Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
Play therapy and insight based psychotherapy do not treat ADHD. There is no buried, unexpressed feeling driving it that talking will let out.
The difficulty sits in executive control and how it develops, not in hidden conflict. That said, a child with ADHD can also be anxious, grieving or bullied, and those are real reasons for therapy in their own right. Be clear about which problem the therapy is for, so nobody ends up disappointed for the wrong reason.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast (Quran 2:153). Support is there for whatever you are actually carrying, which is not always the diagnosis.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Psychological work is not written off wholesale here. In a multicentre trial, mindfulness based cognitive therapy added to usual care reduced core ADHD symptoms in adults compared with usual care alone. It was single blind, and it points towards structured, skills based approaches rather than towards exploring the past.
Janssen L, Kan CC, Carpentier PJ, Sizoo B, Hepark S, Schellekens MPJ, Donders ART, Buitelaar JK, Speckens AEM. (2019). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy v. treatment as usual in adults with ADHD: a multicentre, single-blind, randomised controlled trial.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A treatment helps when its target and the person's actual difficulty are the same thing.
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
Cutting sugar does not improve ADHD, and nor does stripping out additives. Both have been tested repeatedly, including under conditions where nobody knew which child had eaten what.
Turn the socks inside out so the seam sits away from the toes, cut the label out and print the size onto the fabric instead, and look at seamless clothing. These cost pennies against a course of therapy and they work by teatime.
Neurofeedback rests on a tidy idea: in ADHD the slower theta rhythm shows up when the faster beta rhythm should be running, so the training rewards you for shifting the balance. Knowing the idea is worth a few minutes, because it is what the brochure is built on.