Practices

Do not walk into a hard event and improvise. Ten minutes beforehand, work out what is likely to happen, what you will do about it, and how you get out if you need to.

If someone is coming with you, make it a shared plan. What the signal is when one of you needs air, who says what to whom, when you leave. The point…

If someone was adopted, or simply does not know their family history, say early and plainly that this is not a problem. It helps to have and it is not needed.

Otherwise the question lands as one more reminder of what is missing, and some people will spend the rest of the appointment feeling they brought the…

Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder was built partly to keep the bipolar label off children whose future nobody can yet see. Worth remembering when that word lands on a family's paperwork: it describes now, and it does not settle later.

Use it the way it was meant to be used. Review it as the child grows instead of filing it as a fixed fact about their brain, and think about how you…

Strategies for ADHD are visible. A timer on the table, a list on the wall, an alarm going off in a meeting. If someone has not yet made peace with having ADHD, each of those is an announcement, and it will quietly get dropped.

So ask, before handing over another tool: how do you feel about the diagnosis itself? Sometimes the honest answer is that they still half hope it was…

If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.

A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary…