Recognizing and understanding

Diagnosis: Creative and pathologically absent-minded

Are you full of energy on some days and unable to make decisions on others? Then you may have ADHD. Attention deficit disorder. What is it about this fashionable disorder?

All due respect! Ms. D. walks to work every day. That's more than ten kilometers there and back from her apartment in Ottakring to the office near the Votive Church in Vienna's city center. No matter whether it's snowing, raining, cold or hot. If it were up to her, it could be even more. "My patient needs all that walking to compensate," says her psychiatrist Thomas Vanicek, Head of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapeutic Medicine at the Floridsdorf Clinic. 

The patient has suffered from ADHD, an attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, since childhood. Around three to five percent of all children and adolescents have this disorder, across all countries and cultures. For many, it disappears, but up to three percent have to cope with it for the rest of their lives. However, ADHD looks different in adults than in young people.