Practices

When a young person is struggling to launch into adult life, it is usually two things at once: the practical scaffolding, and the social side. Work on one only and the other tends to pull it down.

Calendars, laundry and deadlines are the visible half. The harder half is friendship, saying no, asking for something, being alone in a room full of…

If you have been the one holding someone's schedule, meals and reminders together, do not put all of it down on the day they leave. Pass it over a piece at a time, each with a date on it.

Write out what you are actually doing for them: waking, appointments, repeat prescriptions, food, deadlines, forms. Most families are surprised by…

Assessing a child's thinking used to mean a referral, a waiting list and a report some months later. Brief cognitive tools an ordinary clinician can run have changed that, and the gap between noticing something and having a plan can now be a session rather than a season.

Learn one of them properly instead of dabbling in three. Know what it measures, what it does not, and how to talk about a score without turning it…

You do not need to become a reading specialist to be useful in a school meeting. A few hours with the current material on how reading is learned will put you ahead of most of the room, and you can carry it in kindly rather than as a challenge.

Pick two or three good sources and actually read them: an introduction written for teachers, and one clear book on how reading develops. What you…

Finding the dose is a search rather than a calculation. It goes up in small steps until either the effect you want turns up, or the side effects get annoying enough that you come back down a step and settle there.

There is no way to work the right dose out from body weight or from how bad things look, which surprises people who expect medicine to be more exact…

One of the founding figures of biological psychiatry summed the whole business up as some medicine helping some people at some doses some of the time. Knowing that before you start makes the first disappointment much easier to survive.

Most people need more than one adjustment: the dose, then the timing, sometimes the drug itself. Go in expecting the first prescription to be the…

Nothing here does the job on its own. Medication if it suits you, a few practical systems, something for the low mood and shame that has built up, and the people you live with brought into it.

The practical layer is the easiest to describe and the first to fall over, because whether you use a system at all depends on how you feel about…

Some people book their first assessment on the day they turn eighteen, because it is the first day they can consent without a parent. If you have been waiting like that, the waiting was not laziness.

Where a family or a community treats mental health care as shameful, a young person can spend a decade struggling with nobody's permission to ask for…

There is no single treatment that covers all of this. What works looks more like five things running alongside each other, and understanding the condition comes first.

Each piece reaches a different part of the day. Medication does something the environment cannot, changing what a room asks of someone does something…

You cannot work out in advance what will light you up. The only reliable method is a wide and slightly undignified search: many activities, many people, plenty of reading and watching, until something catches.

This means giving yourself permission to try things badly and drop them, which is hard if you have been told all your life that you never finish…

Far more people have ADHD than are ever assessed for it. If you have wondered about yourself for years, the odds that an assessment would be worth your time are better than you think.

The usual fear is being told you are making it up, or wasting a professional's morning. In practice adults are missed far more often than they are…

There is no age at which finding out stops being worth it. People have been diagnosed in their eighties and described it as the first explanation that ever fitted.

A late diagnosis will not give back the jobs or the years, and it is fair to grieve those. What it does is rewrite the story: not a person who kept…

Use the established rating scales and a proper developmental history rather than working from the impression someone makes in a first meeting. What you see in a room is a small and unrepresentative sample.

A structured set of questionnaires covering childhood, school, work and daily life turns vague instability into something countable, and it prompts…