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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Say their name, ask something simple, and watch what returns. Attention that has drifted comes back with a small apology and picks the thread up again. Dissociation has a clean edge to it: present, then not present, then a gap they cannot account for. That second picture points towards trauma and needs different care, so it is worth checking rather than filing under poor concentration.
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these (Quran 17:36). Looking properly before naming something is part of that.
الإسراء
وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these
Qur’an 17:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of adults presenting to services with other psychiatric problems found unrecognised ADHD underneath them often, partly because symptoms overlap across diagnoses and people do not always read their own attention well. It runs the other way too: what gets called inattention may be something else entirely. The review pulls clinical literature together rather than measuring how often each mistake is made.
Barkley RA, Brown TE. (2008). Unrecognized attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in adults presenting with other psychiatric disorders.. CNS spectrums doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
One is attention that wandered and can be called back, the other is a door that closed.
Home DNA tests turn up relatives nobody expected. If someone is thinking of taking one to fill in a blank family history, it is worth saying out loud that it may hand them more than they asked for.
Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder was built partly to keep the bipolar label off children whose future nobody can yet see. Worth remembering when that word lands on a family's paperwork: it describes now, and it does not settle later.
Ask twice. First, who in the family has an actual diagnosis. Then, who do you look back on now and wonder about. The second question nearly always brings more than the first.