Adult ADHD: Therapy

Video Transcript

"In my opinion, both as a healthcare employee, and as a person with ADHD, I think talk therapy and other sorts of interventional therapy of that sort, or equally as important as medication, if not more important. So many people with ADHD become accustomed to feeling like they're failures, or expecting to fail at things, that it becomes almost impossible to address the ADHD because of how bad you feel about yourself, and it's hard to see the ADHD as being a cause of your problems. And a very effective therapy method in dealing with, not only symptoms of ADHD and some of the issues, is something called cognitive behavioral therapy. To sum it up sort of quickly--cognitive behavioral therapy is a health segment in itself. Cognitive behavioral therapy is speaking with a therapist, and learning to understand--have cognition of your behaviors, and once you have understanding, once you know you're participating in a behavior such as dominating a conversation, or being distracted when you need to be focused, you can then learn to acknowledge the behavior, and put into place a counter to that behavior that's something you've worked on and something you've practiced. If for example, when I know I'm talking too much and dominating the conversation, as soon as I become aware of it, I cut off what I'm saying at an appropriate point, and if need be I apologize to the person--I'm sorry, I didn't mean to talk too much, get distracted. I didn't mean to overwhelm you, I'm sorry about that. Another very effective method of therapy in ADHD is working with an ADHD coach, and this is a therapist who is trained in helping an ADHD person to organize their life, organize your living space, organize your bills. ADHD coaches can be very effective in the workplace for helping somebody to efficiently use their time, and efficiently use their workspace. And coaching shouldn't be something you need to work with on a lifetime basis, but when things get a little out of control--both inside your head, and outside in your surroundings, an ADHD coach can be very helpful in giving you a place to start learning how to line everything and organize things once again. "