By Chris Kornelis

In the early 1980s, Thomas Brown was working as a psychologist in Hamden, Conn., when he was asked if he would consider working with students at a tony preparatory school called Hamden Hall Country Day School. Each student was assigned an adviser, but there were a few who needed extra support. There was no money in the part-time job, but in exchange, Brown could send his two children to the school free.

As he settled into the position, Brown began to notice a pattern among some of the students sent his way. Particularly the boys. There was a cohort who had a hard time sitting still at their desks. If they were passionate about a topic, they could focus on it intensely. If they weren't, their minds drifted. They forgot to do assignments and fell behind in class, even though many of them were bright.

The boys were under pressure from parents to get great grades, and when they didn't perform, the children took it hard. Some showed signs of anxiety and depression.

Brown started to suspect they also suffered from something else, what had recently become known as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD. Treatment typically involved a prescription for a stimulant, such as Ritalin, but parents weren't thrilled. There was a stigma associated with ADHD -- such as that students who had it weren't very bright -- and they didn't like the idea of medicating their children. For those who did get treatment, it was often life-changing.

'Miraculous recoveries'

His experience with students at Hadley Hall inspired Brown, who died Aug. 18 at the age of 83, to focus his career on ADHD, just as it was beginning to gain public attention. Brown

became one of the nation's pioneering experts on the disorder, helping to shape its understanding, both in the public and medical communities. He saw patients at the school and in private practice, conducted research and wrote books. He also developed widely used tools both to diagnose the disorder and determine whether treatments were effective or not. And he helped remove the stigma from a disorder, which left untreated, threatened to derail the lives of countless people.

"I was there to witness really miraculous recoveries of kids that he had treated and prescribed the correct medicine for him, one of them being my own kid," said Bob Schroeder, the retired administrator who hired Brown at Hamden Hall. He added: "My kid was bright as heck, but when he got treated, he said, boy, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head."

Laurie Kulikosky, chief executive of the patient advocacy group Chadd (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder), said Brown was one of the "giants" in the field, instrumental in reducing stigma and combating myths and prejudices about ADHD, such as that it was a disorder that afflicted children, but not adults; boys, but not girls; and that a diagnosis was somehow an indication of a patient's intelligence. He also argued that ADHD wasn't simply an issue of a person's ability to pay attention, but of the executive function, the brain's ability to manage everything from starting and finishing tasks to managing emotions. Chadd recently renamed its young scientist award the Dr. Thomas E. Brown Pioneer Award.

"Now, it's easy to say visionaries are visionaries, but you have to go back in time and understand that visionaries have to get over a lot of hurdles," said Dr. David Goodman, a psychiatrist, ADHD specialist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "In the late '80s and the early '90s, you had people saying it didn't exist and you shouldn't be diagnosing this and you shouldn't be misleading patients, and, worst of all, you shouldn't be prescribing those terrible medications."

Young preacher

Thomas Edwards Brown was born to Dorothy and Wayne Brown in Minneapolis on June 25, 1942, and raised in Chicago. His father was a traveling salesman. In a typical week, he left in the family's only car on Monday and returned on Friday.

With his father often on the road, the pastor of their church became a mentor to Thomas and noticed his oratory skills. Thomas got behind the pulpit for the first time when he was 13. Later, as a scholarship student at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., he spent many Sundays preaching at area churches. Brown's sister, Nancy Gebhard, said he had a way of making scripture accessible, even to those who weren't intimately familiar with the Bible.

"He could dumb down the important things," she said, "so that we would leave the church service or leave the lecture taking something with us."

At Knox, Brown met the woman he would marry, Roberta "Bobbie" Hallquist. Their son, David Brown, said his mother described Thomas Brown during his Knox days as "the obnoxious guy sitting in the front of class, smoking a pipe and arguing with the professor."

Bobbie Brown died in 2014. In addition to his son and sister, Thomas Brown's survivors include his daughter, Liza Somilleda.

After graduating from Knox in 1964, Brown received a master of divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1968 and went to work in ministry. David Brown said that the parts of ministry his father liked best was counseling, seeing patients, so he went back to Yale and received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1976.

His skills making scripture accessible transferred well into his psychology career. His ability to explain ADHD in lectures, papers, continuing education courses for doctors, and in books like "Stuck But Smart" and "A New Understanding of ADHD in Children and Adults," helped unpack the disorder and the latest research to professionals, patients and parents. A 28-minute video primer on ADHD that he made for Understood.org has been viewed more than 11 million times.

"ADHD is not an all or nothing deal like pregnancy, with either you are pregnant or you're not pregnant and there's nothing in between," Brown explained in the video. "It's more like depression, where everybody gets bummed out once in a while, but just because somebody's unhappy for a couple of days doesn't mean we're going to diagnose them as clinically depressed.... All the characteristics of ADHD are problems everybody has sometimes. It's just, with people who have ADHD, they just have a lot more difficulty with it more of the time."

A love of people

Brown was an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine for many years. After his wife died, he moved to California to be closer to his children. He opened a private practice and taught at the University of South California and University of California, Riverside.

Brown kept working until shortly before his death. In recent years, he had been particularly

interested in the relationship between ADHD and autism and social anxiety, as well as the onset of ADHD symptoms in women after menopause. He also continued to see patients at his private practice. David Brown said that his father just loved to get to know people, whether it was a patient in his office or the chef at a sushi restaurant. When he showed up at his son's house for dinner, he'd spend the first 10 minutes relaying the life story of the person who had given him a ride over.

"It got to the point," Brown said, "where I realized that I was doing him a favor to ask him up to dinner so he could actually get in the car and have a conversation with the Uber driver."

Write to Chris Kornelis at chris.kornelis@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 09, 2025 14:50 ET (18:50 GMT)

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