Russell Barkley: biography of this psychologist and researcher.

A review of the life of Russell Barkley, psychologist and adhd researcher.

Russell Barkley is a controversial author, especially for being an expert on one of the most criticized disorders in the history of psychopathology: ADHD.

Whatever position one may have regarding the disorder and its intervention, both psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacological, the fact is that Russell Barkley has made a significant contribution to ADHD research.

In this article you will find a biography of Russell BarkleyWe are going to talk about the life of this clinical psychologist, author of multiple books and hundreds of scientific articles, in addition to being a collaborator with multiple universities and pharmaceutical companies.

Biography of Russell Barkley

Russell Barkley is a clinical psychologist who has had a prolific professional life.working as a researcher and professor at multiple university centers, in addition to being the author of 23 books and nearly 280 scientific articles.

He has been cited by nearly 100,000 other authors specializing in the field of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and scholars of clinical child psychopathology.

Early years and training

Russell A. Barkley was born on December 27, 1949 in Orange County, New York.. He was the son of a family of five children, and had a twin brother, Ronald Foster Barkley, who died in 2006 in a car accident.

Russell Barkley attributes his brother's death to reckless behaviors, such as drinking large amounts of alcohol and not wearing seat belts, which he has always considered to be symptoms of a possible case of ADHD.

He graduated from school in Maryland and stayed for a year in Vietnam during the war, working in the U.S. Air Force. He married his wife Patricia on March 15, 1969, whom he would divorce in November 2019.

Russell Barkley has earned several degrees throughout his life. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1972. He would also earn a psychology degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He would go on to earn D. in clinical psychology from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.University in Ohio. From 1976 to 1977 he was an intern at the University of Oregon, at its Health Sciences Center in Portland.

Professional career

In 1977, he began his professional career at the Medical College of Wisconsin and then at Milwaukee Children's Hospital, where he founded a neuropsychology service in 1978, serving as chief until 1985.

He then moved to Massachusetts to work at the city's university medical school, where he would serve as director of psychology from 1985 to 2000. There he would work as a professor of psychiatry and neurology. In 2005 he would join the State University of New York, where he would conduct research in psychiatry and neurology.where he would conduct research in psychiatry.

He also taught at the Medical University of South Carolina between 2003 and 2016. Since then he has been teaching on an ad hoc basis at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, and collaborating with the department of psychiatry.

Model of deficits in behavioral inhibition.

Barkley's scientific work has focused, in particular, on the study of ADHD. As mentioned earlier, this interest may have been related to the fact that his twin brother had the symptoms of ADHD, and Russell Barkley himself considered it to be an undiagnosed case of ADHD.

In 1997 he published his book ADHD and the Nature of Self Control (ADHD and the Nature of Self Control). It is in this book that he he tries to reorganize his thinking about the disorder, focusing especially on how the alterations in executive functions occur and how they impact on the day-to-day life of the person diagnosed with ADHD.

In this book he proposes the model of deficits in behavioral inhibition, a theoretical model in which he tries to explain the characteristic symptoms of people with ADHD. This model is considered one of the cognitive models, and it proposes that the main problem in ADHD is the difficulty in inhibiting or delaying the response, i.e., not having the ability to avoid issuing a response that is too hasty.

Within the model, Barkley argues that executive deficits in behavioral inhibition imply an impairment in other executive functions, which depend on this inhibition to be able to function in the most appropriate way. These executive functions would be:

• Nonverbal working memory.
• Verbal working memory (internalization of speech).
• Self-regulation of emotions, motivation and activation.
• Reconstitution (analysis and synthesis of behavior).

It is for this reason and the model proposed by Barkley that the author considers that naming this disorder as an "attention disorder" is not entirely accurate.. He considers that it would be more appropriate to name it 'Behavioral Inhibition Disorder', since it would be the inability to avoid a too hasty response that would be the main responsible for the cognitive and behavioral problems.

Defiant Children Program

Another of Barkley's great contributions to the field of child psychology is the Defiant Children program, a program that aims to train parents to reduce their children's disobedience.. There is also a version focused on parents with teenage children, called Your Defiant Teen.

This program is behavioral, and consists of 8 steps that try to improve the child's behavior, their relationships with other children and adults, as well as facilitate their adaptation at home and school. The program has been developed under the idea that a child's misbehavior is due more to factors related to the parents' educational style than to their child's personality problems. Poor parenting practices are the cause of child misbehavior.

Within the program, what is done first is to define a list of desired behaviors that, in the short run, are expected that, in the short, medium and long term, are expected to be achieved. Then, once the target behaviors have been defined, a system of rewards and punishments is developed, where it is especially important to ignore inappropriate behaviors (as long as they are not too disruptive) or behaviors that have been performed out of time. The reward system is done through the application of a token system.

Controversy

On November 16, 1998, Barkley made a statement that generated some controversy. He claimed that Ritalin (methylphenidate), a drug for ADHD and which has the colloquial name of 'math pill' should be classified as one of the leading treatments to help people diagnosed with the disorder, or those who need to see their cognitive abilities increased.

One fact that has always been a consideration is that the diagnosis of ADHD is higher in the United States, which has raised questions about whether the disorder is as robust and real as one might think. Barkley was asked about this, and he replied that it should not be taken into account how other countries diagnose the disorder, that the United States should not care how other countries do it or allow foreign health standards to impact American society.

More recently, in 2018, Barkley was hired as a consultant at Takeda Pharmaceuticals to contribute to a digital training program for people with ADHD.. This is not new, as Russell Barkley has been hired as a consultant and reader at many pharma companies: Eli Lilly, McNeil, Janssen-Orth, Janssen-Cilag, Novartis, Shire and Theravance. These financial ties to 'Big Pharma' has brought him much criticism and there have been suggestions of a possible conflict of interest in his research.