Adult ADD and Work Productivity
Research finds that adults with ADD / ADHD miss, on average, 22 days a year in workplace productivity due to chronic problems with concentration, distraction, organization, forgetfulness and impulsiveness as compared to adult workers who do not have ADHD.
According to survey data from the World Health Organization (WHO), between 3% to 4% of adults worldwide have ADHD, though many adult workers may not know they have it.
Study co-author Ron Kessler, a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the director of the WHO's World Mental Health Survey Consortium, which is also based at Harvard, notes that while surveying mental disorders around the world and interviewing close to 200,000 people in almost 30 countries, the study team is discovering that a large number of adult workers -- more than 3% on average -- have untreated adult ADHD.
"From a societal point of view, it's a pretty big deal, because ADHD affects work performance even more than depression does,” Kessler adds. "It's more persistent and severe than many mental disorders, and it results in more sick days, more accidents, and more problems interacting with colleagues. So given that employers are increasingly thinking about health care costs in terms of investment opportunities, we think it's useful to point out that it's probably a very smart and profitable business move for employers to screen their workers for ADHD and get them into treatment."
"The fact is that adult ADHD hasn't been on people's radar screens," said Kessler. "The feeling was that somehow magically when kids with ADHD grow up they grow out of it. But this survey shows that this is not the case."
Main Findings From the WHO Survey:
- A high proportion of childhood ADHD persists into adulthood.
- An average of 3.5% of workers in nationally representative surveys carried out in 10 countries met criteria for current DSM-IV adult ADHD.
- Workers with ADHD have on average 8.4 more sick days per year and an even higher number of work days associated with reduced work quantity (21.7 days) and quality (13.6 days) per year as compared to similar respondents without ADHD.
- A small numbers of these workers are treated for ADHD despite evidence that such treatment can be effective in improving functioning.
The good news is that these findings may help identify and initiate treatment in those adults with undiagnosed ADHD. Leading ADHD expert, Ned Hallowell, MD, psychiatrist, founder of the Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health and co-author of the best seller, Driven to Distraction, describes ADHD as a condition similar to nearsightedness. It is a condition that treatment can have a tremendously positive impact upon and those individuals with untreated ADHD do much better once the underlying reasons for lost productivity are identified and treatment is initiated and continued.
Sources:
Alan Mozes. Adults With ADHD Lose 3 Weeks Worth of Work Annually. US News & World Report. Health Day. 27 May 2008.
R. de Graaf, R. C. Kessler, J. Fayyad, M. ten Have, J. Alonso, M. Angermeyer, G. Borges, K. Demyttenaere, I. Gasquet, G. de Girolamo, J. M. Haro, R. Jin, E. G. Karam, J. Ormel, J. Posada-Villa. The Prevalence and Effects of Adult Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) on the Performance of Workers: Results from the WHO World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 20 March 2008.
