ADHD Inattentive Type

March 9, 2008

ADHD Inattentive Type: The Diagnostic Criteria.

ADHD Inattentive Type is one of the three recognized ’sub types’ of the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

It is defined by the criteria laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-IV) which states: In the area of Inattention, the child may display more than one of the following

1. often has difficulty keeping attention sustained in task or play activities, this can lead to mistakes in school work and incompleted jobs.
2. often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly.
3. often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities.
4. often avoids and dislikes tasks that require sustained mental effort.
5. often loses things that are necessary for everyday life.
6. often is easily distracted by extraneous stimuli, this means the events happening in the environment around them.
7. often is forgetful in daily activities of dressing, washing or eating.

What the Experts Say

The leading ADHD specialists have found that, the children with ADHD Inattentive Type have a problem with ‘fluctuating’ attention.

In other words, their distractibility problems are not a given constant, they seem to have periods when they find focusing on a task difficult and times when the child does not listen to direction.

They have also found that when children with ADHD Inattentive Type are truely interested in a project or subject, they have no problems in the area of paying attention and are highly motivated in these areas.

The real difficultly, the experts have found with ADHD Inattentive Type children is they cannot sustain the motivation to be interested on variety of everyday tasks, which themselves present different levels of personal interest to the child.

Therefore the child’s attention levels fluctuate throughout the day. The experts feel this ‘fluctuation’ of interest is more pronounced in ADHD Inattentive Type children and poses the their greatest problems in the area of distractability.
What is Attention

The Oxford dictionary defines attention as ‘The process whereby a person concentrates on some features of the environment to the (relative) exclusion of others’
But how do we concentrate??

For every human being to be able to concentrate the brain has several process which it has to go through, these are referred to as ‘cognitive processes’

What does this mean?

Lets take the process of watching a film:

Firstly ,the brain has to focus upon the screen images, while blocking out or subduing any other visual or auditory stimuli. For example, if, the person next to you is coughing or talking or moving, your brain can reduce the impact this movement or noise has upon you so you can focus only on the film.

Secondly, the brain has to block out any sub-conscious thoughts we may have, like for example: have I got that new job??

Thirdly, we may have to alternate from one task back to another, for example if you are offered some popcorn during the film, your brain will acknowledge this then return to the film.

To be able to do these things the brain must sort through all the incomming information and make a selection of what is wanted at that particular moment in time and disregard all the rest. This process is known as ‘ executive’ functioning of the brain.

So you can see the process of ‘attention’ alone is made up of several steps, of percieving visual and auditory information, sorting that information to find what is important to concentrate on at that time and stopping other irrelevant information becomming the focus. The brain also has to have the ability to switch our focus, from one subject back to another. Or store irrelevant information until such a time we need it.

The area of attention, alone is a very complex task and it is said ADHD Inattentive Type children have specific problems in many processes of attention, this is thought to stem from the lack of certain neurotransmitters in the prefrontal cortex of the brain that deals specifically with attention.

This is where the brain deals with processing the irrelevant information and sustains attention on a specific task and gives directions to co-ordinate attention as required. Quite a feat really.

This process of ‘choosing’ relevant information is quite cool, I cannot help thinking children with ADHD Inattentive Type are onto something. I mean, could it be these children choose to have more interesting lives and disregard the boring bits?

Posted in ADHD