Childhood ADHD: Meditation or medication?

The first aim of this thesis was to asses the effectiveness of a stand-alone 8-week Mindful Parenting training in a clinical setting on child and parental psychopathology. Results of the 70 participating parents showed a decrease in parental and child psychopathology after the training. Furthermore, improvement in general mindful awareness predicted a reduction in parental psychopathology, whereas improvement in mindful parenting predicted a reduction in child psychopathology. The second aim was to describe the rationale behind mindfulness for children with ADHD, why it may be an alternative to medication, and to give an overview of the current stage of literature. Medication is often the treatment of choice for children with ADHD as it is currently most effective, but it has only short-term effects and has serious side effects. Therefore, the need for non-pharmacological alternatives is high. Parallel, mindfulness training is emerging as a potentially effective training for these children. The third aim was to evaluate whether a mindfulness training for children with ADHD and a parallel Mindful Parenting training (MYmind training) could be an alternative treatment to medication. An RCT was conducted in which 91 children, 172 parents, 81 teachers, and 85 researcher reports were included. Results of subjective measures showed that medication was more effective compared to mindfulness in reducing ADHD-symptoms, but that mindfulness training was effective nonetheless. Moreover, children in both treatment conditions improved equally well on objective neuropsychological measures of attention. Thus, it was concluded that the MYmind training may be considered as a non-pharmacological alternative treatment