ADHD: The Implication of Inhibition Response Therapy & Sleep Deprivation

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, continues to be a leading focus of interest among those involved in childhood disorders research. For parents and ADHD children, the complications of ADHD continue to be a daily challenge to manage. Even with the best of medications, many children continue to experience complications of ADHD and must be engaged in other types of treatment to obtain optimal therapeutic results.

One key symptoms of ADHD involves the development of impulsivity. Often, without the control and management of impulsivity, children with ADHD will find a greater tendency toward the use of drugs, alcohol, and may even engage in criminal activity. As a result, parents of ADHD children are often looking for ways in which to provide therapy and education in controlling impulsivity in their child.

A process known as response inhibition is crucial to managing impulsivity of ADHD. With the practice of response inhibition, a child with ADHD and impulsivity complications can learn to manage their attention to incoming stimuli and, in addition, prevent their impulsive or automatic response to those same stimuli. Without proper training, a child with lack of response inhibition will continue to expand their impulsive nature.

In some therapeutic settings, a child with ADHD, and poor response inhibition, may undergo a new, and controversial process, involving sleep deprivation. Since lack of sleep is closely associated with the risk for slowed automatic responses, it is believed that by using sleep deprivation, we can slow the impulsivity of a child with ADHD during response inhibition training. However, in some children, the use of total sleep deprivation may actually have an adverse reaction. Rather than slowing the automatic response, the lack of sleep may simply result in the child's inability to with hold a response when they intended to do so. That is to say, with sleep deprivation, if your child is planning to with hold an automatic response to stimuli, the withholding ability may be impaired with no sleep.