Practices

If telling your doctor or midwife what you are using feels impossible, you can ask someone you already trust to pass it on for you, with your permission and in your words.

People often stay quiet with the very clinician who could help, because saying it out loud feels heavier than the problem does. Handing the message…

Match the tablet to the person rather than to the diagnosis. For someone flattened and slowed who has said clearly that they will not accept sexual side effects, paroxetine is close to the worst choice available.

It is the most sedating in the class, the least activating, and carries a high risk of exactly the effect they ruled out, with weight gain and the…

If you are the therapist, hand the prescriber the profile and leave them the pick. What you hold that they do not is what this person is like across a week, and what they will absolutely not tolerate.

So write those two things down and send them: the presentation, in plain description rather than jargon, and the non-negotiables. Not a drug name.…

If a treatment reliably produces strange sensations, describe them beforehand. Expected strangeness is far easier to sit through than strangeness that arrives unannounced.

With esketamine, feeling oddly detached from your body or the room is the drug doing what it does, not a sign of harm, and it usually clears within a…

Rules about ADHD and military service move with recruiting needs. Send a family to a recruiter for the current position rather than answering from memory.

Every version has been seen: medication allowed, medication stopped before basic training, the diagnosis treated as disqualifying, the diagnosis…

Before you decide a club is out of reach, ask. Some let children earn the uniform through the levels, and plenty have quiet arrangements for families who need them.

Cost keeps more children out of these things than lack of interest does. A single phone call is worth making, and the answer is often better than the…

A weighted vest seems to do its work in roughly the first quarter of an hour. Twenty minutes did not beat fifteen, so longer is not more help.

Use it as a tool for a moment rather than a garment for the day: on before the piece of work that needs the most sitting still, off once that is…

Decide at the start what you are actually aiming at. Eight difficulties down to six, then to four, then perhaps to two. Never zero, because zero was never on offer.

Everybody has some of these traits, and ADHD is largely inherited, so a life with none of it was never a realistic target for anyone. Naming a number…

Everything has side effects, including doing nothing. The only real question is whether what you gain outweighs what it costs you.

The conversation about medication often gets set up as a risky drug against a safe natural alternative, and that is not the choice anyone is actually…

Treatment is not only about school reports. Lower rates of accidental injury and of other serious harms are reasons in their own right, even for a child whose marks are perfectly fine.

This is the answer to the question about the bright child who is coping academically and whose impulsivity worries you in traffic, on a bike, or…

Said plainly, because it should be: medication is the most effective treatment for ADHD, and by a good margin. Everything else in this area is something you add to that decision, not something that replaces it.

This is not a push to medicate. Families weigh side effects, age, other conditions and their own convictions, and those are proper things to weigh.…

Paediatric and psychiatric bodies have moved towards treating earlier than used to be usual. The reasoning is that the damage builds on itself.

A year of falling behind makes the next year harder, a reputation among classmates is quick to form and slow to shift, and a household that has been…