Focus, starting, and ADHD

The name is a little misleading. What tends to be hard is not seeing or understanding a task, it is getting your brain to switch on for something it finds no reward in, and to switch off from something it loves.

You may have noticed you can lose four hours to something that grips you and then be unable to start a ten minute form. That gap is the thing itself,…

There is a real difference between a person who will not start and a person who cannot get started, and with ADHD it is nearly always the second.

This matters most in how you speak to yourself, and in how the people near you speak to you. Refusal invites pressure and punishment, which reliably…

With ADHD the one dependable thing is that you are not dependable in the same way each day. A day when everything works and a day when nothing does can arrive with no reason you can find.

Say this out loud to the people who need to know, because the good days get held against you later, by them and by you. Plan around your average…

ADHD does not look the same in two people. If someone tells you that you cannot have it because you are calm, or organised at work, or did well at school, they are describing one version of it.

Two people with the same diagnosis can look nothing alike: one talkative and always moving, the other quiet and away inside their own head. Other…

Roughly one person in twenty has ADHD, and the figure holds up across very different countries. You are not part of a modern trend.

That number matters in two directions. It means you are not rare, so in a class of thirty or an office of forty there will be others. It also means…

More people being recognised is not the same as more people having it. What has changed over recent decades is awareness, not the number of minds built this way.

Parents often carry a quiet fear that something they did, or something modern, caused this. Grandparents with the same traits simply grew up without…

When you speak about a death by suicide, say died by suicide or completed suicide rather than committed. Committed sets a crime beside the person's name.

Families hear these words at the worst moment of their lives and carry them for years afterwards. The wording also reaches people who are struggling…

Being able to disappear into something for six hours does not cancel the diagnosis out. Getting stuck on and getting stuck off are the same switch failing in two directions.

People often use their own absorption as evidence against themselves, or a family member uses it against them: if you can play that game all night,…

When you explain ADHD to someone who does not have it, describe the effort rather than the outcome. Not that the form is unfinished, but what twenty minutes of trying to fill it in actually took out of you.

Most people around you are judging the visible result, because that is all they can see. One concrete picture of the inside of an ordinary task…

If you reach the bottom of a page and nothing has stayed, reading it again more slowly usually will not fix it. Change something about how you are reading instead.

Read a paragraph and then say it back in your own words before moving on, or write one line per section, or read with a pen underlining as you go.…

ADHD tends to run in families, and the differences in reported rates between countries say more about how a country counts than about its people.

It is common to find, part way through your own assessment, that you are recognising a parent, a sibling or a child. That is not a coincidence and it…

Before you decide who in front of you looks like ADHD, notice the picture you are already carrying. The loud boy gets sent for assessment and the quiet, drifting girl often does not.

The research on how race affects who gets diagnosed is genuinely mixed, and it is more honest to read the studies than to adopt a position from a…

When you meet a confident claim about ADHD, look it up before passing it on. A search of recent papers, limited to the last few years, takes a couple of minutes and often changes the picture.

Free scholarly search engines will show you abstracts without an institutional login. Two habits do most of the work: filter by date so you are…

You will see wildly different figures for how many children still have ADHD as adults. The range mostly reflects what is being counted: symptoms on a childhood list, or whether life is actually being made harder.

Counted by childhood symptom lists, many people look as though they grew out of it. Counted by whether it still gets in the way, far more have not.…

With ADHD, self-management usually runs a few years behind the birthday. Expecting a child to handle what other children their age handle sets you both up to fail.

A rough working guide many clinicians use is to expect around two thirds of the chronological age for this kind of self-regulation, so an eighteen…

Telling parents that their child's self-management is running behind their age usually brings relief rather than alarm. It names something they had already noticed and had been blaming somebody for.

Left unexplained, parents fill the gap with a story, and the story is almost always that the child is choosing this or that they have parented badly.…

Set jobs at the level the child can manage now, then build up. A task pitched at their age that ends in a row every week mainly teaches them they are hopeless at chores.

Break it down further than feels necessary: not tidy your room, but put the clothes in the basket. Stay nearby for the first few goes, since being in…

A child who is tall for their age gets treated as older, and with ADHD their self-management may be running years behind. Pitch what you expect to the skills in front of you rather than to the height.

This lands hardest at school, where a big ten year old who cannot sit still reads as defiant rather than young for his skills. It is worth saying…

Not knowing a child's family history is not evidence against ADHD. Where a child is adopted, a blank family history should keep the question open rather than close it.

Assessment leans a good deal on family history, and adoption often means that history is simply unavailable. An unknown gets read as a negative,…

Much of what matters most in an assessment never comes up unless you ask for it directly. Unplanned pregnancies, money trouble, sackings, near misses in the car: people very rarely volunteer these.

Put the questions on the form rather than waiting for a moment that feels right, since a questionnaire normalises them and takes the weight out of…