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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2485 practices

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Not every bout of eating too much belongs to an eating disorder. Ask whether how the body looks is part of it, because that is where the two paths separate.

When bingeing comes out of ADHD it is often boredom, or the food simply being there with nothing stepping in to stop it, and the person is not…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 95:4One line of research

Check the licensing before assuming you cannot afford a good instrument. Some come with permission to photocopy once you have bought the manual.

That detail matters most to the clinicians least likely to have a budget, which usually means the services seeing the families with fewest options. A…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 65:7One line of research

There is more than one decent instrument, and which you use often comes down to what you were trained on. If you have never used one, say so rather than having a view about it.

Several rating scales are in wide circulation for children and for adults, validated by different groups for slightly different purposes. Picking one…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:32One line of research

Home DNA tests turn up relatives nobody expected. If someone is thinking of taking one to fill in a blank family history, it is worth saying out loud that it may hand them more than they asked for.

People find half siblings. Sometimes they find that the story they were told about their birth was not the story. That is a great deal to receive by…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 50:16

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

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Structure and routine

What worry does

Making it stick

Treatment and medication

Emotions as signals

Being seen and judged

Feeling from the inside

When you use something to cope

Tolerate distress

Facing it a step at a time

Breaking the worry loop

Remembering to do it

What you are actually defending

Shame

Obsessions and compulsions

Righteous anger and perfectionism

When anger turns to harm

Posture and how you carry yourself

Self-compassion

Anger, alcohol and the body

Living with uncertainty

Letting it out safely

One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 16:43One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:286One line of research

Ask for a number first, then go hunting for exceptions. How is today on a scale of one to ten, and when was it last higher than that?

An assessment can turn into an hour of everything that is wrong, which leaves a person flatter than when they arrived. Exception questions do the…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 94:5One line of research

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.…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 42:38One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 96:5One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 21:83One line of research

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?…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 49:6One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 20:114One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 39:9One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 17:36One line of research

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.…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:31One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 4:28One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 50:16One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 91:8One line of research

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…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 12:87One line of research

The relative who was shut in a cupboard, tied to a chair or expelled was being managed for the same thing you are assessing now. There was simply no name for it then and no help attached to it.

Told carefully, this changes the story a family tells about itself. Not a line of difficult people, but a trait that has been present for generations…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 24:61One line of research