September 24, 2025The ADHD community has lost a caring, generous, and influential leader.Thomas E. Brown, Ph.D., died on August 18 at the age of 83.
He was instrumental in advancing the understanding of ADHD through a lens of executive functioning differences.“We will miss Tom Brown, but his contributions will endure,” says Stephen Faraone, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Norton College of Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University. “He was a pioneering psychologist whose vision reshaped how we understand ADHD as a disorder of executive function.
His compassion, clinical acumen, and scholarship improved the lives of countless adolescents and adults living with the condition.”Brown created the Brown Executive Function/Attention Scales, which clinicians widely use to assess, diagnose, and care for patients with ADHD.
His research reframed ADHD as a complex problem in the development and functioning of the brain’s self-management system, its executive functions, instead of simply a behavioral disorder.“Many individuals living with ADHD never had significant behavior problems; they have difficulty focusing their attention on necessary tasks and using working memory effectively,” he wrote in the ADDitude article “ADHD Is Not a Behavioral Disorder.” “Many of these people weren’t recognized as having ADD problems until they were adults.
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