When I was a child in the 1980s, the people I knew with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder were hyperactive boys who went to the school nurse at lunchtime to get their medicine. Many people assumed that these boys would “grow out of” their symptoms as teenagers or adults.
For most of the 200-year-plus history of the condition we now know as ADHD, it was considered a childhood disorder. Specialists began to more widely recognize that ADHD can also affect adults only in the 1990s, when scientific evidence showed that some people continue to experience ADHD symptoms into adulthood and that it can profoundly effect their lives.
