Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Teenage memories of this often come with a sting: the year you worked out how much longer everything took you than it seemed to take everybody else.
That is usually why adolescence is the period people can describe in detail. The work got harder, the scaffolding of primary school fell away, and the comparison with friends became impossible not to see. If going back over it is painful, that is fair, and it is also the part of your history an assessor will find most useful.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Truly where there is hardship there is also ease (Quran 94:5). The two sit in one short sentence, which is worth holding while you go back over the hard years.
فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلۡعُسۡرِ يُسۡرًا
So truly where there is hardship there is also ease
Qur’an 94:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of young people's own accounts found stigma, embarrassment and difficulty recognising their own symptoms among the main reasons they do not seek help, while encouragement from someone else and a previous good experience made it more likely they would. The private noticing rarely turns into asking on its own. The review pools what young people report as barriers, so it tells you what stops them rather than what would fix it.
Gulliver A, Griffiths KM, Christensen H. (2010). Perceived barriers and facilitators to mental health help-seeking in young people: a systematic review.. BMC psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Painful comparisons stay in memory because they mattered at the time, which is why that stretch is the clearest.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Nearly everything on the ADHD list can show up inside a bipolar presentation, and the reverse is not true. So the shared features settle nothing, and the distinctly manic ones carry all the weight.
If someone was adopted, or simply does not know their family history, say early and plainly that this is not a problem. It helps to have and it is not needed.
When you read that some proportion of people with ADHD have a particular problem, the number tells you nothing until you know the figure for everybody else.