Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › What ADHD actually is
Things often seem to get worse in the weeks after a diagnosis. Usually nothing has got worse. You are simply seeing what was always there, and now you have a name to hang it on.
You will start joining things up: the lost keys, the half finished projects, the reason that job ended. It can feel like the diagnosis broke something. Expect this and it passes into something steadier, often within a couple of months. If you are the one giving a diagnosis, say this at the time, because someone who has not been warned tends to conclude that the treatment is failing.
Qur’an and Sunnah
And in yourselves too, do you not see (Quran 51:21). Looking into your own workings is invited there, and it is normal for the first proper look to be uncomfortable.
وَفِيٓ أَنفُسِكُمۡۚ أَفَلَا تُبۡصِرُونَ
and in yourselves too, do you not see?––
Qur’an 51:21read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A quality of life measure for adults with ADHD was built on the premise that symptom counts miss what impairment means day to day, and it works by asking people about their own lives. What a person reports depends on what they are attending to, which is exactly what shifts after a diagnosis. It is a measure validation study and was not examining the period after diagnosis.
Brod M, Johnston J, Able S, Swindle R. (2006). Validation of the adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder quality-of-life Scale (AAQoL): a disease-specific quality-of-life measure.. Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Attention is now pointed at things you used to look past, which changes what you see rather than what is happening.
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
The name is a little misleading. What tends to be hard is not seeing or understanding a task, it is getting your brain to switch on for something it finds no reward in, and to switch off from something it loves.
Not knowing a child's family history is not evidence against ADHD. Where a child is adopted, a blank family history should keep the question open rather than close it.
There is no age at which finding out stops being worth it. People have been diagnosed in their eighties and described it as the first explanation that ever fitted.