SUMMARY OF ADHD and TECHNOLOGY

Barkley (1997) tried to develop an ADHD Model, what he calls a unifying theory. He
focuses upon behavioral inhibition. Behavioral inhibition is an abstract concept that defies
comprehension at a glance. Barkleys study, like many scholarly studies, requires reading it
three or four times. Suffice to say that behavioral inhibition isnt exactly social inhibition
which is a shyness or a shying away from others because one is inhibited versus the
uninhibited and out-going (sociable) person. Behavioral inhibition is something else.
Behavioral inhibition, or inhibition as Barkley calls it, is an entirely confusing concept,
but it seems that ADHD children have slow inhibitory processes. In other words, certain
tasks require withholding of responses, delayed responding, cessation of ongoing responses,
and resisting distraction or disruption (Barkley, p. 68), or else we label it poor inhibition.
On the other hand, too much behavioral inhibition is called fear and anxiety, but for all
intents and purposes, here we are concerned with deficiencies in behavioral inhibition.
How to initiate inhibition? Traditionally, punishment is used to initiate inhibition.
Another theory on how to initiate is called delayed rewards. One must put off immediate
satisfaction, using self-regulation. Again this a concept that defies easy comprehension, but
as Barkley says, consequences are often too far in the future to see. He calls it self-imposed
deprivation when one does something without immediate satisfaction. He attributes
responses to prior socialization. I feel, either correctly or incorrectly, in laymans terms, if
we were then to diagnose ADHD children with this theory, it would simply be that they are
lazy.
Special Education children are not lazy, they are motivationally deficient.
We can perpetuate the psychiatricization of education, medicate children who are deemed
not normal to make them normal, and so forth, but it is a moot question of deficits in
behavioral inhibition, if the irrelevancy of a teacher droning on in front of a class continues
to bore students.

Reference
Barkley, R. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions:
Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychologivcal Bulletin, 121(1), 65-94.