Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Paying someone to help sort the house will not mend the marriage. It will remove one of the things you fight about most weeks, and that counts for more than it sounds.
Nobody should pretend this reaches anything deep. The point is arithmetic. A couple has a certain number of rows in them, and if the living room is generating two a week, taking that away leaves more room for everything else. The same goes for the bills, the school forms, whatever your particular recurring flashpoint is. Buying a problem out of the house is a legitimate move, not a way of avoiding the real work.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
So truly where there is hardship there is also ease (Quran 94:5). The ease that arrives is often small and practical, and it is still worth taking.
فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلۡعُسۡرِ يُسۡرًا
So truly where there is hardship there is also ease
Qur’an 94:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In one trial, 410 adults were randomised to six months of atomoxetine or placebo with work productivity, rather than a symptom count, as the primary outcome. It is medication rather than home organising, and the setting is work rather than a marriage. What it illustrates is the principle at stake here, that the outcomes people live inside are worth measuring in their own right and not treated as a lesser proxy for symptoms.
Adler LA, Spencer TJ, Levine LR, Ramsey JL, Tamura R, Kelsey D, Ball SG, Allen AJ, Biederman J. (2008). Functional outcomes in the treatment of adults with ADHD.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Every recurring trigger you remove is a row that never happens.
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
Rather than memorising which treatments to avoid, keep a few questions you can put to any of them. New products arrive faster than anyone can keep a list.
Most children with ADHD can tell you exactly what they should have done. The knowing was never the missing piece, which is why a course teaching the knowing changes so little.
The point of explaining ADHD to a parent is to produce a particular kind of parent: one who is kind about it, quick to forgive the day's failures, and willing to make a nuisance of themselves at school.