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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Watch for the child who does well in conversation and badly on paper, or who is fine in class and miserable at PE. Those gaps are usually a second thing rather than a facet of the first. Name it separately in your report so it gets its own assessment and its own help, because a difficulty absorbed into an existing diagnosis quietly stops being anybody's job.
'We know what his soul whispers to him' (Quran 50:16). What has not been assessed is not thereby unreal, and a child's difficulty does not need a form in order to exist.
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وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ
We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––
Qur’an 50:16read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Whole groups go unidentified when nobody is looking for them. A clinical review described a generation of adults who grew up before the diagnostic criteria widened and so were never recognised, and argued that first diagnosis in adulthood is a real clinical issue rather than a doubtful one. It concerns autism in adults rather than second diagnoses in children, and it shows what becomes of what nobody assesses.
Lai MC, Baron-Cohen S. (2015). Identifying the lost generation of adults with autism spectrum conditions.. The lancet. Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A diagnosis already on file will explain almost anything if you let it, and then nothing else gets looked at.
A distracted person can be brought back with a nudge. Someone who has gone elsewhere cannot, and the difference shows itself in a couple of seconds.
If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.
The relative who was shut in a cupboard, tied to a chair or expelled was being managed for the same thing you are assessing now. There was simply no name for it then and no help attached to it.