Focus, starting, and ADHD

If you are being assessed for attention, say something about your mood and your worry as well, even if nobody asks.

Anxiety and low mood sit alongside ADHD often enough that a thorough assessment will go looking for them anyway. But shame is quiet, and years of…

When someone says they feel restless inside, ask what the restlessness wants. Restless to move, or restless to do one particular thing until it feels right?

The two feel similar from the inside and point in different directions. With ADHD it is usually undirected: the legs go, the chair is wrong, you need…

A distracted person can be brought back with a nudge. Someone who has gone elsewhere cannot, and the difference shows itself in a couple of seconds.

Say their name, ask something simple, and watch what returns. Attention that has drifted comes back with a small apology and picks the thread up…

Try not to ask why. If the person knew why, they would probably have sorted it out already, and the question tends to land like an accusation.

Ask what happened just before instead. What was going on, what they felt, what came after, what sort of day it had been. Those answers can be worked…

If someone was adopted, or simply does not know their family history, say early and plainly that this is not a problem. It helps to have and it is not needed.

Otherwise the question lands as one more reminder of what is missing, and some people will spend the rest of the appointment feeling they brought the…

Some of what looks like muddle is the system's fault. Our tenth month is named for eight, because two months were added later and nobody renamed the rest.

Worth saying to anyone who feels stupid about dates and forms. A calendar whose numbers are out of step, a tax year starting in April, forms asking…

When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.

Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…

While you are taking the family history, ask about seizure disorders and psychosis too, not only about attention. A family carrying other neurological or psychiatric conditions is worth knowing about whatever you end up concluding.

Keep the list short and ask it plainly: epilepsy, psychosis, learning difficulties, head injuries, anything neurological. Some of it will matter for…

Some people simply cannot get a family history. Refugee journeys, destroyed records, closed adoptions, families that did not survive. That is a gap in the paperwork and not evidence against the diagnosis.

Say so out loud, and write it in the notes as a gap rather than as a negative finding, so the next person reading does not mistake silence for an…

One man put his lamps on a timer so the room would go dark at eleven and send him to bed. It worked for a few nights. Then he simply carried on in the dark. A cue can tell you the time. It cannot make you stand up.

Worth remembering before you build anything clever. If the pull of whatever a person is already doing is stronger than the nudge you have designed,…

'I set a reminder and still did not do it' is not a story about a bad reminder. It tells you the missing piece was never information, and a bigger, louder version of the same thing will fail in the same way.

The reflex is to escalate: three alarms, a different app, an entire new system built on Sunday night. What is needed is a change of kind, something…

An ADHD diagnosis usually arrives with two extra words attached: which presentation it is, and how severe. Both are descriptions of what gets in your way, not a grade you were awarded.

Inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive, or the two together, and then mild, moderate or severe. Mild means you met the threshold and the effect on…

The age by which symptoms have to have shown up is a number people agreed on, not a line in nature. It moved from seven to twelve when the manual was revised.

That matters if you are an adult wondering whether you would even qualify. The old cut-off was itself a compromise between studies pointing in…

Teenage memories of this often come with a sting: the year you worked out how much longer everything took you than it seemed to take everybody else.

That is usually why adolescence is the period people can describe in detail. The work got harder, the scaffolding of primary school fell away, and…

Hyperactivity and impulsiveness almost never turn up alone. When restlessness appears with no attention difficulty beside it, that is a reason to ask what else might be going on.

In practice the two run together, and over the years the visible restlessness tends to settle while the attention side stays. So a picture that is…

You do not need clinical language at an assessment. Some of the wording in the manual came straight from how families described it in the first place.

Phrases about being permanently on the go are in there because people kept saying them. So use yours: that your head is like a browser with forty…

The diagnostic manual is a document people sat in rooms and argued over. That is no reason to dismiss it, and it is a good reason not to treat it as the last word on you.

Committees weigh how reliably clinicians can agree on a criterion, what the field trials show, what a particular wording will do out in the world.…

There is a difference between low mood you have carried all your life and low mood that grew out of years of working twice as hard for half the result. Both are real, and they need treating in a different order.

If the second describes you, the picture often lifts a fair way once the attention difficulties are being managed and the daily experience of falling…

The checklists were built around the loud version of this, and girls are more often the quiet version. If she is struggling and nobody has ever suggested an assessment, that is worth pressing on.

Defiance in girls can look like refusal, withdrawal or a long-running argument about friendships rather than the disruption a teacher would report.…

Not all distraction comes from outside. Some of it is a thought that will not leave, circling while you read the same paragraph four times.

That difference matters at an assessment. Being pulled away by everything in the room, and being held in place by an intrusive thought you cannot put…