Hello,

I have joined this forum because I have recently made friends with a young man who has been struggling with severe ADHD and no social support for pretty much his whole life. He is now facing his first criminal charge as an adult for B&E after impulsively walking into his a high school portable at night and getting caught by the police. He needs legal assistance, social assistance and psychiatric help and cannot get around to getting any of them because he has no real friends or family helping him out and can't deal with all the organisational aspects of pulling these things together.

While growing up he was pushed around between foster parents and group homes, and missed out on most of his public education because of this. So essentially his reading/writing skills are abysmal, as is his ability to follow conversations or remember things.

I cannot tell how much of his cognitive deficiencies are a) related to his ADHD and b) treatable. He has huge memory lapses, trips over his words and says that even looking at a page full of text causes a kind of 'thought overload' in his head so he just avoids reading in general. I suspect there must be some kind of learning disability behind this, too, but what do I know.

When he was young he went through the psychiatric wringer and says he's been put on every kind of medication under the sun (though he's never had any psychotherapy or counselling. He says all the advice he got was "take meds or hopefully you'll just grow out of it".) He has never dealt with psychiatrists, only pediatricians. So now he's extremely anti-drug, but I am just watching him slip farther down as he just lives avoiding everything that he can't handle.

Help! Is there hope for him? Is really severe ADHD always treatable? What does he need? He wants help and he trusts me, but I don't know what the best first step is. Considering he is so poor, waitlists for pro bono therapists and good treatment could take forever.

I realise this is a crazy first message to post, but anything uplifting or optimistic would be so helpful.

Thank you,

M