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Using Your Mind, Body and Spirit (and sometimes medication) to Manage Your ADHD
Sarah Cheyette, MD, graduated from Princeton University, and then UCLA Medical School. She did a fellowship in pediatric neurology and has been in private practice since then. She treats kids and young adults with ADHD, not just with medication but also with non-medication strategies such as those she outlined in her book, ADHD and the Focused Mind. She brings a powerful professional perspective on the benefits and limitations of ADHD medication, and the many behavioral adaptations young people with ADHD must embrace to thrive with their condition. She and her husband have four kids and live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
About Grace Friedman
Co-Author of Winning with ADHD
founder of ADDYTeen.com
Grace Friedman was diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at twelve years old and has experienced all the life-challenging effects it presents. Grace is an advocate for young people with ADHD, author, speaker, and blogger and founder of the ADDYTeen.com community, which is visited by people around the world daily. She is a blogger at The Huffington Post, and at fifteen wrote Embracing Your ADHD, a guide for teens which has been downloaded by thousands from her website.
Now twenty-two, after recently graduating with a BA in Psychology, she works with teens for the State of Washington, mentors others with ADHD, and has plans to become a clinical psychologist. Grace, now thriving with her ADHD, brings a spirit of generosity and purposefulness to everything she does.
About Peter Johnson & Dr. Benjamin Cheyette, MD
Co-Authors of ADHD & the Focused Mind
Learn about Peter’s dojo: sanbrunomartialarts.com
Karate master, Peter Johnson, is a seventh-degree black belt in Karate and also a master of Tae Bo®. He has been teaching students in the martial arts since 1993. Over time, he has seen the number of his students diagnosed with ADHD rise, accompanied by a rise in the frequency of inquiries from parents and school counselors interested in Karate as a way to help kids with ADHD build “mental discipline muscles.” Indeed, martial arts have had a dramatic effect on the lives of many people with ADHD (based on statistics from the National Association of Professional Martial Artists on the positive scholastic benefits of karate in children’s lives).
Peter himself has seen many of his karate students shift from having lackluster academic performance to achieving honor student status. Peter’s philosophy is that martial arts is not simply about acquiring physical skill, but more importantly is about acquiring a drive for excellence in all areas of life. Along these lines, Peter is also an ultra-endurance athlete and runner, and he uses personal lessons he has learned in that setting to help his students feel fully engaged in the moment.
Sarah met her coauthor, Peter Johnson, while training in a form of kickboxing called Tae Bo® at his dojo, and additionally watched him train her kids in Karate, and was very impressed by how he has motivated all kinds of people to work hard to meet their full potential. She realized that the ideas that a coach routinely instills in his athletes can also apply to the treatment of ADHD, and she would like her ADHD patients and others to be able to internalize these strategies to be the most successful they can be.
Sarah’s husband, Dr. Benjamin Cheyette, is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, where he sees patients, teaches medical students and psychiatric residents, and runs a scientific laboratory exploring the molecular origins of psychiatric illness.
In his clinical practice he has treated patients with ADHD, including professionals who qualify for this diagnosis. He is also a black belt student of Peter Johnson, and has witnessed the transformative power of successful coaching strategies on goal-setting, focus, and achievement in the dojo—as well as the generalization of such strategies beyond athleticism to other spheres of life.
