ADHD Activist Sarah Templeton on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Debbie:

Hey, Sarah, welcome to the podcast.

Sarah Templeton:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Debbie:

Yeah, I think we’re going to have a very interesting conversation and yet another after it’s been almost nine years of doing this show. And I love it when I have yet another fresh topic to bring to the listeners. And this is such a critical topic actually. And so really looking forward to getting into your work, but could you take a few minutes and introduce yourself? Tell us what you would want us to know about your personal why and why you do the work that you do.

Sarah Templeton:

Yeah, okay, with pleasure. Okay, so out of the blue, when I was 51, nearly 52, a counselor said to me, has anybody ever suggested your ADHD? And I said, no, why? And she said, because I think you’ve got it, go home and Google it and see what you think. And I went home that night and it’s not underestimating it to say that my entire life suddenly made sense. So I then got diagnosed, that’s a bit of a story in itself. It wasn’t easy, but I did get diagnosed. And then later in my 50s, I was diagnosed with severe dyspraxia, sensory processing disorder and dyscalculia. And that really did make sense of my entire life. So at the time I was still working in prisons as a counselor. I retrained to be a counselor when I was, I started training when I was 49, qualified when I was about 54. And I would have been working in the prisons as a counselor and I had got on phenomenally well with all these boys in the prisons. I only worked in, I worked in four prisons and they were all either young offender institutes or adult male prisons. I didn’t ever work in any female prisons. But all the boys and men I was working with, I got on with like, I used to say it’s a bit like magic. When I would sit down and talk to them, within seconds we bonded. It was just weird, you know? I used say it’s like magic. I don’t understand it. know, other counselors I was training with would talk about it taking three months to build rapport with somebody. Three months? It’s 30 seconds with mine, you know?

Anyway, then I suddenly realized when I was diagnosed, my God, my God, I think all these boys have got ADHD. I think they’re all the same as me. So I then started to dig deeper and it turned out that very roughly 80 % of my clients had either been diagnosed as children and weren’t on medication, hence they’d ended up behind bars, or like me, they had no clue. They thought they were different. They thought they were something not bad, but different about them. They just thought they were slightly different and they didn’t really know what it was. In fact, one of my boys who subsequently went on to be diagnosed with ADHD had asked me to bring in an autism assessment because he had thought he knew there was something different about the way his brain worked, but he thought it might be autism. We did the autism screener and he scored barely anything on it. And years later, I went back and found him and said, do the ADHD screener. And then he, you know, subsequently was diagnosed. So If we fast forward to now, I now run a charity called ADHD Liberty. And our goal is to have mandatory screening for ADHD and the coexisting conditions and autism in all schools and right the way throughout the criminal justice system. So obviously with my criminal justice system background, I’m passionate about the prisons, passionate about young offender and offender institutes, passionate about juvenile prisons and passionate about probation, whose job it is to stop people re-offending, and also passionate about the police. Because our goal is to get all the police screening, and that’s happening in the UK. We’ve got, I think it’s just under 40 police forces now, about 38 I think it is, who are in various stages of starting to screen. So we’ve got some that are screening right now, we’ve got some that already completed their pilots and some that are starting.

But pretty much every police force in Scotland and England, not so many in Wales, but England and Scotland are going to scream for ADHD because the police themselves, a lot of them are ADHD and they are recognising in the people they’re arresting, they’re the same. So the police are actually coming to us now, which is brilliant. And all these police forces, I will say, they’ve approached us. We haven’t approached one. They’ve all come to us and said, we agree with you because I’ve been saying for ages that the prisons are full of ADHD. This is disgusting. It’s got to change. And now the police are coming to us and saying, we totally agree with you. We know that the people we’re arresting are primarily ADHD, but also some autistic. And we know something’s got to be done about this. So they’re coming to us because I’ve got experience in the criminal justice system and we’ve got the screeners and we’ve got the pilots and everything. And it’s amazing because they’re all coming to us. And we’ve had several in Australia as well and two in America.

So yeah, two in America, which is fantastic. But the two in America have both said the same thing, which is interesting, very interesting. They’ve said that they too know that their prisons are full of ADHD. They know that. But both the two different police forces said pretty much word for word the same thing. They said, we are going to have a much tougher job of it in America because we are much more tough on crime here. And we know that the public are going to think this is an excuse and the public are not looking for an excuse, they’re looking for us to beat up on crime. So that was very interesting that they both, both the police forces who contacted me said exactly the same thing about America. And everybody I’ve spoken to in America has gone, yes, yes, that’s exactly it. You know, we’re no different to you. Prisoners are the same, probably the same ratio of ADHD. This is what we’re finding with Australia and what we’re finding with other countries. You know, we’ve got some random countries coming to us, like the ones in Africa, Southeast Asia, and they’re all saying, well, our prisons are pretty much full of ADHD. What do we do? So it’s a worldwide thing, this. It’s not just a UK thing. It’s everywhere. Everybody’s prisons are full of ADHD. And because I think it’s largely the reason for this is that adults weren’t diagnosed with ADHD in the UK till 2009. I can’t say for other countries, but it was very late that adults were accepted to have it. And up until then pretty much everybody thought it was a childhood behavioural disorder that you outgrew in your late teens. So because of that, our prisons are still at this point rammed to the rafters with ADHD. I don’t think that’ll be the case in 30 or 40 years time. I think we’ll have caught up by then and we’ll realise that we need to screen people early, we need to find out if they’ve got any of these conditions going on, medicate the ones that can be medicated, and we will therefore stop the prisons being full of ADHD. But at the moment because we’re playing catch up everywhere in the world, you know, the prisons are full of ADHD. And it’s taken somebody like me, who’s just a lowly counselor, that’s all I was a lowly counselor in prisons, because I had this ADHD brain talking to all these people with ADHD, that to go, hello, this is not acceptable. This is really wrong, that we’re putting people in prison for their natural ADHD ways of thinking and traits and behaviors. And we’re not assessing them at school or screening them young enough to keep them out of prison. I’ve shouted for 10, no, nine years about this, beg your pardon, nine years I’ve been shouting and it’s only in the last two and a half, three that things have taken off. So, and now the world is listening, which is amazing and I’m thrilled, I’m beyond thrilled for all the boys in prison and girls, because it’s girls, girls as much as boys have got ADHD in prisons. And the reason I know that is one of the therapists who works for me. I run the biggest team of ADHD diagnosed counsellors in the UK. One of those counselors has been a prison officer in a women’s prison for 20 years. And she said to me, Sarah, it’s exactly the same in the women’s prisons. It’s nearly all of them. So I can only take her word for that, but she says it is.

Debbie:

So when you’re, first of all, it’s just so fascinating. And I think about the progress in the past 10 years with this and also what’s been happening with the neurodiversity movement in general. And so this, to me, we have changes happening in workplaces. have changes happening in our schools. And this is a whole other environment that needs to be addressed. So I’m so glad that you’re doing this work. I’m curious, you mentioned that police forces are requesting screeners. What can you explain? Like, does that mean that when they arrest someone or they have people come into the system, they’re saying we’d like them to be assessed for neurodivergence? Or what do you mean by that?

Sarah Templeton:

Well, it is, it’s voluntary. So all the police forces so far that have started, nobody’s made it compulsory. I don’t, I don’t think that’s allowed, but that people are offered a screener if they would like to. I don’t know how many police stations you’ve been in, but I’ve been in a few with some of my clients and there’s a lot of hanging around. There’s a lot of boredom. There’s a lot of sitting there waiting, you know, for two hours for the next stage to happen. So during this hanging around in custody, in the first sort of custody suite where they go in, they’re being offered an ADHD screener. Now, what we’re picking up in the pilots is a lot of people are saying, I don’t need to that in, I’m already diagnosed. Yeah, so there’s a lot of saying that. Then there’s another big chunk who are saying, I don’t need to fill that in, I know I’ve got it. My mum’s told me for years, teachers have told me, girlfriends have told me, whoever’s told them, but they know they’ve got it, so they don’t need to fill the screener in.

So there’s two big chunks there. But the third chunk are people that do actually fill it in. I’ll give you some very bang up to date figures. Cumbria police, Cumbria is a county very high up in England, almost bordering Scotland. So it’s very, very north of the country. And it’s very, very rural. Now they are doing a pilot at the moment. They’ve only just completed their first month. But of the people that aren’t saying, no, I’m already diagnosed. No, I don’t want to. The people that are filling it in who are people that are curious, possibly, is this something that’s happening to me? Of those, 78 % are scoring very highly, highly enough to be almost probably ADHD. So these are not the borderline people, these are the very high scorers, that’s 78%. So that’s kind of coming out of what we’ve always said. When I came out of the prisons and people used to ask me, well, how many do you reckon are ADHD in there? I would always say it’s roughly eight or nine out of 10. That was my estimation. After that I met a mental health nurse who also she’s ADHD and she’d worked in the prisons as a mental health nurse for 20 years and she said to me, Sarah I’ve kept an unofficial record for years and it’s 85 % of them and I said my god that tallies exactly with my eight or nine out of ten and she said yes it does but she said mine’s more of a record, I’ve actually kept a record of all the people I’ve seen over the years and it is coming out roughly 85%. I was like, wow, that is so fascinating that that was my complete guesstimate. And then it’s with a mental health nurse’s records. So we’re basing it, we’re saying at least 75 % to be safe, at least 75 % of the prison population are neurodiverse. And I think what’s really scary about that is we’re doing a lot of assessments into prisons now, because even in our prisons here, that sort of tout themselves as being neurodiverse aware and having neurodiverse wings, all that sort of thing. Fantastic. But what they can’t do is screen people. They can’t assess people. So we’re doing assessments into prisons for ADHD. But the thing that I think most people will be quite shocked about is that nearly all of those assessments are for ADHD and ASD, because a lot of people have got both. So I think the trouble is you probably know that I guess this is the same in America, but I’d be fascinated to know. In England, there’s a lot of empathy for autism and there’s a lot of disdain for ADHD. On the whole, the educated don’t say this, but the people who don’t know much, they will say, ADHD, just calm down, sit down, behave yourself, learn to act like the other children. It’s just a bit of a naughty, for goodness sake, control yourself type condition.

Whereas when you talk about autism, it’s all that, we should take that very seriously. You know, that’s a very serious issue, very seriously. So when we’re talking about the amount of ADHD in prisons, when people are getting a bit sort of scoffy about that, I’m like, well, do you know that most of them also have autism? And then people are really like, whoa, really? So we’re up people with, yes, we are. We’re locking up people with autism and ADHD, which in my book, and everybody who’s knowledgeable about this book, is just as severe a condition as autism. It’s just the attitude towards it that’s different. But it’s very true. I met a lady who runs an autism branch of the Autistic Society. And I did a talk, and she was doing a talk as well. And she said to me, by the way, Sarah, it’s as many people in prison that have autism as have ADHD. And at the time, I thought, I don’t think so. But actually, all the screening we’re doing would indicate that she’s right. There’s a lot of autism as well in prison. I guess you just call it neurodivergence, but there’s a lot of it in prisons way, way more than there is in the general public.

Debbie:

I appreciate that, the way you mentioned that there’s more empathy towards autism and more disdain towards ADHD. I agree. I think it is the same here. I think it is one of the more or most maligned forms of neurodivergence. And there’s still a lot of myths about whether or not it’s a real thing. Okay, and just to back up, I had read in research that there’s much higher prevalence of learning disabilities and dyslexia, like there is, but this information about ADHD specifically, I did not know, and it completely does not surprise me. But I’d love to hear from your experience, what are the aspects of the ADHD brain that make it much more likely perhaps, I don’t know if that’s even the right word, but why is there such a…

Sarah Templeton:

It’s very easy, very easy. How many traits would you like? The first one is the hyperpensity to boredom. The amount of people I’ve worked with in prison, when I’ve asked them why they’ve done something, they’ve gone, oh, I was just so bored. I just had to do something. So hyperpensity to boredom. The need to get out and do something. So people will get out and they will go on building sites. They will do things they shouldn’t do because they need to get out and do something. Risk taking and thrill seeking massively comes into it. The need for adrenaline massively comes into it. Always thinking they know best. Wanting everything now, that comes into it, that trait because I’ve met numerous young sort of teenagers, young offenders who have started drug dealing or stealing because they could not wait for the next pair of trainers. They could not wait for the next designer tracksuit. They couldn’t wait for the next, you know, they just, they just can’t wait. They need it now. So because they need it now that entices them down the wrong road. Also a massive trait of ADHD that gets people put behind bars is not thinking of the consequences. So, I didn’t realise that I hadn’t thought of the consequences until I took simulant ADHD medication when I was 55. And I suddenly for the first time thought of a consequence. it’s when you suddenly for the first time think of a consequence, you think, good grief, have I not been thinking of consequences for 55 years? And I hadn’t. So lots of the boys that I worked with in prison, I’ll give you one specific case. One boy I was working with was in prison for stealing his 1000th car. And I said to him, when you were stealing your 1000th car, after did you think that if you did maybe it you’d end up in here did that thought come into your mind or not and he thought about it and he said to be honest sarah he said no he said i was walking down the road and i tried the door handle like you always do and i thought well no i don’t always but okay you always do fair enough so he tried the door handle of the car and then he looked at me he said i opened and he said and the keys were in the ignition what else was i supposed to do. That was as far as his thinking went. The keys were in the ignition. Go. Good to go. And he really thought about whether he’d thought about whether that might end up with him back in prison. Hadn’t entered his head. Not at all. So not thinking of the consequences and impulsivity, doing things without thinking, know, just, that purse looks ready to be stolen. That handbag looks like it might have money in it. Just impulsivity and not thinking of the consequences are two huge reasons, but there’s so many. And when you talk to these boys in prison, it’s heartbreaking because the reason for their offending, it’s either been any of that that I’ve just spoken about, or it’s feeding addiction. So they’ve been self-medicating their addiction either with alcohol, drugs, whatever, and they’ve had to steal to feed that.

So one particular offender, for example, is a trustee of my charity and does not mind his story being shared. All his crime, he’d been in prison 15 times by the age of 29, but all his crimes were around him self-medicating his ADHD. We got him diagnosed when he was 29. But he said every crime was either stealing alcohol, being drunk and disorderly on alcohol, fighting, afraid when he was drunk, or ABH or GBH when he was punching because he was drunk. So every single crime, and he’d been arrested 500 times and convicted 53 times till I got hold of him and said, think you’re ADHD, getting to see this psychiatrist who diagnosed him with very severe ADHD. He it’s the most severe ADHD I’ve ever seen. But that’s why that boy was self-medicating and ended up in prison 15 times, costing us a fortune. We’re trying to get our government to realize that for each person in prison, it’s 48,000 pounds. To get somebody screened, assessed, diagnosed and medicated, even if we’re giving them free prescriptions, it’s about a thousand pounds a year.

Now, if you imagine eight or nine out of 10 in prison are ADHD, how much is that going to save? I’ve got this calculator, I’m the one to work that out, but it’s going to save us colossal amounts of money. And also our government are obsessed at the moment with building new prisons, getting more places in prison. We don’t need more places in prison. What we need are mental health teams in prisons who can assess and diagnose the condition that most of them have got. And they can’t do that. They can’t diagnose them with ADHD and they can’t diagnose them with ASD. Mostly. There are pockets in this country, pockets of prisons, where that does actually work. But the vast majority, it doesn’t. So that’s why we’re campaigning, because we want screening to be mandatory. And all these poor people that are sitting in prison now and having all this awareness raised, which is wonderful, they’re all sitting there going, well, I need a diagnosis then. I want a diagnosis. So a lot of their parents, partners, families are paying our psychiatrist to diagnose these people in prison because well they can’t get the diagnosis in the prison here. So you know it’s it’s it’s hideously frustrating for them when they realise that they’ve got one of these conditions that’s probably responsible for why they’ve been in prison and yet they can’t do anything about it because all these mental health teams, psychologists, psychiatrists, they’re not ADHD or autism specialists so they can’t diagnose them. So it’s massively frustrating. The whole thing is massively frustrating in this country. But as I was saying to you earlier, I think I genuinely now know because of the amount of people who approach our charity that this is a worldwide problem. It’s certainly a big problem in Australia, which is why I’m going to Australia, February, March to talk to a lot of police forces over there who’ve contacted us. And we’ve had a couple of police forces in America and we’ve had police forces from other places, know, Belgium. I’m trying to think of other countries. a couple of different countries in Africa. You know, this is a worldwide problem. This is not just the UK that’s got prisons rammed with ADHD. It goes a lot further than that.

Debbie:

So in terms of the work that you’re doing, because I can imagine it must be frustrating, right? Because these, you know, offenders, these people who are in prison now are there in many ways, because this was not identified earlier, they didn’t have the supports they need. And now they have this information and I’m just wondering like, how is that for you? Do you feel like, gosh, this is too late for this person, but I’m working more to prevent the younger generation.

Sarah Templeton:

No, I never think it’s too late because I’ve worked with people who are 60 and just finding out their ADHD. It’s never too late to get diagnosed, never. And this is why we’re very passionate about catching young people early, and I’ll give you an example of something in a minute, but we want to catch the whole lot. People that have been in prison on 20, 30 year life sentences, if there’s a reason for it, they deserve to know as much as anybody else. But something very interesting, we were approached about literally three weeks ago. So this is very new. And I only went to visit them three days ago. So it’s very, very new. We’ve been approached by an approved school. Now, I don’t know what they’re called in America, but here approved schools are where kids who’ve been excluded from mainstream school are sent. So they have various names, but they usually go by the word approved school in the UK. Now, the manager of this particular approved school in Nottinghamshire in England. He had just had his oldest daughter, he had five children. He’d just had his oldest daughter diagnosed with ADHD and she’s on the ASD waiting list as well. But it was when reading and filling in forms for her and reading all about the ADHD traits that he not only realized he and his wife who run this school are both ADHD, so are all the seven teachers, but much more scary than that, I mean that’s scary enough, but more scary than that, he has 30 students currently. That does include girls, a small ratio of girls, primarily boys. But the whole staff team, when I met them, now believe that all 30 of those children are ADHD. And it’s horrified them. And I’ve had to say to them, don’t feel bad. You know, it’s great that you’ve had this awareness because your own daughter has been diagnosed and there you suddenly realized. But don’t be horrified, know, and don’t be sort of beat yourself up for not realizing before. But it’s now we’ve realized this and now we’re going to screen all 30 of those children. What they have already said is we don’t want this to stop here. We need to spread this information out across all the other approved schools in the UK. And I said, be my guest. This is my dream. You know, this is my dream that these kids who are being excluded, that we screen them when they’re 13, 14, rather than 21 and they’ve been in prison for the last three years, you know, let’s catch them when they’re first doing something or when they’re first excluded, when this first kickoff in school, screen them then, not when it’s too late. So we are now going to start to do that with approved schools, which is huge for us because we are massively, massively passionate about stopping the school to prison pipeline. The prisons are full of ADHD. So when you roll it back, where does it start from? It starts when kids are not understood at school.

You know, I wasn’t diagnosed with dyscalculia until I was 55. That’s disgusting. I should have been assessed at 12 when I failed my grammar school entrance because the test was problems and dyscalculia brains can’t work out problems. At 12, that should have been highlighted. It was highlighted in as much as everybody appealed for me and said, you should be at the grammar school, you should be what’s gone wrong, what’s gone wrong. But they couldn’t put me through because I’d failed it so spectacularly. that was in 1975. And what I always say is that wouldn’t it be lovely to say that’s not the case anymore and all these kids are getting screened and getting the right diagnosis and that’s not happening. But it’s exactly the same now. Nothing’s changed since I was 12 and I’m now 61. It’s about time it changed. So this is my vocation now. I just spend my entire life trying to get people to recognise that this is a proper condition. It has severe impacts, especially when it’s not diagnosed and medicated. And if you don’t want your prisons to be full of people with ADHD and autism, we’ve got to change the way we do things. It’s quite simple.

Debbie:

Okay, so, you know, we’ve used the term school to prison pipeline. We’ve spent a lot of this conversation talking about the current adult or young adult prison population, but let’s go back to when, you know, assuming these are kids who are in traditional schools before they’re sent to an approved school. Tell me about some of the school policies that are really kind of exacerbating the struggles of these kids that lead them to go down this road. And as part of that, what we can do differently.

Sarah Templeton:

yeah. Yeah. Teacher training, ADHD and autism and all the coexisting conditions need to be included in teacher training. We always say this is not the teacher’s fault. Teachers on the whole are absolutely desperate for this information. They genuinely want to help. They genuinely don’t know how to help and nobody’s told them. So it needs to be included in teacher training worldwide. Every teacher needs to know about autism, ADHD, all the coexisting conditions and how they co-occur. They need that training. I think it’s very unfair at the moment because we’re putting teachers into a class. There’s likely to be two or three ADHD people in that class and one or two people with autism and we’re giving them, at best in this country, we’ve heard that they get a week’s training. Now that’s at best, that’s out of a three-year degree. More often in this country they would have either three hours training out of three years on neurodiversity or none. And then we throw them into a classroom and we expect them to manage neurodiversity and neurotypicals. It’s very unfair on the teachers. Most of the teachers we train are absolutely lovely and desperate for this information. It’s why I wrote one of, I’ve written three books so far on ADHD and one of them is for teachers. And it’s very much said, know, you know, this is no criticism or judgment of you. We know you are good people. You’ve gone into this, not for the money. You’ve gone into this because you care about children, you want the best for them, and nobody’s given you the right tools. So here’s some tools that will help you. But at the moment, in the UK at least, we seem to be going backwards. So we are punishing children for more things. I I know of schools now that have put in policies of no talking in the corridors, no talking in the classroom. One child recently got detention for asking the other child what the date was. So he asked the chat people, a girl or boy, can’t remember, sitting next to him, what was the date? Because he’d forgotten it because people with ADHD, we have poor short term memories, so we often don’t know what day it is or what date it is. And he got detention because he didn’t know what the date was. Now that’s wrong in my view, but there are some schools that are clamping down and punishing ADHD kids and neurotypicals really, with ADHD, more likely to do this sort of stuff. So if you talk, if you put your hands like this, if you put your head in your hands, that’s punishable. You have to put your both hands on the table. It’s getting draconian. It really is getting bad. And of course it’s the ADHD kids that find it hardest. sorry, there’s another thing. You have to be looking at the teacher for the whole of the lesson in some schools now. Now an ADHD kid is gonna find that very hard. They are going to get distracted. They are going to dream, go into another world at times, but they can be punished for that and they can get detentions. And if they get enough detentions, they can eventually get excluded. So, they are definitely excluding ADHD kids. And that approved school that I was in literally three days ago is the best example. They think all 30 of their students are ADHD and probably a ton of coexisting conditions amongst those as well, you know, because something that also impacts why kids get into trouble at school and then end up in the school to prison pipeline is rejection-sensitive dysphoria.

Yeah, so because we don’t want to be rejected and we don’t want to be humiliated, if you’ve got a child with undiagnosed dyscalculia, dyslexia, dysgraphia, they don’t want to be humiliated. They don’t want to say, Miss, I can’t do this. So rather than Miss, I can’t do this and have 29 children laughing at you, they will just skip the class. They will just nip off, know, go somewhere where it’s not going to be embarrassing, not going to be humiliated. So the humiliation thing comes into it a lot because we’re expecting children to all behave the same and have the same amount of skills and be equally good at everything, that is not taking into account the ones with dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia. It’s not taking them into account and we need to. We need to. Everywhere that needs to change. So what we want in this country and we’re pushing very hard for it is mandatory screening in schools from the age of five and at every transition. So, you know, seven, 11, 15, 18 takes five minutes and it doesn’t cost anything. a paper exercise, it really doesn’t cost to do the screening. Yes, the bit after that might cost, but the screening costs nothing to flag up these conditions. So we want mandatory screening in education and mandatory screening in the criminal justice system. And that includes police, probation, prisons, all right the way through, because then we will pick up people at the earliest possible moment that we can. And that’s what we are very well ahead. We’re nowhere near achieved it yet, but we are very well ahead with that. There’s a lot of people that know that’s got to happen. And one of the people was our previous Minister for Justice, Robert Buckland. He lost his job when we had a change recently, a government change, but for many years he was the Minister for Justice. And he has always said, way before I was saying it. He’s always said there should be mandatory ADHD and ASD screening in the criminal justice system. And he said, use my name whenever you want to, because he was the Minister for Justice, and he’s been saying this for a lot longer than me. So I do use his name because people sit up and listen when the government minister says, this should have happened years ago, why hasn’t it happened? And he’s very right, it should have happened. And tragically, lives are being lost because it hasn’t happened. And that’s the truth.

Debbie:

What kind of resistance or barriers have you encountered to doing this work? even in the school systems, do you find that parents are behind this? You know, are there kind of some some common forces of resistance that you are finding yourself coming up against?

Sarah Templeton:

There’s a few, they’re very minor, I will say. They’re not the overpowering voice. The overpowering voice is, thank God, there’s a reason for this and let’s do something about it. That’s the biggest voice. There are some parents who don’t want ADHD in the family and they think if they ignore it, it’ll go away. There are some parents who don’t want their kids labeled. They see it as a label and it infuriates me that ADHD is the only one condition that they ever use the word label about. They wouldn’t say that if a child had epilepsy or a child was diabetic or a child had cancer. They would say, don’t want the label, but they’ll say it about ADHD. So you do get that. They don’t want the naughty label. And then mostly that comes from, I always say, of genuine ignorance of the fact that the condition is not just naughty boy behavior. It goes a hell of a lot further than that.

Once these parents understand that and they understand you can’t just ignore it it’ll go away, if you don’t get it diagnosed and pretend it’s not there, it won’t go away, it will actually come out and bite you on the bum much harder when it does erupt at some point. So those parents, they need a gentle introduction to it. I always say, just read my books, it’s all in my books, how serious it is, how I was not a naughty child. I never skipped school, I never smoked, I’ve still never smoked, I’ve never done drugs. I’m not your archetypal naughty child. But am I diagnosed moderate to severe ADHD? Yes, I am. So this sort of opens the doors for people who are negative about it by saying, do I look like a naughty boy who’s talking a charity teacher? No, I was diagnosed at 51 when I was a married business owner, property owner, you know, but still moderate to severe ADHD. So it’s a genuine ignorance, I think, when parents come back with that sort of stuff. And also they don’t want the label. The other ignorance we’ve got is our government who think that everything’s going fabulously when it comes to ADHD in the prisons because they’ve put a neurodiversity manager in each prison and they think that means that everything’s going well. Well it’s really not going well because if it was going well we wouldn’t be having to arrange private assessments into prisons every single week which is what we’re doing. So it’s not going well, it’s really not and they’ve got their head in the sand about it and they need to take their head out of the sand because people are dying. People, know, there are young offenders who take their own lives because they will not, they don’t take the ADHD seriously and they have very, very dysregulated emotions and then they take their own lives. And I speak from personal experience, one of my young offenders from Ailsbury took his own life when they refused to put him on ADHD medications in two prisons. And despite my safeguarding risk letters, they ignored it. And I actually met some of these officers at the inquest and not one of them knew anything about adult ADHD. They did not know how serious the condition was. And I suddenly realized, my God.

This is not an individual officer’s or an individual prison’s problem. This is a systemic problem. People do not take this condition seriously and they don’t realise how serious it can be when it’s not medicated. know, one of the figures that shocks people, well two figures that shock people, is that ADHD people have a 15 to 25 year lower life expectancy and a five times higher rate of suicide. Now when you tell people that, they’re like, whoa, really? It is a serious condition. You know, it can be great and it can be wonderful and it can give you drive and enthusiasm and clown of the class and all those wonderful things, but it comes with underlying issues and until you’ve got it identified and medicated, you are not safe from those issues. Did that answer your question? I did go for a bit of a tangent, but…

Debbie:

No, you absolutely answered my question and I just really appreciate your passion and enthusiasm. And I, I just love seeing people light up about the work that they’re doing. That’s so important. And the fact that you’ve kind of identified this huge need and you’re in a position to impact change and be part of that paradigm shift is just really exciting to me. So I just want to say thank you for everything you shared.

Sarah Templeton:

That’s all right. I will just mention, I’ve written a book about this. My next book coming out is called The Prison Counselor. And it’s coming out in April. It’s written, it’s done, it’s just being edited now. But the book is all about the staggering amount of ADHD I found in the prisons before I was even diagnosed and then when I was diagnosed. So if anybody wants to read more, just wait for that book because it’s all in there. The whole thing is absolutely rammed with kids who were diagnosed and then taken off the meds or were told they’d outgrown it and then they all end up in prison and then the other half don’t know they’ve got ADHD, but they have, you know? So I think pretty much every time I worked with was in some stage of either getting diagnosed or had been diagnosed and taken off the meds, there was ADHD in the mix with all of them, you know, but there were different stages of it. So I have poured my heart and soul into this book because I want this book to be the one that changes things for good. It needs to.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s wonderful. And would you just before we say goodbye, you have written other books, some of which are for parents. So can you just mention those and listeners all include links in the show notes if you want to check them out. But could you take a moment to tell us about them?

Sarah Templeton:

Yeah, okay. The first one, the one that already sells quite well in America, actually, is called How Not to Murder Your ADHD Kid, Instead Learn to be a Child’s Own ADHD Coach. So that’s, I always say that’s ideal. It’s ideal really for children of any age, but particularly young. So particularly up to the age of about 11, you know. But then what I’ve done is I’ve written a second one for parents of teenagers because teenagers, I work with loads and loads of fabulous ADHD teenage clients. When I was a counselor, I adored them all. So I’ve written one specifically for parents of teenagers. And that one is called, oh God, I’ve got a brain freeze in it. Oh yes, how not to damage your ADHD adolescent. Yeah, so How not to damage your ADHD adolescent is that one. I always say if parents are choosing between one or the other, if your child is 12 and above, get the teenage book because there’s a lot more in there that’s very relevant for teenagers. And for younger kids, definitely the first one, it covers everything. But the teenage one’s got extra things in about the teenage years. So, yeah, both of them. I mean, if you have a look at the reviews on Amazon from the parents and from other websites, this is the nicest thing about it. I always say, yes, money’s nice, but it’s not the end of the world. What is wonderful when I read these reviews is that parents say they’ve read one or other of my books and it’s changed everything at home. Some parents say, I’ve not been talking to my daughter for the last five years. I’ve read your book. Now everything’s back to normal. That gives me the most incredible buzz that I’m helping families relate better to their kids and understand their kids. Because as soon as you have got somebody with ADHD who’s understood and accepted for the way they are. And people start trying to beat the ADHD out of them, not physically, but know, actually beat it out of them. Your ADHD child will be transformed because somebody understands how they operate and how their brain works. So it’s all about just understanding them. And from understanding them, that stops them kicking off, you know, and all the things that follow and end up in the school to prison pipeline. So understanding is the key word for me.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, Sarah, I just want to say thank you again for everything you shared. And I’m just so happy to have been connected with you and to learn about your work. I’ll definitely follow what you’re doing with curiosity and kind of seeing the impact trickle out around the world. And, we’ll keep an eye on your new book when it comes out. And yeah, thank you so much.

Sarah Templeton:

Bless you. Thank you. Yeah, my great pleasure. Thank you for having me.