Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Much of the symptom wording was written with children in mind. If a question sounds like it is about someone climbing the furniture, translate it into your adult life rather than answering no.
Restlessness at forty is rarely running about. It is being unable to sit through a film, the leg going under the table, two jobs left out of boredom. Missing homework becomes unopened post and a tax return three years late. Doing that translation before the appointment means you arrive with the adult version, which is what an assessor needs to hear.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He inspired it to know its own rebellion and piety (Quran 91:8). The soul was given some capacity to read itself, and that capacity is exactly what you are being asked to use.
فَأَلۡهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقۡوَىٰهَا
and inspired it [to know] its own rebellion and piety
Qur’an 91:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A European consensus statement on adult ADHD sets out that the condition often continues into adulthood and old age, yet remains underdiagnosed and undertreated in many countries, so symptoms and impairment carry on for want of an assessment. It is an expert consensus rather than new data, meaning it reflects where specialists agree the evidence stands. Its message here is that adults do not age out of this, whatever the childhood wording of the questions suggests.
Kooij JJS, Bijlenga D, Salerno L, Jaeschke R, Bitter I, Balázs J, Thome J, Dom G, Kasper S, Nunes Filipe C, Stes S, Mohr P, Leppämäki S, Casas M, Bobes J, Mccarthy JM, Richarte V, Kjems Philipsen A, Pehlivanidis A, Niemela A, Styr B, Semerci B, Bolea-Alamanac B, Edvinsson D, Baeyens D, Wynchank D, Sobanski E, Philipsen A, McNicholas F, Caci H, Mihailescu I, Manor I, Dobrescu I, Saito T, Krause J, Fayyad J, Ramos-Quiroga JA, Foeken K, Rad F, Adamou M, Ohlmeier M, Fitzgerald M, Gill M, Lensing M, Motavalli Mukaddes N, Brudkiewicz P, Gustafsson P, Tani P, Oswald P, Carpentier PJ, De Rossi P, Delorme R, Markovska Simoska S, Pallanti S, Young S, Bejerot S, Lehtonen T, Kustow J, Müller-Sedgwick U, Hirvikoski T, Pironti V, Ginsberg Y, Félegyházy Z, Garcia-Portilla MP, Asherson P. (2019). Updated European Consensus Statement on diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD.. European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A question answered literally will miss the thing it was trying to ask about.
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
'I set a reminder and still did not do it' is not a story about a bad reminder. It tells you the missing piece was never information, and a bigger, louder version of the same thing will fail in the same way.
When you need a date, hand people events rather than months. Was that before or after the holiday? Same year as the move?
When a child with attention difficulties is also at war with every instruction, that pairing is worth taking to someone early rather than waiting to see whether it settles.