, at its core, what we have, we  who have ADHD have that other people don’t   have is an extraordinary imagination. What  sets us apart is a prodigious imagination.   We take it for granted ‘cause we’ve always  had it, but we – most people don’t have the   kind of fertile, vivid, active imagination that we  have. We are constantly coming up with new ideas,   new thoughts, new images, new plans,  new possibilities. We’re the dreamer,   we’re the visionary, we’re the entrepreneur.  We’re forever – or we’re ever – we’re forever   wanting to grow things and build things  and develop things and create things. I’ve written 23 books and the reason I write  so many books, if I don’t have a book going,   I get depressed, and that’s typical of  us. We need to create, we need to build.   You know, the United States was founded  by people with ADHD. We drained off the   gene pool from England, you know, the  restless ones, the ones who wanted to   build and create and were willing to take  big chances in the service of doing that. So, a tremendously active mind and constantly  in motion, such that I often make the analogy,   “People with ADD have a Ferrari engine for a  brain. They have a race car for a brain. They   have a brain that’s just going a mile a minute,  a runaway brain, a race car for a brain. The   problem is they have bicycle brakes, so they  don’t have the breaking power to control the   power of their mind and so, it tends to run  away with them.” And based on that analogy,   you know, I call myself a ‘brake specialist’. If  you come to see me, I’ll help you develop brakes   so that you can win races, instead of spinning  out on the curb or crashing into the wall. A Ferrari with no brakes is a pretty dangerous  car, but a Ferrari with brakes wins races,   becomes a champion, and that’s what folks with  this condition have. Whether it’s a six-year-old   or a 60-year-old, you know, and whether  it’s a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman,   from whatever walk in life, it’s – this was –  this is an equal opportunity condition. Anyone   can have it, and it’s never too late to find out  and my oldest patient right now is 88-years-old   and he’s working on completing a book that  he’s been wanting to write his whole life long.   So, any age you can have it. People misunderstand it because of the name  itself, ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity   disorder. We don’t have a deficit of  attention. I don’t have a deficit of   attention. We have an abundance of attention.  As I said, our challenge is to control it. So,   it’s not a – if it were a deficit,  it would be some form of dementia,   which it certainly is not. We have abundant  attention and it’s all flashing and firing   at the same time. So, not a deficit and, in  my opinion, not a disorder, it’s a trait. Can it be a disorder? Yes. If you don’t know how  to manage it, yes, your runaway brain can crash.   But, at the same time, if you do know how to  manage it, it can be an asset that you can’t buy   or teach. Your race car brain can win many races.  You can become a champion, a Nobel Prize winner,   in fact. So, it’s all a matter of how you  manage the power of this extraordinary brain. Another analogy, in addition to the race  car brain, I like to use, “Imagine Niagara   Falls, a huge, magnificent waterfall in  Upstate New York, in the United States,   and half in Canada, actually. Niagara  Falls is a titanic amount of energy,   but it’s just a lot of noise and mist until  you build a hydroelectric plant. And so,   I’m in the hydroelectric plant. If you think of  ADD as Niagara Falls, it’s just a lot of noise   and mist until you build a hydroelectric plant,  but then you build the hydroelectric plant and you   can light up the State of New York.” So, imagine  the ADD brain is like Niagara Falls in search of   a hydroelectric plant and that hydroelectric  plant is usually finding a creative outlet. In my case it’s writing, someone else it’s  building – starting a business, the entrepreneur   starting a business. Someone else, it’s doing an  experiment in chemistry and coming up with the   polymerase chain reaction. But you’re looking  for a way of taking this tremendous amount of   mental energy and creativity and connecting it to  a means of turning it into something productive. Another metaphor I use, “Having untreated  ADD is like driving on square wheels.”   We get there ‘cause we’re so tenacious, but  ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, imagine   driving on square wheels. What a tremendous amount  of energy that requires. Well, once you learn   about the condition and how to manage it, you  round out those wheels. The square wheels become   round wheels and oh boy, how much further you can  go, with even less energy, than on square wheels. And then, a final analogy I use, because it’s  good in understanding what medication does,   “Having ADHD is like being near-sighted  and not having glasses, and what   the treatment for ADD does is it gives you eye  glasses.” So, instead of getting through life   by squinting, you have eye glasses, and when  you have eye glasses, you can see. It doesn’t   make you smarter, but it allows you to use  your smarts a whole lot more constructively. So, those are some analogies, and they  lead to the interventions that we have,   but it all begins with education  and it all begins with understanding   that you – how your brain works and what your  assets are. Instead of just being told as a   child that you’re – “You should try harder,”  which is what these kids get told from day one,   and “Get your act together” and “Get organised”  and, you know, “Try to remember things” and so on   and so forth, instead of being lectured throughout  school on how to, you know, how to work harder,   with the diagnosis comes the insight that  it’s not a matter of hard work. I mean,   hard work always helps, helps anything  you’re doing, but telling a kid with ADHD   to try harder is about as helpful as telling  someone who’s near-sighted to squint harder. And by the way, it doesn’t stop with  just exhortations to try harder. I mean,   I’ve become friends with a man by the name of  Dave Pilkey, an extraordinary man. And he went   to school at a Lutheran school in the Midwest of  the United States and he used to get paddled, hit   with a board on his butt regularly, all the way  through school, not just as a little kid, but all   the way through school, high school, because he  could make people laugh. That was his great sin,   and the Teachers didn’t like that and so, they  kept hitting him, and hitting him didn’t do   anything, other than, you know, hurt and make  him angry, but he kept making people laugh. Well, he had the last laugh, he’s – now, Dave  Pilkey is the Author of the Captain Underpants   series and it’s sold over 80 million copies  and has delighted children around the world   for many years now. And just another example of  how a person can take this condition and turn it   into a huge asset, and he, like me, has both ADHD  and dyslexia. But that abuse that he suffered,   physical abuse at the hands of Teachers who,  you know, supposedly were trying to help him,   could’ve ruined him. It could’ve broken him,  and it does. These are the kids who get battered   and abused and, you know, unfortunately, it  can break them and permanently disable them.   So, that – what I call the moral model, that  these symptoms are the result of intention,   of not wanting to do well enough, that’s  been killing children for hundreds of years. But when you put it – when you look at it  through the lens of neurology and of medicine   and you discover this is a wiring difference,  then no longer, you know, are you telling them   to try harder. You’re giving them methods of  focusing, of focusing when they’re, you know,   when they’re not necessarily able to. And,  you know, it also depends upon understanding   what this condition is. The medical  model, the deficit disorder model,   defines it in terms of three negatives, you know,  distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity,   or just general feelings of restlessness. And the  whole diagnostic manual, the so-called DSM fifth   edition, defines ADHD in terms of those three  symptoms. There’s nine elements on the axis of   inattention and distractibility and then, there  are nine other elements on the axis of impulsivity   and hyperactivity. And if you have six out of nine  on either axis, you qualify for the diagnosis. Well, think of each one of those three symptoms  inattention, distractibility and impulsivity   and hyperactivity, and turn each one on  its head, and you get a positive. And the   flipside of distractibility, curiosity, “What’s  that? What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?”   You know, that’s a – that’s our driving  force. That’s – we’re endlessly curious.   When I was a little boy, I was called “the  question box.” People in my family got tired   of listening to all my questions, and they were  endless, ‘cause they were driven by curiosity.   That’s my driving force to this day. Excuse me.  I’m 73-years-old and I’m still a question box,   “What’s this? What’s that? Why this? Why that?”   And it really – curiosity is what  leads to progress in all fields. Well, the second one, impulsivity, now, that’s  so bad, right? You’re impulsive, you should think   before you act. What is creativity but impulsivity  gone right? You don’t plan to have a new idea. New   ideas come unbitten, unexpected, unannounced, in  the shower in the morning, on your drive to work,   in the middle of a baseball game, where you  suddenly, ‘pop’, new idea arrives impulsively.   Creativity depends upon weak brakes,  depends upon some degree of disinhibition   and so, you don’t want to eradicate impulsivity,  but once again, you want to learn how to manage   it and control it, so you can trap these new ideas  when they arrive and then do something with them,   not get rid of impulsivity.  You get rid of impulsivity,   you get rid of creativity. Again, it’s  a matter of learning control over it. And then, the third element, the hyperactivity,  you get to my – be my age, I’m 73, it’s called   energy. I’m really glad I have this little turbo  pack with me all the time. It’s why I can do a   lot of things and start a lot of projects  and, you know. So, this is by way of saying   while ADHD can cause problems, the assets  we are born with, and this is genetic,   the assets we’re born with curiosity, creativity,  energy, channelled properly produce results like   nothing else can. Because you can’t buy curiosity,  you can’t teach curiosity. You can encourage it,   but you can’t instil it. You can’t manufacture  it, and the same thing with creativity. You   can’t buy or teach creativity. You  can encourage it or discourage it,   but, you know, you need a certain native DNA  quotient of creativity to be that way. And then,   energy, the same thing, you can encourage  it, but you can’t buy it or teach it. And that’s why it’s very important  that we not label these kids with   negative handles early on. We – a lot of  damage is done. Just the term ‘ADHD’ can   create a kind of, stigmatised, negative  energy. You want to be careful not to do that,   and all the other moral diagnoses that  get made, “wayward, lazy, bad, wilful,   get his act together,” all this kind of stuff.  I say his, could just as easily be a girl.   You want to frame it in a way that allows  for hope, intelligent hope, realistic hope,   and it is absolutely realistic to believe that  these kids can grow up and become world movers,   world changers. Whoever invented the wheel  I’m sure had ADHD, you know, and – ‘cause   we’re the originalists. We’re the disruptors in  the best sense of that word. Whoever first said,   “The world is round, not flat,” I’m  sure that person had ADHD as well.   And, you know, it – we can get  people angry at us, ‘cause we,   kind of, point out new ideas, but at the same  time, progress in the world depends upon us. So, this is all by way of saying if you have  this condition, or you know a child who has it,   or an adult for that matter, if you see  those symptoms of curiosity, creativity,   energy and the negative counterpart of  distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity,   see a Doctor who comes at this from  a strength-based perspective. ‘Cause   you – what you want to do, as I say, is unwrap  the gift, not squash down the condition.   You can look at my – I’ve written a lot of books,  but the most recent one is called “ADHD 2.0”   and then, I have one coming out in England  in September called “ADHD Explained.” And, you know, it is a lifechanging diagnosis,  where you can go from struggling and, you know,   feeling lost, maybe suffering with an addiction,  maybe getting in trouble with the law, maybe   divorced many times or in school struggling  and failing, and once the diagnosis is made   and the plan is set forth on how to unwrap  the gift, all of that can change. You know,   you don’t become Joe or Jill Normal, you’ll never  be that, but you become Joe or Jill Extraordinary,   Joe or Jill Supernormal. You go beyond what anyone  ever thought you could do, including yourself   and, you know, most people with this  condition sell themselves way short. I’m here to tell you, ‘cause I’ve seen it over  and over and over again, the people who have   this condition are the people who change the  world for the better, who come up with the new   ideas. They don’t know how they do it. The honest  answer to, “How did you do that?” in my world is,   “I don’t know, but I did it, somehow or other.”  And what we want to do is just create the   conditions where that’s possible, ‘cause if you’re  – if you grow up in a fear filled environment,   where your lead instinct is to shut it down, then  you won’t develop the way you otherwise might. So, you want to make sure your child, or  yourself, is recognised as having talent,   needing to do some work to unwrap that  talent, but on your way to becoming, you know,   a real contributor to civilisation. That’s  absolutely what can happen. Unwrap the gift,   unwrap the gift, that’s my message to you and get  over the deficit disorder model. It’s inaccurate,   it’s wrong, it’s damaging and instead, think of  it as a condition that has positive qualities   that can’t be bought, can’t be taught, and with  some structure and intervention and guidance,   those nascent qualities can blossom  and grow and change the world. Okay, that’s it from me for  today. Thank you very much.