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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Medication and how it works
Count the corrections in a single day and it is easy to see what accumulates. By the time an offer comes from someone friendly, the pull is belonging rather than the substance itself. So the ordinary business of finding what they are good at, protecting one friendship, cutting the running commentary at home, is doing more than making them feel better. Keep going with it even when it looks unrelated to the presenting problem.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
'My servants who have harmed yourselves by your own excess, do not despair of God's mercy' (Quran 39:53). Even where there has been real fault, despair is the thing being ruled out, and a child feels that long before they could explain it.
الزمر
۞قُلۡ يَٰعِبَادِيَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَسۡرَفُواْ عَلَىٰٓ أَنفُسِهِمۡ لَا تَقۡنَطُواْ مِن رَّحۡمَةِ ٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَغۡفِرُ ٱلذُّنُوبَ جَمِيعًاۚ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلۡغَفُورُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ
Say, ‘[God says], My servants who have harmed yourselves by your own excess, do not despair of God’s mercy. God forgives all sins: He is truly the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful
Qur’an 39:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a study of over three hundred children taking methylphenidate, poor adherence tracked with maternal distress and with strain in the parent and child relationship rather than with symptom severity alone. It examined whether medicine got taken, not peer pressure, so it does not test this tip directly. What it does support is that the emotional weather around a child shows up in how treatment goes, which makes attending to it part of the job.
Gau SS, Shen HY, Chou MC, Tang CS, Chiu YN, Gau CS. (2006). Determinants of adherence to methylphenidate and the impact of poor adherence on maternal and family measures.. Journal of child and adolescent psychopharmacology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A child who already feels wanted somewhere has less to gain from being wanted by anyone.
Stopping medication rises sharply in the early teenage years. If that is where you are, it helps to know this is the usual pattern rather than a sign that something has gone wrong with your child.
Being given a medicine that holds no licence for your condition can feel like being experimented on. Usually it means the evidence is decent but thinner than a licence demands.
People usually stop for one of three reasons: the side effects are not worth it, the price is too high, or the dose was never raised far enough to do anything. The last one is the saddest, because it makes a workable medicine look useless.