Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
University is one route, not the route. Saying so only helps if you can name the others, so find out what actually exists before you have the conversation.
Apprenticeships, supported employment schemes, part time study, a trade, working while doing one course at a time. In many places there are publicly funded transition programmes for young people with a diagnosis or a disability, and families routinely have no idea they are there. Come with two or three real options, with names and dates attached. Without those, saying that university is not for everyone sounds like a gentle way of giving up on someone.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know (Quran 16:43). Going to find out what the options are is the instruction, not a poor substitute for knowing already.
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 diagnosing and treating adult ADHD exists because the condition is under recognised and under treated across many countries. It is expert agreement rather than a trial, so it settles nothing about which path suits a given person. Its use here is blunt: provision is patchy and people fall through it, so what is actually available to this young person has to be looked up rather than assumed.
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
A choice with alternatives named next to it reads as a plan, while the same choice without them reads as a failure.
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
Find out how long you actually last before your mind wanders somewhere nicer, then make that your block. If the honest answer is eleven minutes, work in elevens.
Decide now what you will do when the technology fails, because it will. The plan can be one line: if the connection drops, I take the laptop to the library and carry on there.
A school to home report works daily for younger children and weekly for older ones. The point is to close the gap between what happened at school and anything that follows at home.