ADHD

I'll try to talk about the more severe cases, or the more-unique cases, or a case to where you can see the expertise in action.

Case #1: Elementary School kid bouncing off the walls

In this case, the kid just wouldn't sit down. Ever. Teachers reporting he can barely pay attention. Dig into the home life and there isn't a lot of stability. Parental situation where an immediate family member had been dealing with substance abuse. Kid not getting sleep at night, staying up on screens, playing games, and likely running around the house. Family has 4 kids and a few other additional adults living with them.

Formulated the treatment plan to be mainly about mindfulness, breathing, i-feel statements. Utilized a lot of Play Therapy. Kid opened up about home life. Mainly there was no routine. We would draw objectives to do when they got home. Drawing a person sleeping, making an easy-to-read list and having pictures next to the words as well. And again, lots of mindfulness. Breathing exercises, role-play for playground issues, role-play for issues on the bus. Kid would take up for their siblings and couldn't/wouldn't let anyone talk to their siblings like that. Recommendation was headphones for the bus and to sit in front of the bus (good luck having that play out unless it was mandated by the school which in this case the school mandated the kid sit in the front of the bus). So all in all with the treatment plan and the interventions from the principal and the school bus driver, they were able to ride the bus. The reports coming from the teachers were that there were improvements and they were getting in less trouble in class. We also created strategies for self-regulation (i.e. what to do if you notice you're off-task in class). Teachers were open to giving him many breaks in class and learned to leverage the breaks with getting more output for classwork.

All in all, parents were happy, kid improved, and the system operated efficiently enough to make progress with the kid's goals.