Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
Narrowed down
166 practicesTheme · Medication and how it works
How long you have
Approach · Medical and treatment
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
For a small number of children the question was never about school reports. A toddler who runs into a road and keeps running, a child who climbs the pool fence: what is being weighed there is whether they stay alive.
Most decisions about treating a very young child are finely balanced and deserve to be taken slowly. Where the behaviour itself is life threatening,…
If the first medicine disappoints, that is information about the first medicine. Plenty of people who get nothing from one class do well on another.
Methylphenidate and amphetamine are not the same drug at different strengths. They work by partly different routes, so a poor result on one says…
Finding the dose is a search rather than a calculation. It goes up in small steps until either the effect you want turns up, or the side effects get annoying enough that you come back down a step and settle there.
There is no way to work the right dose out from body weight or from how bad things look, which surprises people who expect medicine to be more exact…
Most people who try do find something that helps, but often not the first thing they try. Not responding to one class of stimulant says surprisingly little about the other.
The high response figures you may have read come from people who worked through more than one option, not from one prescription going well. Response…
One of the founding figures of biological psychiatry summed the whole business up as some medicine helping some people at some doses some of the time. Knowing that before you start makes the first disappointment much easier to survive.
Most people need more than one adjustment: the dose, then the timing, sometimes the drug itself. Go in expecting the first prescription to be the…
When medication works, its best effect is often on everything else you were already trying. Coaching, exercise, a routine: each of them needs enough attention to get started, and attention is the thing in short supply.
That is why setting medication against the other approaches usually misses the point. The plan you could not keep last year may be perfectly keepable…