Question: Hello Dr. Barkley,
  
  Thank you very much for answering the questions and all the research you have done on the subject of people with adhd and treatment methods. 
  
  Mostly something I've wondered, I don't have a lot of questions on adhd itself right now, they slip my mind easily, but a bit more of a personal one.
  
  What is the reason you have researched adhd as much as you have? what interests you about it?
Answer: Thank you!  I got into this field in 1972 when I attended UNC and was majoring in psychology and minoring in biology.  I wanted to go to graduate school but need to have done extra things besides getting good grades.  So I wandered their medical school offering to volunteer 15+ hours per week to anyone who needed a research assistant.  By chance, a faculty member had just gotten a grant to study hyperactive (ADHD) children and the role of behavior modification and medication in treating them.  I became his assistant, then his honors student, and went on to graduate school where I did all my research on ADHD and  have never stopped since.  The condition fascinated me as I wanted to understand why these children had such poor behavioral (self) control.  As I got older, I also realized that understanding ADHD could teach us a great deal about how people generally develop self regulation, what it is, how the executive functions develop so as to allow self control.  And I wrote two books just on my theory of all that (ADHD and the Nature of Self Control, 1997, and The Executive Functions, in 2012).  Studying ADHD is like holding a mirror up to ourselves - we can all learn a lot from it about self regulation and how to improve it.  As some of you know, ADHD was also in my family and so studying it helped me personally to understand and even deal with and try eo help some family members my fraternal twin brother in particular.  Regrettably, his life of impulsivity, risk taking, risky driving, and use of alcohol resulted in his death in a car accident when he was 56.  And a year later his son with ADHD committed suicide impulsively after an argument with a girlfriend.  So understanding ADHD is also personal for me.
content: Q: Hello Dr. Barkley,
  
  Thank you very much for answering the questions and all the research you have done on the subject of people with adhd and treatment methods. 
  
  Mostly something I've wondered, I don't have a lot of questions on adhd itself right now, they slip my mind easily, but a bit more of a personal one.
  
  What is the reason you have researched adhd as much as you have? what interests you about it?
   Ans: Thank you!  I got into this field in 1972 when I attended UNC and was majoring in psychology and minoring in biology.  I wanted to go to graduate school but need to have done extra things besides getting good grades.  So I wandered their medical school offering to volunteer 15+ hours per week to anyone who needed a research assistant.  By chance, a faculty member had just gotten a grant to study hyperactive (ADHD) children and the role of behavior modification and medication in treating them.  I became his assistant, then his honors student, and went on to graduate school where I did all my research on ADHD and  have never stopped since.  The condition fascinated me as I wanted to understand why these children had such poor behavioral (self) control.  As I got older, I also realized that understanding ADHD could teach us a great deal about how people generally develop self regulation, what it is, how the executive functions develop so as to allow self control.  And I wrote two books just on my theory of all that (ADHD and the Nature of Self Control, 1997, and The Executive Functions, in 2012).  Studying ADHD is like holding a mirror up to ourselves - we can all learn a lot from it about self regulation and how to improve it.  As some of you know, ADHD was also in my family and so studying it helped me personally to understand and even deal with and try eo help some family members my fraternal twin brother in particular.  Regrettably, his life of impulsivity, risk taking, risky driving, and use of alcohol resulted in his death in a car accident when he was 56.  And a year later his son with ADHD committed suicide impulsively after an argument with a girlfriend.  So understanding ADHD is also personal for me.