Russell Barkley


Russell A. Barkley is a clinical psychologist who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the VCU Medical Center and an author of books on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Involved in research since 1973 and a licensed psychologist since 1977, he is an expert on ADHD and has devoted much of his scientific career to studying ADHD and related problems like childhood defiance. He proposed to change the name of sluggish cognitive tempo to concentration deficit disorder.
Author of 23 books and more than 280 scientific papers and book chapters, his research articles include multiple papers from his longitudinal study in Milwaukee, WI, his development of a theory of ADHD as a disorder of executive functioning and self-regulation, his early research on family interaction patterns in ADHD children, his more recent studies on the nature of ADHD in adults, early intervention for children at risk for ADHD, training parents to manage ADHD and defiant behavior, and the nature of sluggish cognitive tempo. His research has been cited by more than 91,000 other authors and he has a H-index of 133 on Google Scholar. Barkley also edits The ADHD Report, a newsletter for clinicians and parents. Besides his clinical work, he is also an expert in the neuropsychology of executive function and self-regulation. He has given more than 800 invited lectures in more than 30 countries during his career, and is board certified in three clinical specialties: clinical neuropsychology, clinical psychology, and clinical child and adolescent psychology.

Early life and education

Barkley was born in Newburgh, New York. rqHe was one of five children, born to Donald Stuart Barkley and Mildred Minerva. Barkley had a twin brother, Ronald Foster Barkley, who was killed in a car crash on 24 July 2006. Barkley attributes his brother's history of dangerous and reckless behavior, including not wearing a seat belt and speeding at the time of his crash, to untreated ADHD. Ronald was several times over the legal alcohol limit, speeding and not wearing a seat belt at the time of his fatal crash.
Barkley married his wife Patricia on 15 March 1969. He graduated from school in Maryland and did a tour of duty in the US air force including a year in Vietnam. He divorced in November 2019.
Barkley earned an Associate of Arts from Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina in June 1972, and a BA in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned an MA and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. From July 1976 to 1977, Barkley was an intern at the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center in Portland, Oregon.

Career

In 1977, Dr. Barkley began his professional career at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Milwaukee Children's Hospital, where in 1978, he founded the Neuropsychology Service and served as its chief until 1985. He then moved to the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he served as Director of Psychology from 1985 to 2000. Barkley was professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. In 2005, he joined the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, where he was a consultant and research professor of psychiatry. He taught at the Medical University of South Carolina from 2003–2016 and then moved to Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, VA, where he currently occasionally teaches in the Department of Psychiatry.
Besides his books, he has published 6 clinical rating scales related to ADHD, executive functioning, and impairment. One of Barkley's rating scales for adult ADHD evaluates sluggish cognitive tempo. In April 2014 he declined an interview with the New York Times to discuss the disorder.https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/health/idea-of-new-attention-disorder-spurs-research-and-debate.html
In response to critics who point to countries with lower rates of diagnoses and medication of children for ADHD, Barkley said, "So what? We do not let the rest of the world set our standards of care when we do more research on childhood disorders--specifically ADHD--than other countries combined?".Barkley was also responsible in getting Gretchen LeFever Watson fired from her job in Virginia after she was reporting high rates of ADHD diagnosis and treatment.Barkley is a leader in the burgeoning sluggish cognitive tempo research field. Barkley writes "The fact that SCT is not recognized as yet in any official taxonomy of psychiatric disorders will not alter this circumstance given the growing presence of information on SCT at various widely visited internet sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia, among others."
Barkley is a political libertarian.https://www.guilford.com/featured-author/may-2020-barkley. He believes in "Limited government, individual rights, freedom of speech and association, and the nonaggression principle, and private property rights".

Consultant

He has been a paid consultant, for pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly, McNeil, Janssen-Orth, Janssen-Cilag, Novartis, Shire, Takeda pharmaceuticals, and Theravance.
Between 2009 and 2012 Barkley took over 129k dollars from Eli Lilly.http://addspeaker.net/dr-barkley-is-not-big-pharmas-puppet/
Alan Schwarz, formerly of the New York Times, in 2016 described Barkley as a “a one-man ADHD public-relations powerhouse” and a “pharma-sponsored scientist”.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/10/adhd-nation-alan-schwarz-review-attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder
Barkley claims "Once convinced of an ADHD diagnosis there is no compelling reason whatsoever to avoid Ritalin".Now Tell Me I Was Wrong: 15 Years of Unheralded Wisdom and Warnings in the Battle for the Republic - Tom DeWeese. and "All of the research we have indicates that these drugs are some of the safest that we employ in the field of psychiatry and psychology. That's not to say that we know everything about them. But we know a lot more than we know about cough medicines and Tylenol and aspirins and other things that children swill whenever they come down with a common cold. Nobody asks those questions about those over-the-counter medications, yet we know substantially less about them".https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/medicating/interviews/barkley.html
Barkley also claims regarding Ritalin and Adderall "They are not addictive whatsoever when they are taken orally. All of the evidence points to these being non-addictive drugs when taken as prescribed".https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/medicating/interviews/barkley.html

Books