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Draft for review only — not for publication or scheduling If you have reached midlife and suddenly feel that your usual systems no longer work, you are not imagining it. Menopause does not create ADHD, but hormonal transition can expose or intensify executive-function difficulties that you have spent years compensating for. The “masking debt” of midlife For many women, ADHD has been hidden in plain sight. You may have achieved highly, arrived early, over-prepared, copied ot

Draft for review only : not for publication or scheduling Hair pulling can be incredibly difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it. People often say to themselves, “Why can’t I just stop?” They may promise that this will be the last time, hide thinning areas of hair, avoid hairdressers or photographs, or feel ashamed when somebody notices. Yet trichotillomania is not simply a bad habit or a lack of willpower. Trichotillomania, sometimes called Hair-Pulling

A neurodevelopmental assessment can bring profound clarity. It may finally explain executive dysfunction, sensory processing differences, attention regulation, communication patterns, impulsivity, or the exhausting daily work of masking. An ADHD or autism diagnosis should not, however, become a full stop. Sometimes a child’s anxiety, low mood, obsessive fears or behavioural changes are quietly folded into the neurodevelopmental profile. The distress becomes “part of the ADHD”

You can be surrounded by people and still feel profoundly alone. You may share a home, a bed, a friendship group or a busy workplace, yet experience a hollow space where emotional understanding, tenderness or reliable support should be. This is not a personal failure. Loneliness is a complex psychological and relational experience, not simply a measure of how many people are physically nearby. A useful distinction is between social loneliness, emotional loneliness and social

Returning to school, college or university after a long summer break can feel oddly disorientating. On paper, September is meant to symbolise a fresh start. In practice, for many children, teenagers and young adults, it can feel like being dropped into a fast-moving current before your internal system has fully rebooted. The timetable returns. Homework appears. Emails accumulate. Group chats restart. Deadlines, forms, uniforms, packed lunches, transport arrangements, reading

If your child avoids food because of texture, smell, fear of choking, low appetite or previous pain, you may have encountered ARFID: avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. So, what is CBT-AR? CBT-AR is cognitive behavioural therapy developed specifically for ARFID. It is one of the most developed and clearly manualised ARFID-specific treatments currently available. “Leading” does not mean universally proven or guaranteed to work. The evidence is promising, but much of it

Draft for review only , not for publication or scheduling Short answer: no. If your child is eating very little, losing weight or becoming nutritionally compromised, the answer is not to apply more pressure. It is to seek the right medical and psychological support. Most parents who ask, “Should I force my child to eat?”, are not cruel. They are frightened. They may have tried encouragement, routines and gentle exposure, while watching their child’s food list shrink. Someone

Vomiting is unpleasant for everyone. However, for some children, the fear of being sick becomes much larger than an ordinary dislike. It can begin to organise meals, school attendance, bedtime, travel and family life. This fear is known as emetophobia, or specific phobia of vomiting (SPOV). It may involve fear of vomiting oneself, seeing someone else vomit, feeling nauseous or being in situations where vomiting seems possible. In a treatment-seeking clinical sample, emetophob

The short answer Yes. Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) appears to occur considerably more often among autistic people than in the general population. Nevertheless, an autistic child having a narrow diet does not automatically mean that they have ARFID. That distinction matters enormously. Many autistic children have strong and consistent food preferences. They may prefer one brand, one texture, one temperature or one particular arrangement on the plate. Thes

Short answer: The signs of ARFID cluster in four places: what happens at the table, what happens to the body, what happens to the child's world, and what's driving the avoidance. A short food list on its own isn't ARFID. A short food list plus real impact usually is. Most parents arrive at the word ARFID after years of being told to relax, that he'll eat when he's hungry, that she's just being fussy. By then they've usually stopped mentioning it at appointments. Which is a sh

Short answer: Picky eating is common, tends to peak in the preschool years and usually softens with time. ARFID is an eating disorder in which food avoidance is severe enough to affect a child’s growth, nutrition or life. The dividing line isn’t how many foods a child eats. It’s how much the eating is costing them. Almost every parent of a toddler has stood at a kitchen counter holding a plate of something they’ve been asked for and then rejected. That’s normal. Really normal

The question behind the question If you have ADHD, you may have wondered whether therapy creates lasting change: or whether the benefits disappear as soon as the sessions end. It is an understandable concern. ADHD affects attention, working memory, planning and task initiation across the changing landscape of everyday life. A strategy may work beautifully in one season, then become harder to access when sleep deteriorates, demands increase or stress pushes your nervous syste

When psychological therapy does not help, it can be tempting to conclude that you have failed, or that therapy itself is pointless. For autistic adults, that conclusion may be especially painful when the therapeutic approach has not been adapted to your sensory, communication, functional or cultural needs. A 2026 study offers a more nuanced picture. Rather than describing one average response, researchers examined how depression and anxiety symptoms changed across 7,175 autis

The return to school can be exciting. For some autistic and ADHD children it is also one of the hardest transitions of the year. After several weeks of a looser summer rhythm, September brings louder rooms, unfamiliar routines, more social demand, and a sharp rise in what the child has to hold in mind at once. Not every neurodivergent child struggles with the return. But some need far more preparation, predictability and recovery time than the adults around them expect. If yo

Leaving home for university is often presented as an exciting milestone: new friends, greater independence, intellectual discovery and the first taste of adult freedom. Nevertheless, for some students, the transition can feel less like a gentle opening and more like stepping onto a moving platform without handrails. Familiar routines disappear. Administrative demands multiply. Sleep becomes irregular. Meals, medication, laundry, travel and deadlines must be managed simultaneo

Ageing is not a psychological failure. Neither is wanting to look refreshed, choosing a cosmetic procedure, or deciding that you would rather leave your face entirely alone. Nevertheless, the emotional landscape around ageing, menopause, body image and appearance can be complicated. A decision that feels freely chosen one day may feel pressured the next. A wrinkle may be a normal part of a life lived, yet still evoke grief, uncertainty or a painful sense that the person in th

If eating has become a daily negotiation, you may already know how quickly food avoidance is misunderstood. A child may be called “fussy”. An adolescent may be accused of seeking attention. An adult may be told to “just be more disciplined”. Meanwhile, the person is navigating sensory distress, fear, low appetite, anxiety or a nervous system that does not experience food as neutral. This is one reason it is so important to understand avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder,

If you are a neurodivergent adult living in the modern world, you have likely heard this refrain more times than you can count: "Everyone feels exhausted right now. You just need to get an early night, take a weekend holiday, and practise a bit of mindfulness." When you are dragging your bones through another week, struggling to string two coherent sentences together, and feeling like your entire neurological system has been short-circuited, being told that your profound coll

👉 GRAB YOUR FREE HOLIDAY SURVIVAL GUIDE As the sun climbs higher and the school gates close for the long summer break, a peculiar cultural narrative takes hold. Magazines, social media feeds, and advertisements bombard us with idyllic imagery: sun-drenched picnics, smiling children building sandcastles, and relaxed families drifting effortlessly through long, golden afternoons. Yet, for many parents, particularly those raising neurodivergent children or managing complex, hig

We live in an era of hyper-connectivity, where our pocket-sized screens beam the highlights of thousands of lives directly into our retinas twenty-four hours a day. Yet, beneath the veneer of digital omnipresence, a quiet, corrosive crisis is unfolding across the United Kingdom. Fresh data reveals a sobering statistical reality: approximately 1 in 10 Britons now report having zero close friends (YouGov, 2026; The Independent, 2026). Furthermore, this "friendship recession" cu