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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.
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8 practicesTheme · Treatment and medication
How long you have · A minute
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
If someone selling you a treatment for ADHD uses the word cure, that is your cue to leave. There is no cure. What good treatment offers is fewer symptoms, and that is a real and worthwhile thing.
A registered clinician is not allowed to promise you an outcome, because nobody can honestly guarantee one. So a provider who promises makes you a…
Somebody will eventually ask you whether you want what is best for your child. It is a sales line, and knowing that in advance is most of what you need to withstand it.
Parents of a newly diagnosed child are frightened, motivated and often exhausted, which is exactly the state that gets marketed to. The question is…
A lot of what people now know about ADHD came from a video. Some of it is genuinely good, some of it is not, and asking someone what they have been watching is a fair question to open with.
Creators who live with ADHD have done real good here. They have made people feel recognised and made asking for help less frightening, and some…
ADHD is managed rather than cured, across a whole life. Anything advertising a cure is telling you it is not working from the evidence.
Managed sounds like a disappointment until you look at what it means in practice: treatment that fits your life now, adjusted when the life changes,…
Listen for the sentence that says the child could manage all of this perfectly well if they only decided to. However kindly it is meant, that is the belief to take apart.
It sounds like encouragement and it works like a verdict, because it says the ability was always there and only the willingness was missing. In a…
Most children with ADHD can tell you exactly what they should have done. The knowing was never the missing piece, which is why a course teaching the knowing changes so little.
Watch closely and you see the skill appear in quiet moments and vanish in loud ones, when another child has already grabbed the ball and there is…
If mindfulness is going to help with ADHD, the version with a chance is small and spread out. A few seconds of noticing, several times a day, rather than one long sitting you come to dread.
A forty five minute block asks you to get settled in one place and then somehow carry that into the afternoon, and the carrying is exactly what tends…
By response rate, extended release stimulants are among the most effective medicines in psychiatry, and most people tolerate them well. That is worth hearing plainly, particularly from people who are not generally keen on medication.
What the long acting form buys you is coverage. A dose that has faded by four in the afternoon leaves the evening bare, and the evening is where home…