Dr. Nicole Murray - Decoding ADHD

Okay.

So- Can we go back a little bit? Maybe explain to us, for those who don't know, which I'm putting my hand firmly in the air, neuropsychology.

Yes.

Can you explain a little bit about what that is? And then also explain to us what's happening with ADHD.

Sure.

So neuropsychology, it is the study of brain and behavior relationships.

So typically what happens is... you know, psychologists, we all go to grad school for a gazillion years.

And then at some point, we break off into specialties.

Some people go into peds, some people go into health, we go into the study of the brain.

And so we look at how the brain operates under certain conditions.

So my specialty area, like I mentioned before, was brain injury, concussion, and something called ABI, which is an acquired brain injury.

So that's our strokes after heart attack, right? And so Um, initially I went into this field because a lot of times when these sorts of things happen to the body, people treat the body and then they forget what happens to the brain and then they're thrown back into work.

People get fired.

We don't want that.

And so basically what we do is we assess brain capacity and say, Hey, look, your memory's really great here, but your attention is not so great here.

This is what you're going to need to survive in the workplace.

Right.

So, um, That's essentially what we do.

Now, when it comes to the neurodevelopmental disorders, typically what we're trying to do is establish their strengths so we can use their strengths to kind of pull up some of the traps that they continue to fall into.

So now with ADHD, do you need a neuropsychologist to assess? Not necessarily, but it's kind of nice to know what your brain's doing and so you can work with it and not against it.

Okay.

Yes.

So not wanting to date myself too much, but when I, you know, when I was growing up, we didn't talk about.

ADHD.

At all.