Is ADHD part of your story?
Difficulty with focus, organisation, and impulsivity has a name, and an assessment is how you find out whether that name fits. Here is exactly how the process works, written by the people who build the tools clinicians use to run it.
Hundreds of adult assessments. Diagnosed with ADHD at 41.
What a thorough assessment gives you
Confirmation
Find out whether ADHD is actually the root of the challenges, or whether something else is.
Your own profile
The specific ways ADHD shows up for you, rather than the general description.
Informed decisions
Choices about work, study, and relationships made with real information behind them.
Access to support
The documentation that accommodations at work and school usually require.
A diagnosis can also carry weight you did not expect: stigma, worry, or grief about the years before you knew. That is normal, and it is worth naming before you start.
Step 1. Decide what you need the result for
This single decision sets the type, length, and cost of your assessment. Everything else follows from it.
Basic screening
Identifies whether ADHD is likely and whether a fuller evaluation is worth pursuing.
Comprehensive
An in-depth evaluation: interviews, standardised questionnaires, and often cognitive testing.
Assessment depth is usually lowest with a family doctor or nurse practitioner. A psychiatrist or psychologist will run a longer interview, and a psychologist may add questionnaires and measures of cognitive and academic skills.
Who can assess you
Four kinds of professional can assess adult ADHD, and the depth varies a lot. Pick one to see what that appointment usually involves.
Family doctor (GP)
Usually the shortest route and often the first conversation. Expect a brief history and symptom questions. Useful for starting the conversation and for medication, less useful if you need documentation for work or school.
What you need the result for should decide the route. Documentation for accommodations usually means a longer assessment with a psychologist.
Step 2. Prepare properly
The better prepared you are, the more accurate the assessment. Tick these off as you go, and the list will remember where you left it.
Clarify the goal
Accommodations at work, or understanding yourself better? The answer changes the assessment you need.
Gather the paper
School report cards, especially elementary, and any previous psychological reports.
Note real examples
When overwhelm hits, what distracts you, what you put off. Medication and substance use history too.
Find an informant
Someone who knew you as a child. A parent, a caregiver, or a friend's parent who paid attention.
Step 3. What happens during the assessment
History taking
A practitioner should want your past in depth, because that is where the evidence for adult ADHD lives. Developmental milestones, school, work, relationships. If nobody asks about your childhood, that is a warning sign.
Questionnaires
Standardised tools the practitioner provides, free of charge, to gather information about your behaviour and experience in a form that can be compared against a known baseline.
Interview
Twenty minutes for a basic screening, up to three hours for a comprehensive evaluation. Personal history, developmental milestones, academic and work performance, and current symptoms.
Cognitive testing, sometimes
Measures of attention, memory, and problem solving. If a learning disorder is also in question, you will complete tests of academic skills as well.
If your parent or other informant does not think you have ADHD, that does not mean your assessor will agree with them. Some clients worry an informant could bias the result. An experienced assessor knows informants carry their own biases, and weighs every piece of information objectively.
Step 4. After the assessment
If ADHD is diagnosed, you will get personalised recommendations. Usually some combination of medication options, ADHD coaching to build practical strategies, and therapy for the emotional side.
What a diagnosis can open
A medication conversation with a physician, coaching resources that raise day-to-day functioning, and the documentation that makes accommodations possible.
What it can cost you
You might feel stigmatised by the label, or worry about what it means for the people around you. Grief about the years before you knew is common, and it is legitimate.
A diagnosis is not a limitation. It is information you can finally act on.
We work on both sides of the assessment.
Dr. Claire Sira is a clinical neuropsychologist whose research background is executive function, and whose medical-legal history battery is the basis of the questionnaires used in our pre-assessment service.
Tom Hudock built HyperFocus with her, the software physicians and psychologists use to run ADHD assessments properly. Between them: ten years coaching adults with ADHD, two books, and a national network of 50+ licensed psychologists.
We do not diagnose. That is the psychologist's job, and we would rather you go in prepared than go in twice.
Ready to start one?
Begin with our pre-assessment history at no charge. You will be matched with psychologists in your province, and you keep the file for whatever you decide next.