Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Coaching for adult ADHD comes down mostly to one thing: a standing appointment with somebody who will ask how it went. That sounds thin until you have tried keeping a plan alive entirely on your own.
A coach is not a therapist and does not need to be. They hold the horizon you keep losing and the fortnight that has quietly gone by, and they make you say your intention out loud to a person who will remember it. Some people get much the same from a friend with a recurring call in the diary. It sits alongside medication and therapy rather than replacing either.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Conduct their affairs by mutual consultation (Quran 42:38). Bringing another person into how your weeks are run is an old and honourable arrangement, not an admission of failure.
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتَجَابُواْ لِرَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَمۡرُهُمۡ شُورَىٰ بَيۡنَهُمۡ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 42:38read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial in 88 adults compared group CBT with individual coaching, with and without medication, partly to ask whether psychological treatment helps adults who are not on medication. So coaching has been put next to therapy in a trial rather than only sold as a service. The sample is small and this is one comparison, so it supports coaching as a reasonable option rather than as the better of the two.
Cherkasova MV, French LR, Syer CA, Cousins L, Galina H, Ahmadi-Kashani Y, Hechtman L. (2020). Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy With and Without Medication for Adults With ADHD: A Randomized Clinical Trial.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An intention you have promised to another person stays visible for longer than one you only made to yourself.
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
Gathering disruptive children into one room to learn social skills leaves about a quarter of them worse than before. They pick things up from each other far faster than from the adult at the front.
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.
The most convincing programme for teenagers does the obvious thing. It runs at school, twice a week, so nobody has to be driven anywhere: homework systems, organisation, some social practice and sport, in the place where the trouble actually happens.