Practices

The age by which symptoms have to have shown up is a number people agreed on, not a line in nature. It moved from seven to twelve when the manual was revised.

That matters if you are an adult wondering whether you would even qualify. The old cut-off was itself a compromise between studies pointing in…

Teenage memories of this often come with a sting: the year you worked out how much longer everything took you than it seemed to take everybody else.

That is usually why adolescence is the period people can describe in detail. The work got harder, the scaffolding of primary school fell away, and…

You do not need clinical language at an assessment. Some of the wording in the manual came straight from how families described it in the first place.

Phrases about being permanently on the go are in there because people kept saying them. So use yours: that your head is like a browser with forty…

Before handing anyone a new system, make sure they can say back why it should work better than what they are doing now. A strategy with no reason attached gets dropped the first time it is inconvenient.

Ask them to explain it to you in their own words and listen for whose reason it is. If the logic is only yours, it will hold for about a week. It is…

Strategies for ADHD are visible. A timer on the table, a list on the wall, an alarm going off in a meeting. If someone has not yet made peace with having ADHD, each of those is an announcement, and it will quietly get dropped.

So ask, before handing over another tool: how do you feel about the diagnosis itself? Sometimes the honest answer is that they still half hope it was…

Ask what they think this will cost them in effort, then say what you think. People rarely give up because a strategy failed. They give up because it turned out to be harder than anyone had told them.

Be specific about the first fortnight, since that is when it is worst and the payoff has not arrived yet. Someone who expected a small effort and met…