Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Think of ADHD as sitting at the centre of an onion. Poor sleep, sleep apnoea, low vitamin levels, allergy, ongoing pain, untreated anxiety or low mood all sit in layers around it, and each one makes the centre look worse than it is.
This explains something that otherwise looks strange: treatments that do nothing whatever for ADHD can still make a real difference, because they took a layer off. It also means you cannot fairly judge how severe someone's ADHD is until the layers have been dealt with. Sort the sleep, treat the anxiety, check what a blood test says, and then see what the middle actually looks like.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Take action! God will see your actions (Quran 9:105). Working through what can actually be treated is doing something, even while the centre of it stays.
وَقُلِ ٱعۡمَلُواْ فَسَيَرَى ٱللَّهُ عَمَلَكُمۡ وَرَسُولُهُۥ وَٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَۖ وَسَتُرَدُّونَ إِلَىٰ عَٰلِمِ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
Say [Prophet], ‘Take action! God will see your actions- as will His Messenger and the believers- and then you will be returned to Him who knows what is seen and unseen, and He will tell you what you have been doing
Qur’an 9:105read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A double blind trial compared atomoxetine with placebo in children who had both ADHD and anxiety, a combination present in roughly a quarter to a third of children with the condition. The scale of that overlap is the point worth carrying. Other things are usually going on alongside, often enough that assuming a clean single condition is the less likely bet.
Geller D, Donnelly C, Lopez F, Rubin R, Newcorn J, Sutton V, Bakken R, Paczkowski M, Kelsey D, Sumner C. (2007). Atomoxetine treatment for pediatric patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder with comorbid anxiety disorder.. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Everything sitting on top of ADHD makes it worse, so what you can see is the centre plus the layers until you take some of them off.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Part of why so many adults are coming forward now is that well known people have said out loud that they have this. Seeing someone capable say it makes the asking cost less.
Think of it the way you would think about diabetes. Something to manage with several things at once, most days, for as long as it is there.
Medication does not make somebody care more. It narrows the distance between meaning to do the thing and doing it, and that distance is exactly what the other person has been feeling as being let down.