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.

Every practice

2847 practices

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Choose the subtests that answer the question you were actually asked, and read whatever reports the family already has before adding anything of your own. Children arrive with thick folders, and they also arrive with nothing at all.

Where occupational therapy, speech and language or neuropsychology have already covered ground, do not cover it again for the sake of a complete…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 20:26One line of research

When you explain executive function to parents and teachers, four words will do: attention, reasoning, speed, memory. Each one can be worked on, and four is a number people can still repeat at the school gate a week later.

The academic models have a dozen headings and nobody outside the field retains them. A short list gives parents something to hang observations on, so…

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

Two referrals turn up again and again. A young child being asked to leave a school for behaviour, with no developmental or cognitive information anywhere in the file. And a parent saying something is wrong while the school says everything is fine. Both are describing adult frustration rather than a formulation.

In each case the first job is the same: get some data. Not another opinion, not another meeting, but something measured about how this child thinks…

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

If you cannot remember much about being six, you are in the majority. Early childhood comes back poorly for most adults, while the teenage years are far easier to describe.

So do not sit in an assessment feeling you have failed a test because the early years are a blur. Bring what you can find instead: old school…

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

Breathing

Reading, numbers and learning differences

What worry does

Making it stick

Treatment and medication

Emotions as signals

Being seen and judged

Tolerate distress

Remembering to do it

Feeling from the inside

Knowing your partner

What you are actually defending

Breaking the worry loop

Facing it a step at a time

Answering bids

When you use something to cope

Repair after rupture

Shame

Obsessions and compulsions

Shared spiritual life

Rebuilding trust

Righteous anger and perfectionism

When anger turns to harm

Fondness and admiration

Affection and touch

Rituals of connection

Listening and understanding

Posture and how you carry yourself

Anger, alcohol and the body

When you go numb

Rest and pacing

Panic and the body

Living with uncertainty

Safety and grounding

Meaning after harm

Letting it out safely

Let the wave come

Working with anger

Act on your values

Notice the pattern and flex

Name what you feel

Your worth is not conditional

Calm the body

Hold a boundary

Help someone grieving

Listen to the body

Get it out of your head

Care for yourself in loss

Work with your brain

Ask and say no well

Validate yourself and others

Your window of tolerance

Keep the bond

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

A list of symptoms on its own does not make a diagnosis. What counts is that they cost you something real in at least two areas of ordinary life.

That means work or school, money, home, friendships, driving, getting through the week. Almost everyone loses keys and drifts off in meetings, so the…

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

Much of the symptom wording was written with children in mind. If a question sounds like it is about someone climbing the furniture, translate it into your adult life rather than answering no.

Restlessness at forty is rarely running about. It is being unable to sit through a film, the leg going under the table, two jobs left out of boredom.…

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

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

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

Ask for the most frightening moment of their life, then the next one down, then the next, until there is a scale running from one to a hundred. You get the ladder you needed, and they get something they did not expect: fear comes in sizes.

Do it slowly and write it in their words rather than yours. Most people arrive believing anxiety is one solid block that either has hold of them or…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 21:83One 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

If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.

A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 42:38One 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

Before intensive work ends, turn what you have learned about a child's thinking into things a teacher can actually do on a Tuesday morning. That translation is what decides whether any of the gains survive going back to school.

A profile written for clinicians is no use in a classroom of thirty. Give three or four concrete actions instead: where this child sits, how…

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