Thread by @neuroqueery

friends, I give you a thread:

A Short History of #ADHD

*for anyone who thinks it's a New Thing caused by phone screens, high fructose corn syrup, or bad parenting*

1/ Our boy Hippocrates wrote in 493 BC about people with “quickened responses to sensory experience, but also less tenaciousness because the soul moves on quickly to the next impression”

aka, an Entire #ADHD Mood

2/ He thought that these people had more fire than water in their blood, and prescribed them exercise regimens and special bland barley diets for treatment.

3/ Shakespeare wrote in 1613 about an adult with “a malady of attention” in King Henry VIII.

In 1808, Goethe described a boy in Faust who couldn’t stop running around and never listened to his mom.

4/ In 1798, Scottish physician Sir Alexander Crichton wrote “On Attention and its Diseases", where he described “the incapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one object.”

He more succinctly described it as "the fidgets"

5/ In 1844, German physician Heinrich Hoffman wrote a book of absolutely terrifying children’s stories to teach his kids some lessons.

6/ One of these stories, "Fidgety Phil" was about a boy who bounced off the walls & ruined dinner.

Another, "Johnny-Look-In-The-Air", was about a boy who fell in a river bc he was staring at clouds.

Hyperactive and Inattentive types, anyone???

7/ In 1902 Sir George Frederic Still wrote his Goulstonian Lectures, considered by many to be the first scientific account of #ADHD.

He described kids with low impulse control, and blamed it on brain damage.

8/ Still called it a "moral defect". He wrote:

“the case of a boy with moral defect who would repeat the process of saying ‘Good-night’ several times before he was aware that he had done so; the same boy would often put his boot on the wrong foot apparently without noticing it”

9/ After an epidemic of encephalitis from 1917-1928, children who survived were said to have become hyperactive, easily distracted, and difficult to manage in school, which reinforced the "brain damage" theory.

10/ In 1932, German physicians Franz Kramer and Hans Pollnow wrote about a “hyperkinetic disease” they observed in children who couldn’t sit still, liked to climb stuff, and acted out.

They did not follow-up into adulthood and believed this was just a childhood condition.

11/ The first use of a stimulant to treat #ADHD was in 1937, when Charles Bradley, who ran a children's home, attempted to use benzedrine to treat headaches he had induced by doing experiments on kids. (Oh yes, this is real.)

12/ He observed that half the children who took the drug were more calm and performed better in school.

“It appears paradoxical that a drug known to be a stimulant should produce subdued behavior in half of the children,” he said.

IT SURE DOES, BRADLEY.

13/ Kids he identified as being most likely to benefit from stimulants were “characterized by short attention span, dyscalculia, mood lability, hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and poor memory”

No one paid any attention to these published findings for 25 years.

14/ In 1944, Methylphenidate (aka Ritalin) was first synthesized by Leandro Panizzon; he named it after his wife, Rita, since she let him test it on her.

His drug began to be prescribed in the 1950’s.

15/ They were still calling it hyperkinesis and attributing it to brain damage then!

It was first listed in 1968’s second edition of the DSM as a “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood”.

16/ In 1980, the DSM 3 renamed hyperkinesis Attention Deficit Disorder, w/ or w/o hyperactivity

In 1994, the DSM 4 listed 3 different types of ADHD: inattentive, hyperactive/impulsive, & combined

17/ In 1999, autistic writer Judy Singer coined the term neurodiversity and challenged the medical model that people with #ADHD and #autism were disordered or damaged.

18/ In 2013, the DSM 5 defined these types of #ADHD as “presentations” and specified that they are not fixed, but can change over the course of a person’s life.

19/ And now, in 2020, we the #ADHD would very much like for you to stop acting like we have no history.