Find a therapist to help with ADHD

Not recognising ADHD does not make its associated difficulties or impairments disappear.

How ADHD-related difficulties are understood and responded to is shaped by social and cultural context.

ADHD skepticism creates additional barriers for the people least likely to have their difficulties recognised.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Klaus Minde, a German-Canadian child psychiatrist, arrived in Uganda on a WHO secondment. He was looking for something that he did not expect to find—ADHD. At the time, research and clinical understanding of what would become ADHD was dominated by studies of boys in North America and Europe. In Uganda, he established the first child psychiatry clinic in East Africa and began conducting research, including comparative studies on childhood mental disorders in Canada and Uganda.

When publishing his findings, Minde acknowledged that he had approached the research assuming he would not find hyperactive children in Africa. Instead, he was surprised to identify children with similar features to those observed in North America. Drawing on reports from teachers and parents, he identified a subgroup of Ugandan children who showed a pattern of high activity levels with differences in attention and impulsivity, features consistent with those seen in a comparison group of Canadian children. What was different was not the behaviour itself, but how it was understood. In the Ugandan context, these characteristics were more likely to be viewed as nuisances requiring punishment rather than difficulties needing support. As a result, many of these children were not kept in school beyond the........

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