Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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165 practices

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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.

Bupropion is the common case. It helps some people with attention difficulties, often alongside a stimulant, and it never gained the indication, so…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:36One line of research

Debt, impulsive spending, an account that never quite recovers: this belongs in the conversation about attention rather than in a separate drawer marked shame.

People hide this part longer than anything else, which means it is usually the last thing to get any help. If you are the one struggling, saying it…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 33:5One line of research

Before you explain anything about medication, ask what the person already believes about it. You cannot correct a worry that has never been said out loud.

Most people arrive carrying something: a cousin who could not sleep, a headline, a parent with a strong view. Lead with your own information and you…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 42:38One line of research

In practice the non-stimulants turn up more often as an addition than on their own. A stimulant in the morning with guanfacine alongside it is a common shape.

The two act at different points of the same circuit, so they tend to complement rather than repeat each other, and the blood pressure effect of one…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 42:38

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

Shame

The fear underneath anger

What you are actually defending

Your nervous system

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Grounding and settling

Making it stick

When everything feels flat

Obsessions and compulsions

Choosing your response

One line of research

Where anxiety sits alongside the attention difficulty, a non-stimulant is sometimes the better first choice. Stimulants sharpen anxiety in some people, and that is a hard trade to live with.

The same holds when blood pressure rises on a stimulant that is otherwise working, since adding an alpha-2 agent can make it possible to keep the…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:83One line of research

A small short-acting dose in the afternoon, on top of the long-acting one, is ordinary practice rather than a special case. Homework and the evening drive often fall outside what the morning dose still reaches.

The hours when you most need to hold back are frequently the hours the medicine has stopped covering. Raising the morning dose to solve an early…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 73:20One line of research

These are among the best studied medicines in psychiatry, in use for decades. Most of the hesitancy around them traces back to how they get covered in the press rather than to the safety record.

Saying that is not the same as saying there is nothing to watch. Heart rate and blood pressure shift a little, appetite and sleep often need…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 49:6One line of research

For a family stuck on whether to medicate at all, the comparison with diabetes often unlocks something. Nobody manages diabetes on diet alone, and nobody calls insulin a moral failure.

Offered gently it moves the question from what kind of parent am I towards what does this condition need. Played as a trump card it makes people…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69One line of research

Methylphenidate and amphetamine are not two names for the same thing. One mainly blocks dopamine from being taken back up, and the other does that and pushes more of it out as well.

That extra step is why the amphetamines tend to produce somewhat larger average effects, and why somebody who got nothing from one can do well on the…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:43One line of research

The potential for misuse belongs to one of the three families rather than to ADHD medicines generally. The stimulants reach the reward circuitry and the others do not.

That gives a clear answer where there is a substance history in the house, or a worry about tablets going missing at school. Say plainly that a…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:35One line of research

When somebody decides against medication, respect the decision and then say the rest plainly. Some of the struggle will stay, and no amount of therapy or another clever app will fully close that gap.

Left unsaid, the person keeps trying harder and reads the shortfall as personal inadequacy, which is the very belief you are working to undo. Said…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 17:36One line of research

Ask how many hours the cover really lasts, not only whether it helps. A long acting stimulant is meant to carry roughly ten to twelve hours, so if everything collapses by mid afternoon that is worth reporting.

Very few lives need only six good hours. Evenings hold homework, cooking, driving, tempers and the people you live with, and those hours get written…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 9:91One line of research

Put today next to the night before it, out loud and often. How did today go after seven hours of sleep, next to the day that followed staying up until three?

ADHD makes it hard to link a consequence back to a choice made hours or days earlier, so the link has to be supplied from outside until it starts…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 16:69One line of research

Plenty of children on a stimulant are taking something else as well, most often an antidepressant. That second medicine is usually there for a second problem rather than for the attention itself.

It is a useful lens when a regimen has grown complicated. Ask what each item is for, and the list generally resolves into a treatment for the…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:35One line of research

To find out whether treatment is helping, ask the people who live with the person. One parent who stopped her medication for a family holiday remembered a lovely trip, while her children remembered running it.

Two teenagers had packed for her, fetched what she forgot, and kept an eye on the airport clock. She had no idea any of it happened. There is no…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 3:159One line of research

The old argument about medication against behaviour therapy was set down years ago. The useful question now is what each one covers.

They work by different routes and they reach different hours of the day, so putting them in a single contest was never going to tell anyone much.…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 12:67One line of research

Adding psychosocial work to medication buys something extra, and less than people hope. The extra tends to arrive in the places medication was never going to reach.

Homework routines, the temperature of arguments at home, how a teacher speaks to a child, the hours after a dose has worn off: that is where the…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:286One line of research

Doing the behavioural work alongside a medicine can mean managing on less of it. That matters most for the side effects that follow the size of the dose.

Appetite, sleep and irritability all tend to scale with how much is being taken. Where part of the load is carried by routines, by support at school,…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 7:31One line of research

Medication treats the attention difficulty. It does not teach reading, lift a depression, or repair a household that has been fighting for years.

Those things need treatment of their own, and they are often what the family actually came about. Treating the attention difficulty well can stop…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:83One line of research

Smoking runs high in ADHD, and nicotine genuinely does something for attention. It helps to treat that as self-medication rather than as one more impulsive habit.

It changes what a conversation about stopping looks like. If a cigarette is doing a job, taking it away and leaving the job undone is a plan that…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 39:53One line of research