this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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ADHD
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This answer is for the USA.
A health care professional is going to ask you questions from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). There are 9 symptoms for each kind of ADHD. If you have five of one or the other, you have ADHD. The difficult part is, everyone does these things sometimes. The question is, do you do them often, and does it have a negative impact on your life. A mental health provider is going to have more training on evaluating you than a general practitioner. When it comes down to it though, anybody can ask the questions, you have to give the answers.
I scheduled a physical with my GP and figured I'd get to take care of everything at once. Unfortunately that's not how the helthcare system works. The doctors don't like to combine multiple ailments into a single visit, because they can't bill them that way. So I left with a referral to psych. I haven't gone yet and still don't have a diagnosis. If you're going to go the GP route, make a specific appointment for an ADHD diagnosis. Make sure to ask beforehand if your GP feels comfortable giving the diagnosis and, if you're interested, prescribing meds. If you don't ask, your GP is likely to wait til after you've paid your copay to tell you that you'll need to see a psych specialist.
I've seen many online self-assessments that use some version of the DSM questionnaire that you've mentioned. I have a hard time committing to a binary answer to an open question so these are always a nightmare for me. My answer is usually something more like "sort of" or "depends" and I get very stressed out that I'm not being truthful or accurate. I've found ways to manage my symptoms out of necessity over the years and I think that might skew my answer to some of the questions also. I still usually end up answering "yes" to five of them, but that seems like I'm on the cusp. I just feel like a list of 9 written questions lacks nuance and that's why I was hoping to hear that a more holistic approach would be part of the diagnosis process.
My experience is that psychiatrists have never just asked me "do you experience X", going through those specific DSM symptoms, but instead they'll administer some kind of questionnaire that asks a significantly larger number of more specific questions that give you some sort of score at the end. The score is then used to determine whether or not you rank highly in certain symptom areas, which can then help the psych better understand your symptoms and whether or not you qualify for a certain diagnosis.