Russell Barkley is a controversial author, especially since he is an expert on one of the most criticizable disorders in the history of psychopathology: ADHD.

Whatever one’s position on the disorder and its intervention, both psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacological, the fact is that Russell Barkley has contributed significantly to research on ADHD.

In this article you will find a biography of Russell Barkley ; we will talk about the life of this clinical psychologist, author of many books and hundreds of scientific articles, as well as being a collaborator with many 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 in multiple university centers, in addition to being the author of 23 books and nearly 280 scientific articles.

It 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.

First 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 behavior, such as drinking large amounts of alcohol and not wearing a seat belt, which he has always considered to be symptoms of a possible case of ADHD .

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

Russell Barkley has earned several degrees throughout his life. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1972. He also earned a degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He would later obtain a doctorate in clinical psychology from Bowling Green State University , in Ohio. Between 1976 and 1977 he was an intern at the University of Oregon, at its Health Sciences Center in Portland.

Career

In 1977, he began his professional career at the Medical College of Wisconsin and later at the Children’s Hospital of Milwaukee, where he founded a neuropsychology service in 1978 and was its chief until 1985.

He then moved to Massachusetts to work at the City University Medical School, where he would work 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 carry out research on psychiatry.

He also taught at the Medical University of South Carolina from 2003 to 2016. Since then, he has taught on a regular basis at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, and in collaboration with the department of psychiatry.

Modeling deficits in behavioral inhibition

Barkley’s scientific work has focused, in particular, on the study of ADHD. As we have already mentioned, this interest could be related to the fact that his twin brother had the symptoms of a person with this disorder, and Russell Barkley himself considered it to be a case of undiagnosed ADHD.

In 1997 he published his book ADHD and the Nature of Self Control . In this book he tries to reorganize his thinking around the disorder, focusing especially on how the alterations in executive functions occur and how these affect the day-to-day life of the person diagnosed with ADHD.

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

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

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

It is for this reason and the model that Barkley proposes that the author considers that calling this disorder “attention disorder” is not entirely accurate . He considers that it would be more appropriate to name it ‘Behavioral Inhibition Disorder’, given that it would be the inability to avoid too hasty a response that would be mainly responsible for the problems at the cognitive and behavioral level.

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 focused version for parents with teenagers, 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 parental practices are a cause of child misconduct.

Within the program, what is done first is to define a list of desired behaviours and which are expected to be achieved in the short, medium and long term. Then, once the target behaviours have been defined, a system of rewards and punishments is developed, where it is especially important to ignore inappropriate behaviours (as long as they are not too disruptive) or behaviours that have been carried out out 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 said that Ritalin (methylphenidate), an ADHD drug that goes by the colloquial name of ‘the 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 taken into account is that the diagnosis of ADHD is higher in the United States, which has raised the question of whether this disorder is as solid and real as one might think. Barkley was asked about this, and he answered 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, since Russell Barkley has been hired as a consultant and reader at many pharmaceutical companies: Eli Lilly, McNeil, Janssen-Orth, Janssen-Cilag, Novartis, Shire and Theravance. These financial links with ‘Big Pharma’ have drawn much criticism and a possible conflict of interest in his research has been suggested.

Bibliographic references:

  • Barkley, R. (2015). Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment.4th ed.
  • Barkley, R. (1997). ADHD and the Nature of Self Control. New York: Guilford Press.
  • Barkley, R. (2013). Taking Charge of ADHD: The Complete, Authoritative Guide for Parents. New York: Guilford Press.
  • Barkley, R. (2010). Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Adults: The Latest Assessment and Treatment Strategies. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.
  • Barkley, R. (2010). Taking Charge of Adult ADHD. New York: Guilford Press.
  • Barkley, R. (2012) Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. New York: Guilford Press.