Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Before handing anyone a new system, make sure they can say back why it should work better than what they are doing now. A strategy with no reason attached gets dropped the first time it is inconvenient.
Ask them to explain it to you in their own words and listen for whose reason it is. If the logic is only yours, it will hold for about a week. It is worth naming what the strategy will cost as well, so that when the friction arrives it feels expected rather than like proof that this was never going to work for them.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'May I follow you so that you can teach me some of the right guidance you have been taught?' (Quran 18:66). Moses asks for the reasoning as well as the instruction, and what follows in that story is largely about how hard it is to keep going when you cannot see it.
قَالَ لَهُۥ مُوسَىٰ هَلۡ أَتَّبِعُكَ عَلَىٰٓ أَن تُعَلِّمَنِ مِمَّا عُلِّمۡتَ رُشۡدࣰ ا
Moses said to him, ‘May I follow you so that you can teach me some of the right guidance you have been taught?’
Qur’an 18:66read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
There is some support for the general idea that understanding helps. A systematic review of adolescents found that the young people who most need mental health attention are the most reluctant to seek it, and that interventions improving mental health literacy show some promise for shifting that. It is about help seeking rather than about sticking with a strategy, and the promise it reports is modest, so take it as encouragement to explain rather than proof that explaining is enough.
Aguirre Velasco A, Cruz ISS, Billings J, Jimenez M, Rowe S. (2020). What are the barriers, facilitators and interventions targeting help-seeking behaviours for common mental health problems in adolescents? A systematic review.. BMC psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
People keep doing things they can see the point of, and abandon things they were only told to do.
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
One man put his lamps on a timer so the room would go dark at eleven and send him to bed. It worked for a few nights. Then he simply carried on in the dark. A cue can tell you the time. It cannot make you stand up.
Trouble with eating, and with how your body looks, gets missed far more often in men. The questionnaires and the expectations behind them were built around women.
For the child who flies off the handle at noise, labels and crowded rooms, with no autism diagnosis in the picture, a free parent completed sensitivity questionnaire will tell you more than another behaviour chart.