Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Phrases about being permanently on the go are in there because people kept saying them. So use yours: that your head is like a browser with forty tabs open, that sitting through a meal feels like holding your breath. A good assessor is listening for the lived version, and your own phrasing carries more information than a tidy summary you rehearsed on the way in.
Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful (Quran 21:83). Job says it plainly, without dressing it up or playing it down, which is a good model for the room.
الأنبياء
۞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.
A short self-report screener for adult ADHD performed reasonably well at flagging people who might have it in an international clinical sample, and the study is clear that a screener is a first step rather than a diagnosis. Questionnaires narrow things down. The conversation is where the detail lives, which is exactly where your own description does its work.
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.
Your own words describe what actually happens, and borrowed words describe what you think is wanted.
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?
Nearly everything on the ADHD list can show up inside a bipolar presentation, and the reverse is not true. So the shared features settle nothing, and the distinctly manic ones carry all the weight.
Processing speed is the stubborn one. It shifts a little with repeated, rhythmically paced practice and hardly at all with explanation, so say that to a family at the start rather than when they are disappointed.