Allen Frances , professor emeritus , former chair , Bernard J Carroll , professor emeritus , former chair Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University, North Carolina, USA

Last words on ADHD from the father of the diagnosis

Shortly before his death on 5 July 2017, Keith Conners helped us write this obituary. He didn’t want to talk himself up, but rather provide one last word of warning on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—a condition that 50 years ago he helped identify and validate, but recently had done his best to restrain. Keith had collaborated with Leon Eisenberg in the early 1960s, when what we now call ADHD began to take shape, and probably knew more about what the disorder is, and is not, than anyone who has ever lived.