Practices

If someone selling you a treatment for ADHD uses the word cure, that is your cue to leave. There is no cure. What good treatment offers is fewer symptoms, and that is a real and worthwhile thing.

A registered clinician is not allowed to promise you an outcome, because nobody can honestly guarantee one. So a provider who promises makes you a…

ADHD is managed rather than cured, across a whole life. Anything advertising a cure is telling you it is not working from the evidence.

Managed sounds like a disappointment until you look at what it means in practice: treatment that fits your life now, adjusted when the life changes,…

Listen for the sentence that says the child could manage all of this perfectly well if they only decided to. However kindly it is meant, that is the belief to take apart.

It sounds like encouragement and it works like a verdict, because it says the ability was always there and only the willingness was missing. In a…

If mindfulness is going to help with ADHD, the version with a chance is small and spread out. A few seconds of noticing, several times a day, rather than one long sitting you come to dread.

A forty five minute block asks you to get settled in one place and then somehow carry that into the afternoon, and the carrying is exactly what tends…

By response rate, extended release stimulants are among the most effective medicines in psychiatry, and most people tolerate them well. That is worth hearing plainly, particularly from people who are not generally keen on medication.

What the long acting form buys you is coverage. A dose that has faded by four in the afternoon leaves the evening bare, and the evening is where home…

Three things are worth noticing before you buy any treatment: whether the only research on it is their own, whether they will say plainly what it is meant to change, and whether you have to sign something.

Each one covers a different way of being caught out. Research a company funded and ran itself has never been checked by anyone with nothing to lose.…

Better usually means smaller, rarer, or shorter. Pick something you can count, like losing your keys twice a week instead of every day.

Vague goals cannot be reviewed, so a few months later nobody can say whether anything changed and you are left going on mood alone. Choose two or…

You are going to look things up anyway, so start somewhere with proper review behind it. CHADD and Understood both have professionals checking what goes on the page.

Telling anyone to stop searching online has never worked and only means they search without saying so. Better to hand over two or three places worth…

Part of why so many adults are coming forward now is that well known people have said out loud that they have this. Seeing someone capable say it makes the asking cost less.

The old picture of ADHD was a careless child and a lazy adult, and that picture kept a great many people from ever mentioning it. An athlete at the…

Brain training and therapeutic games raise one question above all others. Does the improvement show up anywhere except inside the game, and does it last once you stop playing?

People do get better at what they practise, and the scores go up, which makes for a persuasive chart on a website. The harder question is whether…

Supplements are not checked before they go on sale, so what is in the bottle may not match the label. Look for a third party mark such as USP or NSF before you buy.

This is not about whether a given supplement helps. It is about the plainer question of whether you are getting the dose written on the front, since…

CBT has more research behind it than most other therapies, and part of that is because it is easy to count. Its steps and its outcomes can be scored, so it gets studied more often.

That is worth saying because a thin research base is not the same as a therapy that fails. Approaches that work through relationship, imagery or the…

Two things happening together is not one causing the other. Learn that once and you have a reply to most of the claims you will meet.

Children with ADHD may use more screens, and screens may not be the reason. The same shape turns up with sugar, with additives, with organic food and…

The point of treatment is not a tidier score on a questionnaire. It is fewer accidents, a finished course, work that holds, relationships that survive, a longer and better life.

Symptoms are worth reducing because of what they do downstream, and that is where the goal should be set. It changes what you review, too. Instead of…

After a working lifetime in this field, Barkley names the change in how a family sees the child as the most important step of all. Not the medication, not the charts.

The reason is practical rather than sentimental. Every other part of treatment asks parents to keep going for weeks with very little to show for it,…

Being told ADHD is largely inherited can sound like being told nothing can be done. It does not follow, and the two questions are separate ones.

How much of something a person shows, day to day, moves a good deal with what is around them, even when the underlying trait is strongly heritable.…

A child can be almost trouble free with a grandparent who has all afternoon for them, and impossible in a class of twenty five. Same child, same condition, very different demand.

What a setting asks for is the ratio between the self control a person has to supply and the structure being supplied for them. One adult, close…

Untreated ADHD is not free. It turns up in appointments, in repeat trips to A and E, in school reports and in lost work, and the bill lands on the family either way.

So when the cost of treatment is the reason for waiting, it is worth adding up what is already going out, in money and in hours and in the things…

Gathering disruptive children into one room to learn social skills leaves about a quarter of them worse than before. They pick things up from each other far faster than from the adult at the front.

This is not a reason to give up on helping a child socially. It is a reason to look hard at who else is in the group before you accept a place in it.…

The warning about group social skills work is about loud, disruptive children. A quiet, anxious child who simply has not had much practice with other children is a different case, and a gentle group may be exactly right.

So the question is not whether groups work, but which child is sitting in front of you. If the difficulty really is inexperience, a group offers…