It was about all the times I'd disrupted classrooms because I couldn't sit still, about assignments missed, cars crashed, jobs lost, relationships blundered into and out of. It was about this noisy, cluttered, disorganized, and often overwhelmed brain of mine. I met with a psychiatrist, who went over everything again and agreed with the psychologist. Then, at the age of 43, I went on drugs. About this time, researchers also figured out that kids who were diagnosed with these problems wouldn't outgrow them as adults.
People change as they grow older, and they learn to compensate.
When a single problem goes through five different names in a little more than a half century, you know it's as confounding to scientists as it is to the people who have it. The pieces are coming together, though. In particular, many studies have shown genuine biological differences between people who have ADD and those who don't. One is the basal ganglia, a pair of nerve clusters in the middle of the brain. The other is the right prefrontal cortex, the last part of the brain to develop in childhood.