Practices

Ask for the old school reports every time. Some people arrive with a folder of every one they ever had, and you cannot tell in advance which people those are.

It is easy to assume that a parent who is disorganised will not have kept anything, and that assumption quietly costs you evidence. Teacher comments…

When you need a date, hand people events rather than months. Was that before or after the holiday? Same year as the move?

Asking whether something happened between October and January invites a guess. Asking whether it was before or after a wedding, a house move or a…

Find out what they have tried before that did not work. It saves everybody from a plan that failed this person two years ago.

Most people arriving for an assessment have been trying things for years: apps, alarms, lists, an early night, a course somebody recommended.…

The manual now asks for signs by age twelve rather than age seven, and it added wording that fits adult life, including restlessness felt on the inside.

The older cut-off quietly excluded a familiar group: bright children, or well supported ones, who managed until the demands rose and only visibly…

Run a short anxiety and depression screener alongside the ADHD measure at every intake, not only when someone mentions their mood.

Mood and anxiety sit beside ADHD often enough that leaving them out means guessing about the concentration difficulty in front of you. Doing it as…

A tick beside 'does your mind race' means less than it looks like. Someone whose mind has raced since they were nine has nothing to compare it against, so ask what changed and when before you let the score speak.

Take the endorsed items one at a time and put a period of time around each one. When did this start? Was there ever a stretch when it was not there?…

Both people will tell you they were up for three nights. The useful question is what they did with those hours: driven and busy points one way, wired and wrecked points another.

In mania the need for sleep falls away and the activity has a purpose behind it, however unrealistic that purpose looks from outside. In ADHD the…

Nearly everything on the ADHD list can show up inside a bipolar presentation, and the reverse is not true. So the shared features settle nothing, and the distinctly manic ones carry all the weight.

Put your attention on episodic elevation, grandiosity and a genuinely reduced need for sleep. Those do not belong to ADHD on its own, so they tell…

Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder was built partly to keep the bipolar label off children whose future nobody can yet see. Worth remembering when that word lands on a family's paperwork: it describes now, and it does not settle later.

Use it the way it was meant to be used. Review it as the child grows instead of filing it as a fixed fact about their brain, and think about how you…

How an outburst ends tells you more than how it starts. Give an ADHD storm some room and it often burns itself out. The rage that runs for an hour with the lights out behind the eyes is a different animal, and so is the child who genuinely does not mind what you take away.

Ask the parents to walk you through the last three. What set it off, how long it ran, what stopped it, what the child was like an hour afterwards.…

When someone cannot let go of the old rule after the rules have changed, that is the same machinery that loses their keys and drops the thread of a sentence. Stuck, not stubborn.

It shows up in small places. The game changes and they argue for the old version. The usual road is closed and the whole trip falls apart. A plan…

Ask twice. First, who in the family has an actual diagnosis. Then, who do you look back on now and wonder about. The second question nearly always brings more than the first.

Plenty of families never went near a clinic. Help was not trusted, or the answer at home was to stop complaining and get on with it, so the…

A child who grew up listening for a parent's seizure learns to keep half an ear on the room, and years later that can look a great deal like distractibility. Ask what they were listening out for as a child.

This turns up most often where there was one parent and nobody else to keep watch. The person cannot settle, cannot stay with a task, and has assumed…

Alongside diagnoses, ask how relatives died. Falls from roofs, crashes, deaths with the safety gear left on the ground: these recur in some family lines and they say something a list of diagnoses cannot.

Ask it gently and let people take their time, because you are asking about grief as much as about pattern. What you are listening for is a habit of…

Where a relative has taken ADHD medication, take the details: who they are to your patient, what they were given, what it did, and what was tried and dropped. Then put it in the referral letter.

No blood test tells a prescriber where to start, so a brother's clear response to one drug, or a mother's bad reaction to another, is one of the few…

There is no box you type 'always late' into and get the answer out of. When a sensible strategy is not landing, the work is finding out what is blocking it rather than producing another strategy.

If you notice yourself handing over the fourth tool for the same problem, stop and ask a different kind of question. What happened the last time they…

When something did not get done, find out which half broke. Did they not know what to do or when? Or was the plan fine, and the moment for doing it came and went?

Ask for the last time it happened, hour by hour, up to the point where it did not happen. A planning failure needs somewhere reliable to catch tasks…

Awareness is knowing what needs doing and when. Motivation is doing it once you know. Nearly every app on the market solves the first one, which is why buying another one so rarely helps.

Test it with one question: at the moment it did not happen, did you know? If the answer is yes, the reminder was never the missing piece, and a…

A man who could not get himself to bed kept his bedtime alarm upstairs, where his wife and baby were sleeping. Switching it off meant climbing the stairs, and leaving it meant waking them. The walk to the alarm was the thing he was trying to do anyway.

That is the part worth copying. Put the cue somewhere that costs something to answer, and make answering it land you where you meant to be. Anything…

Carry the rough proportions into every ADHD assessment. Executive function difficulty in the great majority, coordination difficulty in around half, dyslexia in something like a quarter to two fifths. A workup that never asks about handwriting, sport or reading is not finished.

The behaviour problem you were called about is often the visible end of an unidentified reading or coordination difficulty. Ask what PE is like, what…