Practices

Take a few photographs of your bedroom, then look at them later and circle whatever has to change or go. Seeing the room in a picture shows you things you stopped noticing years ago while standing in it.

The list is usually short and dull: the light on a charger, the pile of unfinished things on the chair, the television, the clock you keep checking.…

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…

Somebody will eventually ask you whether you want what is best for your child. It is a sales line, and knowing that in advance is most of what you need to withstand it.

Parents of a newly diagnosed child are frightened, motivated and often exhausted, which is exactly the state that gets marketed to. The question is…

A lot of what people now know about ADHD came from a video. Some of it is genuinely good, some of it is not, and asking someone what they have been watching is a fair question to open with.

Creators who live with ADHD have done real good here. They have made people feel recognised and made asking for help less frightening, and some…

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…

Most children with ADHD can tell you exactly what they should have done. The knowing was never the missing piece, which is why a course teaching the knowing changes so little.

Watch closely and you see the skill appear in quiet moments and vanish in loud ones, when another child has already grabbed the ball and there is…

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.…

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…

Hear this before you start rather than after: change here is gradual. Habits built over twenty years do not come apart in three weeks.

Waiting is genuinely harder with ADHD, and a treatment whose reward is months away is exactly the sort of thing that gets dropped in week five.…

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…