Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
It is easy to assume that a parent who is disorganised will not have kept anything, and that assumption quietly costs you evidence. Teacher comments from primary school are among the best corroboration available of when the difficulties started, better than most adults' memories of themselves. So ask, and give people a fortnight to look. Grandparents and old family houses turn up more of this than anyone expects.
You can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know (Quran 16:43). The people who hold the knowledge of a childhood are usually the ones who lived in the house.
النحل
وَمَآ أَرۡسَلۡنَا مِن قَبۡلِكَ إِلَّا رِجَالࣰ ا نُّوحِيٓ إِلَيۡهِمۡۖ فَسۡـَٔلُوٓاْ أَهۡلَ ٱلذِّكۡرِ إِن كُنتُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ
[Prophet], all the messengers We sent before you were simply men to whom We had given the Revelation: you [people] can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know
Qur’an 16:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A research review of girls and women with ADHD concluded that referral practices, as much as the criteria themselves, contribute to people being overlooked. What clinicians expect shapes what gets collected and therefore who gets identified. It reviews a field rather than studying individual clinicians, but the mechanism it describes is the one at work here.
Hinshaw SP, Nguyen PT, O'Grady SM, Rosenthal EA. (2022). Annual Research Review: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in girls and women: underrepresentation, longitudinal processes, and key directions.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You cannot receive what you never asked for.
When you read that some proportion of people with ADHD have a particular problem, the number tells you nothing until you know the figure for everybody else.
While you are taking the family history, ask about seizure disorders and psychosis too, not only about attention. A family carrying other neurological or psychiatric conditions is worth knowing about whatever you end up concluding.
Both people will tell you they were up for three nights. The useful question is what they did with those hours: driven and busy points one way, wired and wrecked points another.