The American psychiatrist Ned Hallowell – open-necked peach shirt, Bill Clinton hair – perches on his sofa, leaning into the camera and addressing his audience with the twinkly-eyed intimacy of a Hollywood granddad. “One of the oddest things about having this condition so misleadingly called ADHD is how we can enjoy going into a sort of stupor,” he says. “We can come out of the shower, for example, and sit down on the bed with a towel around us and just stare out of the window, thinking about… nothing!” People with ADHD tend to find their brains run a mile a minute, Hallowell observes – but every now and again there is the bliss of complete vacancy.
At 72, Hallowell (@drhallowell) has become a TikTok star; even this seemingly banal video has been viewed 1.1 million times. He is also the author of over a dozen books, most of them on ADHD, including the 1992 bestseller Driven to Distraction, co-written with the psychiatrist John Ratey, which shifted the public conversation around attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Hallowell, who has ADHD himself, described the condition as a “good news diagnosis”. Children with ADHD, so often dismissed as “problem kids”, have a “special something”, he argued. He likes to say that people with ADHD have brains like a Ferrari engine equipped with only bicycle brakes; that Einstein, Mozart and Dalí most likely had it.
Content from our partners
