Practices

Difficult things come out more easily when your hands are occupied and you are not looking straight at the other person. Walk side by side, drive somewhere, wash up together, keep the sewing going.

If you are the one listening, offer it first. Most people assume that picking something up would look rude or half interested, so they sit still and…

Plenty of children on a stimulant are taking something else as well, most often an antidepressant. That second medicine is usually there for a second problem rather than for the attention itself.

It is a useful lens when a regimen has grown complicated. Ask what each item is for, and the list generally resolves into a treatment for the…

To find out whether treatment is helping, ask the people who live with the person. One parent who stopped her medication for a family holiday remembered a lovely trip, while her children remembered running it.

Two teenagers had packed for her, fetched what she forgot, and kept an eye on the airport clock. She had no idea any of it happened. There is no…

The old argument about medication against behaviour therapy was set down years ago. The useful question now is what each one covers.

They work by different routes and they reach different hours of the day, so putting them in a single contest was never going to tell anyone much.…

Adding psychosocial work to medication buys something extra, and less than people hope. The extra tends to arrive in the places medication was never going to reach.

Homework routines, the temperature of arguments at home, how a teacher speaks to a child, the hours after a dose has worn off: that is where the…

Doing the behavioural work alongside a medicine can mean managing on less of it. That matters most for the side effects that follow the size of the dose.

Appetite, sleep and irritability all tend to scale with how much is being taken. Where part of the load is carried by routines, by support at school,…

Medication treats the attention difficulty. It does not teach reading, lift a depression, or repair a household that has been fighting for years.

Those things need treatment of their own, and they are often what the family actually came about. Treating the attention difficulty well can stop…

Smoking runs high in ADHD, and nicotine genuinely does something for attention. It helps to treat that as self-medication rather than as one more impulsive habit.

It changes what a conversation about stopping looks like. If a cigarette is doing a job, taking it away and leaving the job undone is a plan that…

Stopping medication rises sharply in the early teenage years. If that is where you are, it helps to know this is the usual pattern rather than a sign that something has gone wrong with your child.

The pull is understandable: wanting to be in charge of your own body, hating being the one who is different, and a parent no longer standing over the…

Classes and clubs work mostly because somebody notices when you are not there. It is the being expected, more than the workout, that gets you out of the door.

A running club, a swimming group, a friend at the gate at seven. On the evening when you feel like nothing, an arrangement with another person…

Moving your body and being with people you like are the two most reliable things for feeling well. Doing both at once is not a trick, it is just efficient.

Each of them changes how you feel through the body, and neither depends on you having a good week. A walk with a friend gets you both. If you can…

Headsets have become cheap enough to sit in an ordinary consulting room, and the use with the best backing is graded exposure. You can set the intensity exactly and repeat it as often as the person needs.

The value is in the control. A feared situation can be dialled up in small steps, run again the moment it stops being frightening, and ended without…

With some sensory routines, the part doing the work may be a parent's steady hands and full attention rather than the technique itself. Worth knowing, because contact carries into the rest of the day and a protocol does not.

Views differ on this and the research has not sorted it out. What follows practically is that a family who cannot keep the exact routine going has…

Regular massage has been studied with restless, distractible children and teenagers, and their teachers noticed the difference in class as well as the young people noticing it in themselves.

The pattern in these studies is modest and repeated: short sessions, twice a week, over several weeks, with mood and behaviour improving rather than…

In placebo studies, people improve even when they have been told outright that the pill is inert. They also usually spend half an hour talking with someone who is paying attention.

That half hour is easy to dismiss as a detail of the study design, and it may be most of the treatment. Which is oddly encouraging: careful listening…

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.

Thirty minutes of someone listening properly to your difficulties is not filler around the real treatment. Across the talking therapies, who the…