The DESR Dossier: Why Your Brain Lacks a Brake Pedal.
It’s not "anger issues." It is a failure of Top-Down inhibition.
Did you know that Emotional Impulsiveness was originally part of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD?
If you look back at the DSM-II (1968), it was right there in black and white. But when the DSM-III was published in 1980, it was unceremoniously deleted.
It wasn’t removed because the symptoms didn’t exist. It wasn’t removed because the patients stopped struggling with it. It was removed for a bureaucratic reason: It was deemed “too hard to measure.”
Counting how many times a child leaves their seat in a classroom is quantifiable data. Measuring the subjective, white-hot intensity of a sudden mood shift? That is messy. That is “noisy” data. So, the psychiatric establishment effectively decided to ignore the noise.
For forty years, we have been told that emotional volatility is a “comorbidity”—something else, something extra, perhaps a personality flaw or a mood disorder attached to the side of our ADHD.
The data says otherwise.
Today, we are opening the file on DESR (Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation). We are going to look at the hardware failure that causes you to go from “fine” to “nuclear” in less than three seconds.
The “Why” is in the wiring. Below, we break down the specific Fronto-Limbic circuit failure that creates this volatility, supported by Russell Barkley’s clinical data. Stop blaming your personality. Start understanding your hardware. Unlock the full science for $5/month.
