I’m pleased to announce a free Psych Central webinar on the topic of relationships and ADHD.

Get psyched with Psych Central’s Zoë Kessler and author Melissa Orlov in a fun hour of sharing about the good stuff in an ADHD / Non-ADHD partnership!

We’ll talk about how we can bring out the best in you and your loved one.

During our webinar, we’ll:

• re-discover what each partner brings  to the relationship
• discover some new ways to bring out the best in you and your loved one!
• invite you to share your positive stories
• remind each other of opportunities and possibilities

…and more!

Parenting a child with ADHD can be especially tough during the summer. “Kids with ADHD blossom when they have a structured schedule, and summertime is notorious for having a lack of scheduling,” according to Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D, a psychotherapist and author of Making the Grade with ADD: A Student’s Guide to Succeeding in College with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Psychotherapist and ADHD expert Terry Matlen, ACSW, agreed. Because most parents can’t mimic the tight structure of school, kids often get bored — and may get into trouble, she said. That’s because when kids with ADHD get bored, they seek out stimuli, which can be anything from picking fights with their families to playing with fire, she said.

Some parents discontinue their child’s medication during the summer, which poses another challenge, said Matlen, also author of Survival Tips for Women with ADHD. “That can create a situation where the child has a hard time with self-control, mood regulation [and] social behaviors.”

But while the summer can be challenging, you can absolutely overcome these obstacles and enjoy a fun break. Below, Sarkis and Matlen offer their excellent suggestions.

I’m pleased to announce a free Psych Central webinar on the topic of the impact of anger in a marriage or romantic partnership with an adult with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Anger is one of those emotions we’re taught to suppress and many of us simply don’t know how to handle it. This webinar will help folks better understand the role of anger in a relationships, and ways with dealing with it.

Here are a few of the topics they’ll cover:

• Why effort and willpower are no match for ADHD treatment in curbing anger

• How anger erodes trust and creates anxiety
• The gender difference in coping with anger
• How untreated ADHD anger can lead to low self-esteem, dwindling self-confidence, and depression
• ADHD-specific anger-management techniques, tools, and treatment that work
• …and more!

A Q & A will also be included.

The webinar is this Thursday, May 10 from 8:00 PM – 9:00 PM EDT.

“Stigma thrives in silence but tends to fade when people are open and we can put a face to a condition or situation,” according to Ari Tuckman, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and author of Understand Your Brain, Get More Done: The ADHD Executive Functions Workbook. The good news is that people are speaking up, and the stigma surrounding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is shrinking.

It’s also decreasing thanks to well-designed studies, said Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D, a psychotherapist and author of several books on ADHD, including Adult ADD: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed. “Research is showing more and more that ADHD is a true biological [and] genetic disorder,” she said.

The bad news is that stigma and stereotypes still persist. Psychotherapist Terry Matlen, ACSW, along with other ADHD experts and advocates wrote a piece on ADHD myths almost 10 years ago. Sadly, she said, the misconceptions today are still the same.

I remember the first time I held (and shot) a gun that didn’t shoot water.

I was a teenager. Fourteen? Fifteen, maybe? I was young.

My dad spent an hour one afternoon playing with his new BB gun. I found him in our backyard on a warm summer day taking shots at an empty cardboard shipping box. He was aiming at the “F” in “FRAGILE”.

I stood on our back deck and listened to the obligatory stories about how he and the neighborhood kids used to shoot birds and squirrels with BB guns when he was a teenager.

A teenager? Hmm. I was a teenager. I’d never shot a gun before.

I asked if I could try shooting it. If he used to play with a BB gun at his age, why couldn’t I?

Somewhat reluctantly, he let me try it.

“Aim for the G,” he said, “because it’s right in the middle. And be careful.”

Despite my best aim, my first shot went straight into the dirt. My second shot hit the top edge of the box and my third hit the wall of the garage. (I don’t remember my dad being too happy about that last one.)

A week ago, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by L. Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, questioning society’s reliance on medications to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He suggested that Ritalin has “gone wrong,” in that we simply rely too heavily on drugs to treat childhood disorders.

He starts off the op-ed, “As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.”

Like most professionals who are trying to boil down decades worth of research into a layperson-friendly length, Dr. Sroufe unfortunately glosses over the psychological literature and what we know (and don’t know) about ADHD medications.

I will say this before we begin… most children would benefit not just from being prescribed an ADHD medication, but also getting specific psychological treatment as well. Few child psychologists and child specialists would be happy if their patients were only getting the benefits of one type of treatment, and many would agree that parents are too quick to medicate before trying non-medication options.

You might ask, “Why would anyone want to fake attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?”

Many years ago, when ADHD was first proposed as a diagnosis, you would’ve been right — few people would’ve bothered faking the diagnosis because it brought you little reward to do so.

But as ADHD diagnoses bloomed over the past two decades, so did special accommodations in the school systems for children and teenagers diagnosed with the disorder. And one of the primary treatments for attention deficit disorder is stimulant medication, something that can be used for less-than-legitimate reasons.

Could teens today really be faking ADHD to get into college?

Welcome to the world of unintended secondary gains and rewards.

“Because people with ADD live fairly fast-paced lives, they can forget to slow down a little and consider whether they are living a balanced life,” writes ADHD expert and psychotherapist Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D, in her book 10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD: How to Overcome Chronic Distraction & Accomplish Your Goals.

Self-care is key to balance. In her book Sarkis shares the various ways people with ADHD can practice self-care. This includes attending to your physical wellness, emotional wellness and spiritual wellness.

(By the way, these tips also are great for everyone.)

Here are valuable suggestions from Sarkis’s book on practicing each type of wellness.

If you’re like some Americans today, you’re looking for a place to fill your prescription for generic medication used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Or your parent is, since most people who take ADHD medications are actually children and teenagers.

But the U.S. federal agency responsible for the shortage — the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) — couldn’t care less.

Even when requested by another agency — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — to help relieve the shortage, the DEA just turned up their noses.

It’s no wonder voters get so sick of government interfering in their daily lives: One short-sighted federal agency tries to lessen an already minor problem — abuse of ADHD medications by a tiny minority of people — that ends up significantly impacting thousands of others unintentionally.

As the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders continues to develop, there has been more and more reaction from professional groups with concerns. The most recent of these is an open letter that was sponsored by group of American Psychological Association divisions, and you can read it here: Open Letter to the DSM-5.

The biggest complaint here is that the DSM-5 development committee appears to have departed from the “atheoretical” approach that the past two version of have taken, in favor of a clear biomedical approach. The DSM-5 also seems to be changing the very definition of mental disorder by adding the criterion: ‘[A behavioral or psychological syndrome] that reflects an underlying psychobiological dysfunction.’

Let me state up front that I have no doubt BPA — a chemical used in the manufacture of many modern goods, including in the past many water bottles and sippy cups — is something we should get rid of in any connection to food. But at the same time, I have to speak out when a scientific study’s findings are misused to forward political agendas.

The findings here come, once again, from the journal Pediatrics. It seems like a month doesn’t go by when this journal is publishing more crappy science, and then draping it in a public relations campaign that gets everyone’s attention. (Actually, to be fair, the science is sometimes fine; it’s the over-reaching conclusions drawn by the researchers and the PR media machine that is truly vomit-inducing.)

In this case, the researchers set out to followup on a previous study that found higher gestational (in the womb) BPA levels increased hyperactivity and aggression scores in 2-year-old girls. They wanted to determine if these findings continue as the children age, whether executive functions were impacted by higher BPA levels, and whether it was gestational BPA as opposed to childhood BPA levels that were more important.

Taking medication can seem like a mystifying process, and many people rely exclusively on their doctor to prescribe the right drug and dose. After all, they’re the experts, right? But some doctors may not be well versed in treating adult ADHD, and may get it wrong.

So what can you do?

The key is to educate yourself about medications for adult ADHD. And, fortunately, there are tons of great resources to become a smart consumer.

I recently came across an excellent piece on medication in ADDitude magazine’s Fall 2011 issue by author Gina Pera. Specifically, the article lists 10 erroneous statements doctors may make about ADHD drugs and the facts behind each one. If your doctor mentions any one of these statements, the author suggests giving them a copy of the treatment guidelines from the Canadian Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Resource Alliance, an organization made up of ADHD experts. Or find a new doctor.

Below, I’ve summarized four facts from the article, some of which might surprise you. Be sure to check out the entire article!