Strengthening Your Mindfulness Toolkit: Motivate, Teach, Make it Fun and Make it Stick
Surviving The Emotional Rollercoaster: Using DBT To Help Clients With Mood And Anxiety Disorders Manage Their Emotions
08 Dec ADHD in the news, ADHD in your caseload
If ADHD is showing up more often in your sessions (or in your referrals), you are probably not imagining it. With growing community awareness and shifting policy settings, many clinicians are seeing increased demand for assessment support, therapy, and shared-care planning. So much so that from 1 December 2025, Queensland introduced reforms allowing specialist GPs to initiate, modify and continue psychostimulant medication for adults with ADHD.
In day-to-day practice, ADHD is often already sitting in your caseload, even when it is not the presenting concern. As Dr Ari Tuckman notes, the “one out of 25” general-population figure is not what many clinicians see in therapy settings, where it may be closer to “one out of 10, or one out of five”, and both the client and clinician may miss it because “that may not be the presenting problem”.
Why this matters in your practice
Getting identification right matters because ADHD can be highly impairing over time, but as Dr Ari notes ADHD-like symptoms can also be “better accounted for by depression… a sleep problem… [or] trauma”, so careful differential thinking (and humility about overlap) protects clients from unhelpful pathways and helps the right supports land sooner.
Identifying ADHD accurately (and early) can be a turning point for clients and the people around them. Dr Ari notes, “ADHD is really at its worst before someone knows that that’s what it is”, whether that is the individual, a partner, or the wider family system. When ADHD is not yet on the radar, it can feel “a bit slippery” and become frustrating for all involved, especially when the presenting problems look like anxiety, depression, conflict, or chronic overwhelm.
As explored in Dr Ari’s course, Family Therapy for ADHD, the upside is real: once ADHD is appropriately recognised, clinicians can choose better-fitting strategies, the work often becomes more rewarding, and families can shift from blame to shared understanding.
Want to go deeper?
If you would like to refresh your ADHD skills (or go deeper in a specific area like assessment, adult treatment, couples work, or family systems), you can explore our full ADHD training collection.
Adult ADHD: Relationships & Sex, How to Treat Both Partners to Help Re-Balance the Relationship
Learning how to work more effectively with these couples will benefit your work with all clients including individuals who are addressing relationship matters.
Identify and Treat the Adults with ADHD Already in Your Caseload
Implement an integrative treatment model that fosters greater consistency and a more satisfying life for your clients.
Family Therapy for ADHD: From Childhood Through Launching
Explore how ADHD impacts individuals and families across childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood
ADHD: Treatment and Symptom Management
An overview of the most common questions caregivers and educators have about ADHD’s symptom management.
Understanding Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
This course will complete an overview of the most common questions caregivers and educators have about ADHD to provide the learners with prepared responses to the questions in digestible and simple terms.
How to Clinically Assess ADHD Using Both Objective and Subjective Data
In this training, Dr Bruce Cappo, Clinical Psychologist who specialises in assessment of complex childhood disorders, will provide a comprehensive ADHD assessment methodology.Â
Treatment of ADHD in Children and Adolescents
This course will provide an updated and comprehensive understanding of ADHD focused on children and adolescents.
Very Best Treatments for ADHD and the Processing Disorders
This seminar focuses on a wide range of concrete skills including assessment of processing and organisational deficits from multiple perspectives and managing symptom overlap among related disorders. You will be able to think clearly about the common “Bipolar or ADHD?” assessment question. By the end of the seminar you will know how to avoid the most common diagnostic error in executive dysfunction assessment.