Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Before anything else, the people around the child need to understand what ADHD actually is. Everything else works better once that has happened.
The chain is quite direct. Understanding changes how behaviour gets read, how it is read sets what a parent expects, and expectations shape the tone of the house day after day. A parent who reads a forgotten bag as defiance responds one way, and a parent who reads it as a memory that keeps dropping things responds another. The second house is calmer, and the calm is not decoration, it is part of the treatment.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know (Quran 16:43). Learning what you are dealing with is treated as the ordinary first step, not as an optional extra.
وَمَآ أَرۡسَلۡنَا مِن قَبۡلِكَ إِلَّا رِجَالࣰ ا نُّوحِيٓ إِلَيۡهِمۡۖ فَسۡـَٔلُوٓاْ أَهۡلَ ٱلذِّكۡرِ إِن كُنتُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ
[Prophet], all the messengers We sent before you were simply men to whom We had given the Revelation: you [people] can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know
Qur’an 16:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The updated European consensus statement on diagnosis and treatment in adult ADHD goes through the options and says where the evidence supports each, including the place of explaining the condition properly to those affected. It is a consensus document rather than a trial of psychoeducation, so it reflects expert judgement about what belongs in good care. The specific chain from understanding to a calmer household is a clinical account rather than a tested one.
Kooij JJS, Bijlenga D, Salerno L, Jaeschke R, Bitter I, Balázs J, Thome J, Dom G, Kasper S, Nunes Filipe C, Stes S, Mohr P, Leppämäki S, Casas M, Bobes J, Mccarthy JM, Richarte V, Kjems Philipsen A, Pehlivanidis A, Niemela A, Styr B, Semerci B, Bolea-Alamanac B, Edvinsson D, Baeyens D, Wynchank D, Sobanski E, Philipsen A, McNicholas F, Caci H, Mihailescu I, Manor I, Dobrescu I, Saito T, Krause J, Fayyad J, Ramos-Quiroga JA, Foeken K, Rad F, Adamou M, Ohlmeier M, Fitzgerald M, Gill M, Lensing M, Motavalli Mukaddes N, Brudkiewicz P, Gustafsson P, Tani P, Oswald P, Carpentier PJ, De Rossi P, Delorme R, Markovska Simoska S, Pallanti S, Young S, Bejerot S, Lehtonen T, Kustow J, Müller-Sedgwick U, Hirvikoski T, Pironti V, Ginsberg Y, Félegyházy Z, Garcia-Portilla MP, Asherson P. (2019). Updated European Consensus Statement on diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD.. European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
How a parent explains their child's behaviour to themselves decides how they respond to it, hour after hour.
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
The trouble now is not that nothing works. It is that the things which work are spread unevenly, and whether a family gets any of them depends heavily on where they happen to live.
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.
A great many people are diagnosed and then left with a starting dose nobody ever revisited, no reading, no group, nothing else at all. If things have stalled, the first thing to check is whether the treatment was ever actually finished.