Practices

Offer school again at ten, and at eleven, and after lunch. One refusal at half past seven should not be allowed to decide the whole day.

Morning dread usually peaks around the time they would be leaving and then drains away over a couple of hours. A child who could not face it at half…

Find one adult in the building the child already trusts, and have them meet the child at the entrance. The doorway is the hardest minute of the day.

The job is small and specific: be there at the door, walk with them to their locker, get them started, be findable later on. It turns the worst…

If getting to the appointment frightened you, then you have already done the first hard thing. Walking in and talking to a stranger about yourself is the ladder, not the preparation for it.

Nobody watching later can see it. What they see is someone sitting there talking, and they miss the week of dread and the near cancellation. Say it…

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…

If you are being assessed for attention, say something about your mood and your worry as well, even if nobody asks.

Anxiety and low mood sit alongside ADHD often enough that a thorough assessment will go looking for them anyway. But shame is quiet, and years of…

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…

Not all distraction comes from outside. Some of it is a thought that will not leave, circling while you read the same paragraph four times.

That difference matters at an assessment. Being pulled away by everything in the room, and being held in place by an intrusive thought you cannot put…

Eating that runs away from you, and eating you cannot stop once it has started, turn up alongside ADHD more than people expect. Usually it is doing a job rather than proving a weakness.

The pattern leans towards bingeing rather than restricting, which fits: it belongs with the difficulty of stopping something already in motion. Often…

Trouble with eating, and with how your body looks, gets missed far more often in men. The questionnaires and the expectations behind them were built around women.

In men it runs more towards size and muscle than towards thinness, and towards fixing on one part of the body that everybody else says looks…

A few treatments are only given in a clinic, with someone sitting with you afterwards. The chair and the hours are part of the treatment rather than paperwork.

Esketamine is the current example. It is a nasal spray, given on site, with a monitoring period of about two hours afterwards because blood pressure,…

Say it, out loud if you can manage it: I am done for the day. A decision, rather than a slow guilty drift away from the desk.

The hours after a proper clocking off feel different from the same hours drifted into, even when nothing else about them changes. It does mean facing…