From emotional regulation skills and oppositional defiant disorder to teens’ mental health and ADHD symptoms in men, ADDitude’s top articles of 2023 tackled topics of vital importance to adults and caregivers living with ADHD.
Anger and irritation, easy to explode, feeling mental tension, destructive thoughts, experiencing stress, panic attack, hysteric behavior, volcano eruption in head, vector flat illustration
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1. How to Control Your Anger When ADHD Emotional Reactivity Kicks In
By Sharon Saline, Psy.D.
“Living with ADHD means living with a stress-producing condition that begets emotional reactivity. Though the ADHD brain is wired to feel emotions like anger, frustration, and hurt quite intensely, emotional reactivity is ultimately a response pattern — one that you can shift with the right tools and frame of mind.”
2. ADHD at the Center: A Whole-Life, Whole-Person Condition
By Linda Roggli, PCC
“ADHD is more than the sum of its symptoms. It touches your life from the moment you wake up to the instant you finally nod off. (In truth, ADHD continues to work its influence while you sleep.) Your health, personality and preferences, friendships, and relationships — and truly everything else in between — are colored by your ADHD. It is there 24/7, 365 days a year, influencing every single part of you.”
Mother driving her teenage daughter with ADHD in car, girl rolling eyes because she’s not allowed to drive yet
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3. Teen Girls Are Not Alright. ADHD Magnifies the Crisis.
By Nicole Kear
Rates of sexual violence, suicidality, and sadness have hit a record high among teen girls, according to an alarming new CDC report. Those risks are further elevated for girls with ADHD. “The numbers are unprecedented,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health. “Our young people are in crisis.”
Mother confronting her explosive, defiant preteen son with ADHD
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4. The Parents’ Guide to Dismantling Oppositional, Defiant Behavior
By Sharon Saline, Psy.D.
“Oppositional defiance disorder is classified as a disorder in the DSM-5, but symptoms of ODD often present situationally. Kids with ODD who are openly resistant in one setting or with one authority figure may be completely cooperative in other areas of their life. Their behavior presents like a switch — angry one minute and fine the next. This can be confusing to the parent of a child who acts out at home but not at school.”
“As a 62-year-old man with ADHD, I can get emotional quickly and often about relatively insignificant things. I can be immature and irresponsible. For years, I have felt embarrassment and shame about the lack of progress in my career. I also have learned that these characteristics, among others, are more pronounced in many men with ADHD than they are in their female and neurotypical counterparts.”
Teens on electronic devices, kids on phones
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6. Why Screens Mesmerize Our Teens — and How to Break the Trance
By Jeremy Edge, LPC, IGDC
“From Fortnite to TikTok, video games and social media channels are carefully designed to encourage habitual use. It’s certainly possible to engage in a healthy, recreational way, but technology use can and does become problematic. The factors that drive ‘technology addiction’ are complex. That said, teens with ADHD who struggle with self-control and self-regulation may be at elevated risk.”
7. Adult ADHD Is Real — and Still Heavily Stigmatized
By J. Russell Ramsay, Ph.D.
In November, “Psychiatric Times published a controversial and off-putting opinion piece titled, ‘The Making of Adult ADHD,’ 1 which calls ADHD in adulthood one of psychiatry’s ‘fads’ in ‘theory, diagnosis, and treatment.’ It argues, quite weakly, that adult ADHD is not a scientifically valid diagnosis; the authors instead attribute persistent symptoms to the effects of mood temperaments, which is conveniently a topic of research interest for at least one of them.”
3Ruffalo, M. L., & Ghaemi, N. (2023): The making of adult ADHD: The rapid rise of a novel psychiatric diagnosis. Psychiatric Times, 40(9), 18-19.
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8. Hormonal Changes & ADHD: A Lifelong Tug-of-War
By Anni Layne Rodgers
“Hormonal fluctuations worsen symptoms of ADHD for men and women alike, and the severity grows more pronounced with age, according to a recent ADDitude survey of 1,829 adults with ADHD. Across genders, ADDitude readers almost equally cited progressively more debilitating challenges during the marked hormonal shifts of puberty, pregnancy, postpartum (the time after childbirth), perimenopause, menopause, and andropause (often called male menopause).
“These findings suggest that the traditional view of ADHD — as a childhood disorder that resolves after puberty — was entirely backward.”
9. Raising a Child with BFRBs: A Guide for Parents
By Suzanne Mouton-Odum, Ph.D.
“Body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) — from hair pulling and skin picking to cheek and nail biting — are treatable conditions, given a trained therapist and a willing child. Yes, BFRBs can be very difficult for families to manage; sometimes, though, it’s parents who have a harder time coping with their child’s BFRB than does the actual child.”
10. Eating Disorders in Teens with ADHD: Red Flags and Recovery Steps
By Dena Cabrera, Psy.D., CEDS
“We are just beginning to understand how ADHD influences the development of eating disorders and disordered eating in teens, however, it stands to reason that the low self-esteem associated with ADHD, particularly when undiagnosed, could be at least partially to blame, among other ADHD-related factors.”
