Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Run a short anxiety and depression screener alongside the ADHD measure at every intake, not only when someone mentions their mood.
Mood and anxiety sit beside ADHD often enough that leaving them out means guessing about the concentration difficulty in front of you. Doing it as routine also takes away the awkwardness of singling somebody out, and it leaves you a number to compare against in three months. Brief validated screeners take a few minutes and are the cheapest information in the appointment.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful (Quran 21:83). Job says the hard part out loud, and a routine question makes it easier for someone else to do the same.
۞وَأَيُّوبَ إِذۡ نَادَىٰ رَبَّهُۥٓ أَنِّي مَسَّنِيَ ٱلضُّرُّ وَأَنتَ أَرۡحَمُ ٱلرَّٰحِمِينَ
Remember Job, when he cried to his Lord, ‘Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful.’
Qur’an 21:83read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A study of a short adult ADHD self-report screener found it flagged possible cases reasonably well in an international clinical sample, while being explicit that a screener is not a diagnosis. That is the right expectation for brief mood and anxiety measures too: they open a conversation and set a baseline. The validation was done in clinical samples, so performance in a general population would look different.
van de Glind G, van den Brink W, Koeter MW, Carpentier PJ, van Emmerik-van Oortmerssen K, Kaye S, Skutle A, Bu ET, Franck J, Konstenius M, Moggi F, Dom G, Verspreet S, Demetrovics Z, Kapitány-Fövény M, Fatséas M, Auriacombe M, Schillinger A, Seitz A, Johnson B, Faraone SV, Ramos-Quiroga JA, Casas M, Allsop S, Carruthers S, Barta C, Schoevers RA, IASP Research Group, Levin FR. (2013). Validity of the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) as a screener for adult ADHD in treatment seeking substance use disorder patients.. Drug and alcohol dependence doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot tell what is causing the poor concentration if you only measured one of the possible causes.
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
Hypervigilance after trauma and ADHD scanning look much alike from outside. Often the honest answer is that both are present, and the real question is how much of each.
Ask about the family properly: parents, brothers and sisters, children, then aunts, uncles and grandparents. Include drinking and drug use, in them as well as in the person sitting with you.
Damage to the front of the brain can produce something that looks a great deal like ADHD: poor impulse control, blunted judgement, a person their family says has changed.