Russell Barkley: Biography Of This Psychologist And Researcher
Russell Barkley is a controversial author, especially for being an expert on one of the most objectionable disorders in the history of psychopathology: ADHD.
Whatever the position one may have regarding the disorder and its intervention, both psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacological, the truth is that Russell Barkley has contributed significantly to research on ADHD.
In this article you will find a biography of russell barkley ; We 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.
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.
It has been cited by nearly 100,000 other authors specialized 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 behavior, such as consuming large amounts of alcohol and not wearing a seat belt, something he has always considered 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 US 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’s degree in arts from Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1972. He would also earn a degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He would then get PhD in clinical psychology at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. Between 1976 and 1977 he was an interim at the University of Oregon, at its Health Sciences Center in Portland.
In 1977 he would begin his professional career at the Medical College of Wisconsin and, later, at the Milwaukee Children’s Hospital, where he would found 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 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 between 2003 and 2016. Since then he has taught occasionally at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, 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 we were already commenting previously, this interest could be related to the fact that his twin brother had the typical symptoms of a person with this disorder, and Russell Barkley himself considered that it was a case of undiagnosed 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 where tries to reorganize his thinking around the disorder, focusing especially on how alterations in executive functions occur and how these impact the daily life of the person diagnosed with ADHD.
In this book he proposes the model of deficits in behavioral inhibition, a theoretical model that attempts to explain the characteristic symptoms of people with ADHD. This model is considered one that is included within the cognitive models, and in it the main problem in ADHD is proposed to be the difficulty in inhibiting or delaying the response, that is, not having the ability to avoid issuing a response that is too hasty.
Within the model, Barkley maintains that executive deficits in behavioral inhibition imply a deterioration in other executive functions, which depend on this inhibition in order to function in the most appropriate way. These executive functions would be:
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 the inability to avoid a too hasty response would be the main cause of problems at a 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 version focused on parents with teenage children, called Your Defiant Teen.
This program is behaviorist, and consists of 8 steps that try to improve the child’s behavior, their relationships with other children and adults, as well as facilitating 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. Bad parenting practices are the cause of bad child behavior.
Inside the program, What you do first is define a list of desired behaviors and that it is expected that, in the short, medium and long term, they will end up being achieved. Then, once the target behaviors have been specified, 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 those that have been carried out out of time. The reward system is done by applying a token system.
On November 16, 1998, Barkley made a statement that generated some controversy. He argued that Ritalin (methylphenidate), an ADHD drug that has the colloquial name ‘math pill’, should be classified as one of the leading treatments to help people diagnosed with the disorder, or those who need it. see your cognitive abilities increased.
A fact that has always been taken into account is that the diagnosis of ADHD is higher in the United States, which has raised doubts about whether this disorder is as solid and real as one might think. Barkley was asked about this, and he replied that how other countries diagnose the disorder should not be taken into account, that the United States should not care how other countries do it, or allow foreign health standards to have an impact on society. American.
More recently, in 2018, Barkley was hired as a consultant at the pharmaceutical company Takeda 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 led to much criticism and a possible conflict of interest in his research has been suggested.
