Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
If therapy for ADHD did little for your thirteen year old, that is not a sign they were not trying. The self monitoring it leans on is still being built at that age, and it builds later in ADHD than in most.
The practical reading is about timing rather than willingness. Younger teenagers usually do better when the adults around them change the setup at home and at school. Somewhere in later adolescence the more self directed work starts to become possible, and it is worth going back to then. What did not fit at thirteen is not settled for good.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God has set a due measure for everything (Quran 65:3). Capacities arrive when they arrive, and something tried too early is not the same as something that failed.
وَيَرۡزُقۡهُ مِنۡ حَيۡثُ لَا يَحۡتَسِبُۚ وَمَن يَتَوَكَّلۡ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ فَهُوَ حَسۡبُهُۥٓۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ بَٰلِغُ أَمۡرِهِۦۚ قَدۡ جَعَلَ ٱللَّهُ لِكُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدۡرࣰ ا
and will provide for them from an unexpected source; God will be enough for those who put their trust in Him. God achieves His purpose; God has set a due measure for everything
Qur’an 65:3read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of fifteen years of research on adolescents with ADHD coded the available studies and worked out effect sizes for medication and for behaviour therapy. That is where the sense of an age gradient comes from, in the pattern of what has been tried with this age group and how well it did. It summarises a literature rather than testing directly when therapy starts to take, so hold the timing loosely.
Sibley MH, Kuriyan AB, Evans SW, Waxmonsky JG, Smith BH. (2014). Pharmacological and psychosocial treatments for adolescents with ADHD: an updated systematic review of the literature.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot run a strategy on yourself until the part of you that watches yourself has grown in.
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
Two things happening together is not one causing the other. Learn that once and you have a reply to most of the claims you will meet.
The stack goes: understand it, medicate where that is right, change what the adults do, change what the day asks, and keep arguing the child's corner. Each layer does a job the others cannot.
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.