Different Brains

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Commonly known as: ADHD

ADHD is one of the most common and most misunderstood neurodevelopmental conditions. The name suggests a simple attention problem — but ADHD is far more complex than that. It is a difference in how the brain regulates attention, impulse control, and activity level. And it doesn't look the same in everyone.

Some people with ADHD are visibly hyperactive — fidgeting, interrupting, unable to sit still. Others are quietly inattentive — daydreaming, losing track of conversations, starting tasks and never finishing them. Many adults with ADHD, particularly women, were never diagnosed as children because their presentation was internal rather than disruptive. They were called spacey, scattered, or underachieving — when in fact their brain was working differently.

ADHD also involves something called emotional dysregulation — intense emotional responses, low frustration tolerance, and difficulty recovering from disappointment. This aspect is often overlooked but can be one of the most impairing parts of the condition. ADHD is highly treatable through a combination of medication, behavioral strategies, and therapy that addresses self-esteem and executive functioning.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Commonly known as: autism or ASD

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by differences in social communication and interaction, alongside restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. The word "spectrum" is important — autism looks vastly different from one person to the next. Some autistic people are nonspeaking and require significant support. Others are highly verbal, hold demanding careers, and may go undiagnosed for decades.

Autistic people often experience the world with heightened intensity. Sensory input that others barely notice — the hum of a fluorescent light, the texture of a fabric, a crowded noisy room — can be genuinely overwhelming. Social interactions that neurotypical people navigate intuitively often require conscious effort and active decoding, which can be exhausting over time.

Autism is not a disorder to be cured — it is a different neurological profile with its own strengths and challenges. The goal of support is not to make autistic people appear neurotypical, but to help them understand themselves, navigate a world that wasn't designed for them, and build lives that are genuinely their own.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Intellectual Developmental Disorder

Previously called: intellectual disability

Intellectual Developmental Disorder involves significant limitations in both intellectual functioning — reasoning, problem-solving, learning — and adaptive behavior, which includes the practical, social, and conceptual skills used in everyday life. It originates during the developmental period, before age 18.

The severity ranges widely. Many people with mild intellectual developmental disorder live independently, hold jobs, and have full social lives. Others with more significant support needs thrive with the right services and environments. What people with IDD have in common is not what they can't do — it's that they need support tailored to their specific strengths and challenges.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Language Disorder

Difficulties with understanding or using language

Language Disorder involves persistent difficulties with the acquisition and use of language — including vocabulary, sentence structure, and the ability to use language to communicate effectively. It is not about accent, dialect, or bilingualism. It is a fundamental difficulty with language itself, in both understanding and expression.

Children with language disorder may struggle to find the right words, express complete thoughts, or understand what is being said to them — even when their hearing is perfectly intact. Because language is the medium through which almost all learning happens, a language disorder can have ripple effects across academics, social development, and self-esteem.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Specific Learning Disorder

Includes: dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia

A Specific Learning Disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects the ability to learn or use specific academic skills — most commonly reading, writing, or mathematics — despite adequate intelligence, instruction, and opportunity. These are not problems of motivation or effort. They reflect genuine differences in how the brain processes certain types of information.

Dyslexia — difficulty with reading — is the most well-known. People with dyslexia may struggle with decoding words, reading fluently, or spelling accurately. Dyscalculia affects the ability to understand numbers and math concepts. Dysgraphia involves difficulty with written expression. Many people with learning disorders are extremely intelligent — and have spent years feeling unintelligent because no one identified what was actually going on.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Developmental Coordination Disorder

Sometimes called: dyspraxia

Developmental Coordination Disorder involves significant difficulty with motor coordination — the ability to plan and execute physical movements — that interferes with daily activities and academic achievement. Children with DCD are often described as clumsy, but this misses the real picture. The difficulty is neurological, not motivational.

Tasks that other children master with ease — tying shoes, riding a bike, catching a ball, handwriting — may require enormous effort and practice for a child with DCD, and may never feel fully automatic. The impact extends beyond physical tasks. Many children with DCD avoid sports and physical activities, affecting their social development and self-confidence in significant ways.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Tic Disorders & Tourette Syndrome

Involuntary movements and vocalizations

Tics are sudden, repetitive, nonrhythmic movements or vocalizations that occur involuntarily — or semi-voluntarily, in the sense that they can sometimes be suppressed briefly, but only at the cost of increasing tension that eventually must be released. Common motor tics include eye blinking, head jerking, and shoulder shrugging. Vocal tics include throat clearing, sniffing, and in a minority of cases, words or phrases.

Tourette Syndrome — the most well-known tic disorder — requires the presence of both motor and vocal tics for more than a year. The popular image of Tourette's as involving involuntary shouting of obscenities is a significant exaggeration — this symptom, called coprolalia, affects only a small minority of people with Tourette's. Most people with tic disorders have a very different experience.

Tic disorders frequently co-occur with ADHD and OCD. Tics often diminish significantly in adulthood. When treatment is needed, behavioral therapy and in some cases medication can be very effective.

Clinical Expertise

Why Dr. Fitzgerald González's expertise matters

51,000 hours of clinical and research experience across neurodevelopmental presentations

Dr. Fitzgerald González has assessed neurodevelopmental conditions across the full range of clinical complexity — including presentations that went undiagnosed for decades, adults presenting with ADHD or autism for the first time, and complex cases where neurodevelopmental conditions co-occur with anxiety, depression, personality pathology, or trauma histories. Accurate diagnosis in these cases requires distinguishing what is neurodevelopmental from what is psychiatric — and recognizing when both are present simultaneously.

Neurodevelopmental conditions are among the most commonly misdiagnosed presentations in adult psychiatry. ADHD is frequently mistaken for anxiety or depression. Autism in adults — particularly in women — is regularly missed entirely. The consequences of misdiagnosis extend across decades of a person's life: years of treatment that never quite fit, and a persistent sense of being fundamentally different without any explanation for why.

Accurate identification of a neurodevelopmental condition changes the clinical picture entirely — and often provides the first coherent explanation a person has ever received for how their brain works.

Clinical Relevance

Why it matters for you

The right diagnosis changes everything that follows

If you have spent years being told you are lazy, disorganized, difficult, or simply not trying hard enough — and none of those explanations have ever felt accurate — a neurodevelopmental evaluation may provide what decades of effort could not: an accurate account of how your brain actually works.

Understanding a neurodevelopmental profile does not excuse behavior or remove responsibility. It provides a framework — a clinical map of how attention, processing, social cognition, and learning are organized in a particular brain — that makes it possible to build support, accommodation, and treatment around what is actually there.

An accurate diagnosis and evidence-based treatment changes everything.