ADHD assessment and treatment

Ilse is a general adult psychiatrist with extensive experience in child and adolescent psychiatry, and ADHD assessment and treatment is her main clinical focus. She works with both children and adults, which is unusual and useful: ADHD often surfaces in a family rather than in one person, and she can assess the parent as readily as the child.

ADHD is rarely the only thing present. Anxiety, depression, trauma, sleep disturbance and, in adults, substance use either sit alongside it or account for the symptoms outright, and separating them is the substance of the assessment. At Pandion these are screened as standard rather than treated as an optional extra. Where ADHD is not the right answer, the person is told clearly and given a sense of what to do next.

Her work concentrates on how ADHD shows up in daily life rather than on the diagnosis alone: academic difficulty, workplace difficulty, and the emotional cost of managing both for years without knowing why they were hard.

Background and training

Ilse is originally from South Africa, where she obtained her medical degree and specialised in psychiatry. She has more than 14 years of experience as a psychiatrist, and gained international experience working in England and Jersey in the Channel Islands.

She has worked extensively in rural and remote settings in both Australia and South Africa. She moved to Australia with her family in 2020 and settled in Queensland, and is currently a consultant psychiatrist in child and adolescent psychiatry, treating both inpatients and community patients alongside her work with Pandion Health.

Outside the clinic

Ilse loves the outdoors and has a particular interest in long-distance sea swimming. Before moving to far North Queensland she was not fully aware of the saltwater crocodiles and stinger issues, and has since adapted by wearing the highly fashionable stinger suit. She has no solution for the crocodiles yet.