Professor Dave Coghill

You need somebody who's very skilled to engage.

We know people with ADHD.

If their ADHD isn't treated...

find it hard to engage in therapy so you need some extra steps in there but that doesn't mean you should rush to medication and not try the psychological therapies every situation is different which is why the right clinician will take the time to understand exactly what is going on and then make a treatment plan that is safe and has the best chance of success

So we did one family of ADHD medications, the stimulants, and we have another family of non-stimulants.

Yeah, and so you only have one registered non-stimulant in New Zealand called Atomoxetine.

It used to be called Stratera, but it's now under several different brands.

Atomoxetine, not as strong as the stimulants, takes a lot longer to kick in, but it is much more effective across the whole day.

And even though it's not as good, in inverted commas, as the stimulants, it's still actually a really, really effective medication.

Atomoxetine for ADHD is more effective than the SSRIs are for anxiety.

It often gets a bad rap because it's compared to the stimulants, which are superstars in performance.

It is actually really nerdy.

There was one study that looked like it worked.

And then when we questioned the people who did that study and we said, you need to do it in different settings.

They told us, oh, there's only one dietitian in the world that can do this diet.

And so we said, well, if there's only one dietitian in the world that can do the diet.

It ain't very helpful to people who don't live next door.

And so we've looked again at that data and those restrictive elimination diets don't seem to be helpful.

One thing that was helpful was taking away artificial food colouring.

And so in the UK, they actually banned several of the artificial food colourings because they had been shown to make people hyperactive.