Social Therapy and
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Many families are searching for help in dealing with the often baffling challenges of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For parents the question is often whether or not to medicate, and most doctors will point them toward the plethora of medications that are now available. Many of them can work quite well in helping a child to focus — well enough, in fact, that schools are often at the forefront of encouraging their use.
So what’s the answer? Is medication good for the child? Is it enough? Can it be harmful? Side effects are not uncommon, and can be severe. The wide variety of medications and methods of use can be bewildering. Many parents are concerned that while the drugs control the child’s behavior, they do nothing to support — and may actually impede — the child’s emotional growth and acquisition of tools for being with and relating to others.
The decision whether or not to medicate is an important one, and in social therapy we help parents work on how they want to make that decision. If they choose not to medicate, we will support that decision. If it turns out to be that medication is their choice, then we insist that the prescription include more than just the pill or the patch. Medication alone, we feel, is not an answer.
Group therapy for ADHD
It is in the context of a group that children can begin to learn who they are and how they are in the world. Our work in social therapy begins by helping the child see that he or she is, in fact, hyperactive, and has difficulty focusing. We create a multi-family group environment in which the child and the family can discover the impact they have on others. For example, through interacting with the group, children begin to experience the difference between being focused on others or not. We help them begin to discriminate when they are moving faster than those around them, and when they are moving so fast they can’t really handle themselves.
Children are often astonished by seeing and experiencing themselves as “out of control.” Sometimes as they slow down, they feel sad or even lost, because “going fast” is all they know how to do. As children with ADHD learn to self-regulate, they need to develop new, gratifying ways to be with others. The group gives them that opportunity. In the group, children are supported in playing and performing — creative, collaborative activities through which they discover, sometimes for the first time in memory, that they can be with other people. They experience themselves as givers of their creativity and strengths, as well as of their disabilities.
For an inside look at a multi-family group and its work with children diagnosed with ADHD, Asperger’s or on the Autism Spectrum, click here.
