Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
When something did not get done, find out which half broke. Did they not know what to do or when? Or was the plan fine, and the moment for doing it came and went?
Ask for the last time it happened, hour by hour, up to the point where it did not happen. A planning failure needs somewhere reliable to catch tasks and a calendar that actually gets looked at. A doing failure needs the surroundings and the consequences changed. The two look identical from outside, and treating one as the other will cost you months.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The soul was 'inspired to know its own rebellion and piety' (Quran 91:8). Fine grained self knowledge is spoken of as something given, and this is a modest practical version of it.
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
Where the difficulty shows up matters more than how many symptoms are ticked. That reasoning drove the development of a validated adult quality of life measure for ADHD, built because symptom counts alone missed the effect on work, home and daily life. It is a measurement study rather than a test of this planning and doing split, so it supports looking closely at where life breaks rather than proving these are the two places to look.
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
Knowing what to do and doing it run on different machinery, so they need different repairs.
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 age by which symptoms have to have shown up is a number people agreed on, not a line in nature. It moved from seven to twelve when the manual was revised.
Two referrals turn up again and again. A young child being asked to leave a school for behaviour, with no developmental or cognitive information anywhere in the file. And a parent saying something is wrong while the school says everything is fine. Both are describing adult frustration rather than a formulation.
Alongside diagnoses, ask how relatives died. Falls from roofs, crashes, deaths with the safety gear left on the ground: these recur in some family lines and they say something a list of diagnoses cannot.