Arthur Robin, PhD, and Gina Pera
Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy™ presenters Gina Pera and Arthur L. Robin, PhD, bring decades of expertise to ADHD Success Training.
The co-editors of the clinical guide Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy (2016) met more than a decade ago. They began regularly co-presenting at conferences on the topic of ADHD and relationships. When a major publisher of clinical guides asked them to produce the first professional guide for ADHD couples counseling, they embarked on a four-year journey of collaboration—and many drafts!
Please see individual biographies below.
Arthur L. Robin, PhD
Arthur L. Robin, PhD, is the director of Psychology Training at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University, and a licensed psychologist in private practice in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
He obtained his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1975, was on the faculty of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, from 1975 to 1979, and has been at Children’s Hospital of Michigan and Wayne State University in Detroit since 1979.
In addition to functioning as a pediatric psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Dr. Robin has devoted his 37-year career as a clinician, educator, and researcher to children, adolescents, and adults with ADHD and related problems.
Along with many articles, chapters, and grants, he has authored ADHD in Adolescents: Diagnosis and Treatment (Guilford Press, 1998) and has co-authored three books:
- Negotiating Parent-Adolescent Conflict: A Behavioral Family Systems Approach (Guilford Press, 1998)
- Defiant Teens: A Clinician’s Manual for Assessment and Family Intervention (Guilford Press, 2014)
- Your Defiant Teen (Guilford Press, 2014).
The last two books were co-authored with Russell Barkley, PhD, a preeminent expert on ADHD. Dr. Robin is also the primary author of the published assessment instrument, the Parent-AdolescentRelationship Questionnaire (PARQ).
Over the past three decades, as the children and adolescents with whom he worked grew up and married, Dr. Robin came to see the adverse impact of ADHD on their adult relationships. Trained in Cognitive Behavior
To visit Dr. Robin’s Amazon.com page, click the image
Therapy and family systems therapy, it was natural for Dr. Robin to innovate in combining these techniques to help these couples. Thus, for the past decade, Dr. Robin has been treating couples where one or both individuals have ADHD. In 1989, Dr. Robin was himself diagnosed with ADHD and has had personal experience in his own marriage coping with ADHD. He finds that this personal experience nicely complements his professional experience with ADHD.
As the director of a psychology internship accredited by the American Psychological Association, Dr. Robin has pioneered innovative clinical-training techniques, particularly in the area of competency-based education. He has applied these techniques in training clinicians to work with adults and couples affected by ADHD, making numerous presentations at conferences on ADHD and relationships. He brought to the task of editing this book his extensive experience in teaching clinicians how to implement evidence-based family intervention techniques.
Dr. Robin is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and the Journal of Attention Disorders. He has also served as a guest reviewer for many other journals. In 2002, he was inducted into the CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) Hall of Fame for his lifetime contributions to the field of ADHD. In 2007 he became a Fellow of the Society of Clinical Psychology (Division 12) of the American Psychological Association.
To learn more about his private practice, visit this website.
Gina Pera
Gina Pera is an author, workshop leader, private Adult ADHD consultant, and international speaker on Adult ADHD, especially as it affects relationships.
In 1999, however, she was a veteran award-winning print journalist. Her career path changed her 37-year-old husband was diagnosed with ADHD. The couple learned of the possibility not from their repeated attempts at couples counseling. Instead, she randomly picked up a new neurobiology title at the library. As luck would have it, it touched upon Adult ADHD.
This discovery—and the positive difference it made in her husband’s life, her life, and their marriage—launched her desire to educate the public on this poorly recognized condition.
She began by organizing guest lectures and launching support groups for both adults with ADHD and their partners in the San Francisco Bay Area, all free and open to the public. In 2004-2005, she conducted an extensive survey of the partners of adults with ADHD.
These activities, combined with in-depth interviews of preeminent experts and investigation into the literature, informed her first book: Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.?: Stopping the Roller Coaster When Someone You Love Has Attention Deficit Disorder (1201 Alarm Press, 2008). It is as popular today as it was then. Translated now into Turkish and Spanish, the book garnered four national awards, including ForeWord Magazine’s Psychology Book of the Year.
Dr. Russell Barkley invited Pera to contribute the first-ever chapter on couple therapy to his leading ADHD clinical guide: Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment (Fourth Edition), edited by Russell Barkley (Guilford Press, 2014).
Click the image to visit Gina Pera’s Amazon.com page
Pera has participated in several documentaries about ADHD as well as numerous news programs and articles. She serves as resident ADHD expert at WebMD and writes the award-winning blog ADHD Roller Coaster
By invitation, she has presented to public and professional groups worldwide. She served as a plenary speaker for the 2013 International Congress on Psychopharmacology in Antalya, Turkey, and the 13th Annual CADDRA ADHD Conference
In the past six years, she and Dr. Robin have co-presented at national conferences to clinicians on relationships and ADHD. As a volunteer, Pera has served as coordinator of CHADD Silicon Valley for more than a decade. She was named CHADD 2007 National Volunteer of the Year.
In her previous career as a print journalist, her work for USA Weekend Magazine won both the prestigious Best Magazine Edition Award from The Association for Women in Communications and a Unity Award in Media, recognizing accurate exposure of issues affecting minorities and disabled persons. She holds a BS in Mass Communications (magna cum laude) from the University of Tennessee. You can read more about her professional background here.