Practices

The name is a little misleading. What tends to be hard is not seeing or understanding a task, it is getting your brain to switch on for something it finds no reward in, and to switch off from something it loves.

You may have noticed you can lose four hours to something that grips you and then be unable to start a ten minute form. That gap is the thing itself,…

There is a real difference between a person who will not start and a person who cannot get started, and with ADHD it is nearly always the second.

This matters most in how you speak to yourself, and in how the people near you speak to you. Refusal invites pressure and punishment, which reliably…

With ADHD the one dependable thing is that you are not dependable in the same way each day. A day when everything works and a day when nothing does can arrive with no reason you can find.

Say this out loud to the people who need to know, because the good days get held against you later, by them and by you. Plan around your average…

ADHD does not look the same in two people. If someone tells you that you cannot have it because you are calm, or organised at work, or did well at school, they are describing one version of it.

Two people with the same diagnosis can look nothing alike: one talkative and always moving, the other quiet and away inside their own head. Other…

Roughly one person in twenty has ADHD, and the figure holds up across very different countries. You are not part of a modern trend.

That number matters in two directions. It means you are not rare, so in a class of thirty or an office of forty there will be others. It also means…

More people being recognised is not the same as more people having it. What has changed over recent decades is awareness, not the number of minds built this way.

Parents often carry a quiet fear that something they did, or something modern, caused this. Grandparents with the same traits simply grew up without…

If thoughts of ending your life turn up, tell someone that day. Do not wait to see whether they pass, and do not wait until you can explain them properly.

Feelings can arrive at full volume with ADHD, and the gap between a thought and acting on it can be short, which is why waiting it out alone is the…

When you speak about a death by suicide, say died by suicide or completed suicide rather than committed. Committed sets a crime beside the person's name.

Families hear these words at the worst moment of their lives and carry them for years afterwards. The wording also reaches people who are struggling…