Adhd-Dr. George F. Still

Dr. George F. Still is one of the first credited authorities to bring the condition we know as ADHD to attention of the medical attention. He described the children he was diagnosing as having “defective moral control” back in 1902. Even though Dr. Still’s words are a century old, they still have evidence in now what is called conduct disorder today. Kurt Goldstein is another who noticed the psychological effects from soldiers with brain injuries from head wounds in World War I. Goldstein noticed pyschological characterisitcs in the soldiers, which he described as preservation, disorganized behavior, hyperactivity, and a “forced responsiveness to stimuli”. This paved the way to the finding of the Strauss syndrome discovered by Heinz Werner and Alfred Strauss during the 1930’s and 1940’s. They tested children with intellectual disabilities by showing them pictures and analyzing their results. They found that the children with a supposed brain damage were more likely to see wavy lines in a picture than the object in the middle. Werner and Strauss came to refer children who were distractible and hyperactive as exhibiting the Strauss syndrome.
Minimal brain injury was a common term during the 1950’s and 1960’s describing children of normal intelligence who were inattentive, impulsive, and/or hyperactive. This term quickly fell out of use because it was difficult to document actual tissue damage to the brain. The term “hyperactive child syndrome” replaced minimal brain injury because it was more descriptive of behavior, and did not rely on unreliable diagnosis of brain damage. Hyperactive child syndrome also lost its popularity because research began to point to inattention, not hyperactivity, as the major behavioral problem experienced by the children. The definition of ADHD has been debated over for years for the correct diagnosis and most professionals have relied on the American Psychiatric Associations (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental