Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Two of the three big advances in ADHD over recent decades were not new treatments at all. They were clearer thinking about what the difficulty actually is, and honest accounting of what psychological treatment can and cannot deliver.
Understanding ADHD as a problem of self regulation rather than a shortage of attention changed what help gets aimed at. Knowing which psychosocial approaches do not transfer out of the room saved an enormous amount of wasted effort. The medication news was real but mostly about delivery, which is to say about coverage across the day rather than a new kind of effect.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
A healing for what is in your hearts, and guidance and mercy (Quran 10:57). Guidance is counted as help in its own right, so it is no small thing when a field simply understands itself better.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ قَدۡ جَآءَتۡكُم مَّوۡعِظَةࣱ مِّن رَّبِّكُمۡ وَشِفَآءࣱ لِّمَا فِي ٱلصُّدُورِ وَهُدࣰ ى وَرَحۡمَةࣱ لِّلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ
People, a teaching from your Lord has come to you, a healing for what is in [your] hearts, and guidance and mercy for the believers
Qur’an 10:57read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review with network meta-analyses compared pharmacological, psychological and complementary treatments for ADHD in children and adolescents against each other, rather than each against placebo alone. Comparing options directly is the sort of work that turns a pile of separate trials into something a clinician can use. Network comparisons rest on assumptions about how alike the trials are, so any ranking they produce is a guide rather than a verdict.
Catalá-López F, Hutton B, Núñez-Beltrán A, Page MJ, Ridao M, Macías Saint-Gerons D, Catalá MA, Tabarés-Seisdedos R, Moher D. (2017). The pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and adolescents: A systematic review with network meta-analyses of randomised trials.. PloS one doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Knowing what does not work narrows the field, and a narrower field is an easier one to help 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
Do not write off simply sitting with someone. When researchers looked into why dummy treatments helped, one of the things they kept finding was half an hour of a person's full attention.
Hear this before you start rather than after: change here is gradual. Habits built over twenty years do not come apart in three weeks.
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.