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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11 practices

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Attention and impulse problems that appear for the first time in middle age or later are not ADHD arriving late. They need a doctor to look, not a prescription.

Several conditions affecting the frontal lobes can show up first as new disinhibition, poor judgement or a change in personality, and some are…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 21:7One line of research

Ask about food two generations back. What the parents were like about it, what the grandparents were like, what the rules were at the table.

Much of how a person eats was learned long before anybody mentioned a diagnosis, and a fair amount of the shame around it was learned in the same…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 49:13One line of research

The scales worth using are the ones that ask about situations rather than symptoms alone. Home, school, work, and what actually happens in each.

A questionnaire counting how often somebody loses their keys will label half the population. What a diagnosis needs is evidence that the difficulty…

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

Executive function scales ask how the week actually went. That is often more use than an afternoon of testing in a quiet room.

Office testing happens in the best conditions a person will ever meet: no interruptions, someone sitting with them, a clear finish line in sight.…

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

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

Grounding and settling

When anger turns to harm

Growing empathy

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Repair after rupture

The fear underneath anger

When everything feels flat

Rituals of connection

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Structure and routine

Emotions as signals

Rebuilding trust

When you use something to cope

What worry does

Anger, alcohol and the body

Answering bids

Equanimity and perspective

Feeling from the inside

Practising under provocation

Tolerate distress

Posture and how you carry yourself

Treatment and medication

Obsessions and compulsions

Rest and pacing

Keep the bond

Facing it a step at a time

Choosing your response

Care for yourself in loss

Remembering to do it

Ask about the family properly: parents, brothers and sisters, children, then aunts, uncles and grandparents. Include drinking and drug use, in them as well as in the person sitting with you.

This tends to be the highest yield few minutes of an assessment, because the condition runs strongly in families. Relatives who were never assessed…

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

The family history is not the warm up before the real assessment. Give it proper time and it will often tell you more than any single rating scale in the folder.

Walk through the family rather than asking one summary question about it. Who struggled at school, who could never sit through a meal, who changed…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 49:13One line of research

Note who is a first degree relative and who is a second, instead of writing 'runs in the family'. Parents, children and siblings sit in one ring. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins sit in the next.

A simple grid helps: names down the side, then relation, what they were like, what was ever diagnosed, what was ever treated. The picture comes out…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 58:11One line of research

Ask whether anyone kept the old school reports. The same lines turn up generation after generation: not working to potential, talks too much, never has the right books with him.

They were written by teachers who had never heard of ADHD, about children nobody was going to assess, and that is exactly what makes them worth…

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

'I am disorganised' cannot be treated. 'The post piles up on the hall table until something ends up with a debt collector' can. Spend the time getting the problem down to something that specific.

Push for the particulars: which task, which moment, what was happening just before, what they did instead. Where you can, ask someone who was there…

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

For the child who flies off the handle at noise, labels and crowded rooms, with no autism diagnosis in the picture, a free parent completed sensitivity questionnaire will tell you more than another behaviour chart.

It gives you a structured way to describe the reactivity without reaching for a diagnosis the child may not have, and it points at what to change:…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 4:28One line of research

Run the assessment yourself and watch while they work. Under real effort you will see the small movements, the tics and the overflow that never appear in ordinary conversation, and none of it reaches you if a technician or an app does the testing.

Sit where you can see hands and face. Note what happens as the task gets harder: the tongue that comes out, the leg that starts going, the free hand…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 3:159One line of research