Is a skills group, aimed at teaching adolescents with ADHD new ways to manage their emotions and interactions with others, liked and helpful?

Teenagers with ADHD are learning to manage explosive emotions and rocky friendships in a brief therapy group based on Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), and researchers want to know if they actually like it and show up. This matters because emotional outbursts and social rejection are among the most disabling parts of ADHD for adolescents, yet standard treatments focus almost entirely on attention and hyperactivity. Young people often fall through the gap between medication and generic counselling, leaving them isolated and struggling to keep friends. This study directly tests whether a short, skills-based group—teaching concrete techniques for calming down and reading social cues—is acceptable to teenagers who are notoriously hard to engage in therapy. If the group proves popular and helpful, the impact could be immediate: a low-cost, manualised intervention that schools or NHS child mental health teams could roll out without lengthy training. It would give clinicians a practical tool for a problem they currently have few good answers for, and give teenagers a way to navigate friendships without feeling broken. If it fails—if teenagers skip sessions or find it irrelevant—that is equally useful, saving services from investing in something that does not work.