Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Ask for a number first, then go hunting for exceptions. How is today on a scale of one to ten, and when was it last higher than that?
An assessment can turn into an hour of everything that is wrong, which leaves a person flatter than when they arrived. Exception questions do the opposite: when is the distraction less, which rooms, which times of day, who were you with. Those answers are real information about conditions that already work, and they can be built on straight away rather than invented from nothing.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Truly where there is hardship there is also ease (Quran 94:5). The ease is placed inside the hard stretch rather than after it, which is exactly what an exception question is looking for.
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 meta-analysis of cognitive behavioural treatments for adult ADHD found meaningful reductions in symptoms and related difficulties against control conditions, so structured psychological work has something real to offer. The exception questions here come from a different tradition and were not what those trials tested. What the meta-analysis supports is the broader point that skills based work earns its time.
Knouse LE, Teller J, Brooks MA. (2017). Meta-analysis of cognitive-behavioral treatments for adult ADHD.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Conditions that already help are easier to repeat than habits made up from scratch.
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
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.
One man put his lamps on a timer so the room would go dark at eleven and send him to bed. It worked for a few nights. Then he simply carried on in the dark. A cue can tell you the time. It cannot make you stand up.
The family history is not the warm up before the real assessment. Give it proper time and it will often tell you more than any single rating scale in the folder.