How great that the internet offers a chance to review your 2020 intentions to see how you are doing, while setting a course for a new year. Aiming for calm, creating chaos. Broadcaster Clare Catford and journalist Emma Mahony do just that, while reminding ADHDers everywhere that they are not alone with this struggle.
At the beginning of October’s ADHD Awareness month, we posted this podcast to remind people that there’s no shame in asking for help if you have this complex neuro-developmental disorder. In fact, we believe it can be key to making your life, career and relationships a success, so try making it a habit. All too often people with ADHD think they “should” be able to function in the same way as everyone else, and so try harder, leading to burn out or dropping out in an effort to keep up. All along, if they just asked for help occasionally instead, they would have more time for the things where they are really good at – and let their creativity shine through. We think this message is so important that we are going to close ADHD Awareness month with this thought. After all, what’s the point of having a diagnosis if you don’t use it to get more help?
More taboo than death these days, Journalist Emma Mahony and Broadcaster Clare Catford discuss how having ADHD affects your attitude to money, and what you can do to help yourself
As well as posting a recent review of my own book Better Late Than Never on adult ADHD – I wanted to highly recommend a fantastic new book out by Kat Brown called “It’s Not a Bloody Trend!” (love that title). It launched this February, and I have already finished it because it is a galloping and brilliant piece of writing. It successfully brings together different voices as well as Kat’s own nuanced but never sorry-for-herself exploration of her own ADHD. Even when she described her nickname as “Robogob” at school, which made me drop the book with a cruel hoot, she is measured in her approach in how neurodiversity has affected her life.
The research that has gone into the book is properly thorough, and she has got a good variety of people involved from the esteemed CEO of the ADHD Foundation Dr Tony Lloyd to the average Joe, and there are plenty of interviews so everyone’s experience is valid.
Anyone who is exploring their own ADHD would do well to buy this, because it genuinely adds to the sum of human understanding on this complex neurological difference, and my link above is to the Bookshop.org because I don’t use Amazon (they don’t pay tax in this country and have devastated sales in High Street Bookshops). Copies bought through Bookshop.org donate to a fund for independent booksellers, and over £3.4m has been donated to date through them.
Journalist Emma Mahony and Broadcaster Clare Catford look back at the close of October ADHD awareness month and talk about how to have a “Medication Vacation” following yesterday’s piece in the Sunday Times – detailing how roughly 200,000 patients are experiencing a shortage in their ADHD medication supply, which could last till Christmas. GPs have been told not to start new patients on any medication during the shortage. How can you get extra support at work being “out” about your ADHD?
Commissioned by the Teaching website Teachit to write this piece on supporting students with ADHD in a mainstream classroom, I couldn’t resist offering a mini-glimpse of the challenges for the average teacher (let alone a neurodiverse one). The result is this short piece that was published in April 2023 but has been retweeted and reposted throughout ADHD Awareness month this October to remind educators that there is always another way. Not necessarily better, but another.
In this episode of the ADHD Post-Lockdown diaries, author and educator Emma Mahony and broadcaster and journalist Clare Catford explore their shared view of physician Gabor Maté’s theories about ADHD, which he himself has and two of his children. Despite this, he argues that it is not hereditary but the result of early trauma and lack of attunement. Most recently he argued this when he diagnosed Prince Harry in an interview. What’s your view?
What did you last read on neurodiversity? If you haven’t read any of these books – here are some of the latest thinkers and scientists writing accessibly on how the brain works. It’s good to see ADHD in the mix with my book ‘Better Late than Never’ included. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2023/01/neurodiversity-books-characters-memoir-diagnosis
Author, journalist and teacher Emma Mahony along with broadcaster and media consultant Clare Catford discuss during new(ish) year resolutions and how helpful dangling year-long intentions are in front of an ADHDer’s brain.
This ADHD Awareness month, Author and Teacher Emma Mahony and Broadcaster and Podcaster Clare Catford encourage ADHD-ers to follow their gut and take a risk, after years of feeling “wrong” in a neuro-typical world. How risk-taking can be a strength of an ADHD diagnosis, not a curse. As Clare demonstrates while protesting on behalf of the Posties…
On the eve of travelling up to the ADHD Foundation conference, author Emma Mahony and broadcaster Clare Catford explore the different reactions to their parents dying recently and ask whether it is “me or the ADHD”?
Author Emma Mahony and Broadcaster Clare Catford explore this little known aspect of ADHD where sufferers are more sensitive than others to criticism, perhaps because, by the age of 12, ADHDers receive up to 20,000 more negative comments about themselves than other children. So what effect does RSD have on friendships, relationships and self-esteem?
Better Late than Never 