When you have stopped believing you can change anything, the reflex is to avoid and to scroll. What breaks that is not encouragement, it is one small thing actually finished.

Before you offer anyone the upside of their ADHD, say the hard part out loud first. One patient's answer to being told it was a gift was to ask where he could return it.

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.

The idea that attention problems are a moral failing is older than the diagnosis itself. An early medical name for this put it down to defective moral control, so if you grew up hearing that you simply were not trying, you were hearing an echo of that.