ADD/ADHD Online Information

Thanet ADDers Newsletter

Volume 3, Number 1, June '99

Important, Please Note

This is a copy of our local group's paper newsletter sent out to members of Thanet ADDers. For our main online homepage click here for adders.org. Much will have happened since this newsletter was sent out, so check adders.org for up to date information.

Day Trip To Chessington World of Adventure

We will be organising another day trip to Chessington World of Adventure again this year. The date for the trip will be 12th. August and the cost will be £15 per person. This unfortunately a little dearer than last years trip as we have been unable to obtain a grant to help towards the cost. As usual children under 4 years will be free entry to Chessington so the charge will only be for the coach which will be £5 per child. Please could you let me know if you would like to go on the trip by filling in the slip at the end of this newsletter and returning it to me with your payment by the 15^th June 1999 so that I can book the coach and order the tickets in advance. Everyone who books will receive details of the trip with pick up point’s etc. by the beginning of August.

Thomas Phelan Talks in Kent

Thomas Phelan, author of 1,2,3, Magic, a book about behaviour management technique and specialist in ADHD from America, will be speaking in Maidstone on 6th July.

Tickets for the talk cost £6, and are available from ADDISS.

Please see the enclosed information sheet for more details.

Youth Club

We will be unable to re-start the Youth Club as we have been unable to ensure the support of qualified Youth Workers, also the insurance is rather high and at the moment we do not have the funds to take this out.

ADHD Awareness Week

We are arranging an Awareness Week to be held Nationally in November with members of the ADHD Alliance. This will consist of a mail shot to all MPs Health Authorities, Education Authorities Social Services Departments, District and County Councillors, Prisons and Young Offenders Institutes throughout the country. Each group will be asked to send a letter to each of the above for their area. By this we hope to at least ensure that the whole of the country will be covered and that all of the agencies that will come into contact with our children and also adult sufferers will at least have heard of ADHD.

Next year we hope to be able to hold events throughout the country, starting with a Grand Launch in London. We hope to be able to involve celebrities to help raise awareness to the condition and the need for a uniformed approach to treatments available throughout the country.

We need to have ideas of what events we could hold at local level and volunteers to organise this as we, Caroline and Simon are involved in the National Programme organisation and therefore will not have to much time to organise a local event.

We will however be organising local media coverage for the week and local events.

If anyone has any ideas please contact us so that we can start to make plans. These could range from a sponsored event to an awareness campaign of publicity table in town or visits to schools.

If anyone has any ideas as to any public figures we could ask to take part, either Nationally or Locally we would love to hear them.

We will offer all the support to those who feel that they can help and can do all of the publicity and advertising.

Please think about how you can help, as we really need to raise awareness to the suffering of our children and adult sufferers.

What can be done to help adult sufferers and what is available to our children when they leave the paediatric service?

The answer to this is that locally there are no facilities for adults or for adolescents when they leave school.

We are at the present time trying to arrange a meeting with the Local Health Authority to see if there can be some facilities made available locally.

Caroline has recently been diagnosed by a local Psychiatrist but has found that although he realised that medication helped he was unable to prescribe as neither of the drugs is licensed for adults. There are no other services such as counselling or coaching available either.

This issue has proved that the battle for the correct help needed for our children will start all over again once they leave school. Something must be done to address this. If anyone has had any experience of this please get in touch as the more evidence we can provide the more chance we have of changing things locally.

New Children’s Book

Hunter of the past is a new book written to help children to understand ADHD. Once a child has a diagnosis we as parents often sigh a sigh of relief. It is not that we are bad parent, which we have been told on dozens of occasions by various people who try to explain why our child doesn’t appear to be able to control their emotions in the same way as others. We can then try to get the best forms of help for our child and we feel relieved that medication appears to help.

But what about the child, there is very little thought given to how the child interprets what is happening to them, the doctors may try to give some explanation but this rarely is at the child’s ability to understand. There is very little in the way of counselling to help the child understand why they act differently to others in their class. The child needs to be able to express their feelings and needs to be accepted as an individual in their own right, not just "oh its that kid again..."

Caroline and Bernard Braham have tried to address this in a very simple format so that the child can see why they behave as they do based on the Hunter and Farmer Theory written and talked about by Thom Hartmann, a renowned writer and speaker on ADHD from the US.

Hunter of the Past is a short paperback available for £3 inc. post and packing from Thanet ADDers.

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