Question: Does medication help?

Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Sometimes, and for some children.

Some children really do have ADHD that can be helped with Ritalin. I wasn’t really sold on the idea of ADHD before I met a child who had such awful problems concentrating and just sitting still. I was trying to assess him, and he couldn’t sit still without fiddling with everything on the table. I asked him to go outside and run about and then come back, and he came back and was able to concentrate again for a while. This wasn’t a ‘naughty’ boy at all, he really wanted to be good, but he was always getting in trouble for fidgeting and not concentrating. Medication really helped this child, and I’m glad that some children can have the help that they need in a relatively simple way.

Other children don’t really benefit from medication, and so this is when psychologists with good behavioural interventions can really play an important role. I used to work in a hospital with psychiatrists (doctors with an interest in mental health problems), and it was interesting to see how medicine and psychology could work together to help children manage their difficulties. I’m certainly not against medication at all, but I also don’t think that it’s a good idea to rely on it without thinking about behavioural help.