Treatment of ADD

- Offer help with identifying ADD in daily life
- Learn to make use of the stronger sides of your personality
- Learn to recognise your weaknesses
- Come up with effective strategies in dealing with concentration problems
- Offer good alternatives to stop concealing and compensating ADD
- Counseling to keep observing the above
- Education in dealing with emotions / anxiety / panic / depression
- Interviews with loved ones so they can support and help the ADD-er
- Cognitive behavioural therapy
- Pay attention to and offer solutions for problems with study and work
- Offer help / intervention with repair of possibly damaged relationships
- Pay attention to possible sleep problems / eating habits
- Offer explanation concerning the urge for dopamine increasing drugs / activities
- Regularly discuss the working mechanism and possible use of medication.

Tip: Discuss what the ADD-er can or should do should problems arise outside office hours or during holiday periods of the health professional.

Tip: Schools could regularly have the school-reports examined by an external specialist

You can support an ADD-er by helping with:

- Identify healthy, realisable goals
- Learn to understand the flow of thoughts of a non-ADD-er
- Learn to understand the flow of thoughts of an ADD-er
- Apply such a structure that there is no longer a need for concealing
- Set up a a well-organised household and a user-friendly financial administration
- Learn to understand the brain functions and their influence on behaviour
- Look for ways around, and solutions to personal problems
- Encourage all the time
- Give emotional support and listen after the diagnose
- Learn to prioritise with observance of concentration problems
- Look for healthy addictions
- Take a regular time-out
- Build self-confidence
- Learn to see how much the ADD-er as an individual can handle
- Help to learn observing limitations

- Learn to see that ADD also has advantages. May ADD-ers are autodidacts, to name one thing

By: Karin Windt – 2004 – Levente.nl (acknowledge source when quoting)
Karin is the instigator and en president of the Dutch ADD Foundation / Stichting ADD Nederland. Karin has ADD. Translated by Maike Dulk 2006.