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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
The two feel similar from the inside and point in different directions. With ADHD it is usually undirected: the legs go, the chair is wrong, you need to be up and out. With obsessive difficulty it has a target and a job, an itch attached to a specific act, and holding off makes it louder rather than easier. That one question separates them more reliably than another page of symptom counting.
He inspired it to know its own rebellion and piety (Quran 91:8). Some real self-knowledge is possible, and a well aimed question is how you get at it.
الشمس
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.
A literature review of mind wandering in ADHD found excessive internal wandering consistently associated with ADHD symptoms, and argued it captures an inward form of distractibility that observers and checklists tend to miss. Much of what matters here does not show on the outside, which is why it has to be asked about rather than watched for. The review draws associations together and does not settle which way the causation runs.
Lanier J, Noyes E, Biederman J. (2021). Mind Wandering (Internal Distractibility) in ADHD: A Literature Review.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Restlessness with a target and restlessness without one come from different problems, so what it is aimed at is the useful information.
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.
Ask about food two generations back. What the parents were like about it, what the grandparents were like, what the rules were at the table.
Very sweet, very salty, very fatty food acts on the reward system in a way that has more in common with a drug than with dinner. Reaching for it when you are flat is self-medication, not greed.