THE CHALLENGE

From this negative starting point, our approach is about teaching children to cope and to function… as though that’s the best they can hope for, and the message is bleak, making diagnoses of ADHD scary for parents and children. 

Takeda believe in bright futures for everyone, so they needed to change this perspective. We need to counter the idea that people with ADHD are a problem to be solved. They aren’t wrong, they’re different. 

Hundreds of successful people all over the world have the condition and many say it’s the reason they are where they are today. We need to stop viewing ADHD as a bad thing. 

Neuro-diverse people see the world differently – and the world needs them. Instead of forcing kids with ADHD to meet our expectations, why don’t we celebrate their strengths and inspire them with some positive expectations of their own?

THE STRATEGY

We needed to create some neural-diverse inspiration which would inspire ADHD teens in a way that was accessible to parents teachers and the teens themselves… 

We created ‘Stories That Never Stand Still’ - a free, not-for-profit, storybook, full of real stigma-smashing stories about ADHD as a celebration of what the brilliant ADHD mind can do. It’s the only book out there which is created by people living with ADHD, is about living with ADHD and designed to be interesting and compelling for people with ADHD. 

The cover-to-cover inspiration helped teens to see how ADHD could be their strength rather than their downfall… and that their lives could be as extraordinary as anybody else’s.

Once we had the idea for the book, we needed to initiate and build relationships with multiple ADHD Patient Association Groups (PAGs) to ensure we were creating useful, authentic ‘patient-sensitive’ content. 

We identified 10x inspiring people who are living and accomplishing great things with well managed ADHD and then paired them with great artists and illustrators that also have the neurodiverse condition to develop 10 individual life stories and illustrations to bring their experiences to life.

Then, we had the to get the book out there: 
The book is printed on Rain Forest Certified paper with vegetable ink, meaning no nasties – this was a must for our conscious teenage audience.

6,000 books have been printed for distribution by Patient Awareness groups. A digital copy is free to download from the ADHD Foundation and Born To Be ADHD websites.

THE OUTCOME

14,243k engagement on X (formerly Twitter)

1,500 books distributed in 1.5hours at ADHD conference