The Atlantic

ADHD Is Different for Women

The standard conception of the disorder is based on studies of "hyperactive young white boys." For females, it comes on later, and has different symptoms.
Source: (Courtesy of Maria Yagoda)

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When you live in total squalor—cookies in your pants drawer, pants in your cookies drawer, and nickels, dresses, old New Yorkers, and apple seeds in your bed—it’s hard to know where to look when you lose your keys. The other day, after two weeks of fruitless searching, I found my keys in the refrigerator on top of the roasted garlic hummus. I can’t say I was surprised. I was surprised when my psychiatrist diagnosed me with ADHD two years ago, when I was a junior at Yale.

In editorials and in waiting rooms, concerns of too-liberal diagnoses and over-medication dominate our discussions of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. , with great alarm, the findings of a new : 11 percent of school-age children have received an ADHD diagnosis, a

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