Practices

The gentler alternatives are for avoiding a habit forming medicine in the first place. They cannot carry someone who is already dependent, and offering one as a straight swap mid crisis sets everybody up to fail.

Once a body has adapted to one of these medicines, only a careful reduction of that same medicine will get a person off it, and a different drug will…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Long acting does not automatically suit everybody. Some people genuinely do better on shorter doses, and it is worth saying so rather than assuming the newer option must be right.

There is a folk belief that a person's own chemistry takes over in the afternoon once the medicine wears off, and the research does not support it.…

What a person expects from a treatment genuinely changes what they get from it. That is not a trick to be exploited, and it is not nothing either.

In some trials the dummy treatment helps around half the people who receive it, and there is work showing benefit even when people were told outright…

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…

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…

Play based programmes that build executive skills in young children have done reasonably well with children at risk of struggling at school. None has yet been tested in children actually diagnosed with ADHD, and that is a real difference rather than a technicality.

Results found in a broad at risk group tend to shrink, sometimes to nothing, when the same thing is tried with clinically diagnosed children, where…