Adult ADHD Assessment: Where to Start and How It Works
Many adults spend years wondering why everyday tasks feel so difficult. Time slips away easily. You find yourself forgetting important appointments. Focusing on the task at hand, no matter how much you want to, is a challenge.
While these experiences are frustrating and often feel isolating, they could be indicative of ADHD. Understanding whether ADHD is affecting your life starts with a proper assessment and diagnosis. This process can shed light on the challenges you're facing and open doors to effective solutions.
If you’ve been questioning whether ADHD might explain your current struggles, learning about the assessment process is an important first step.
Recognizing the Signs of Adult ADHD
Many people are familiar with childhood ADHD on a surface level, especially in young boys. You may be picturing disruptive or hyperactive behaviors. Adult ADHD, however, often looks a bit different.
You may notice patterns such as chronic procrastination, difficulty completing projects, forgetfulness, or trouble managing your time. On a personal level, your relationships can suffer if you forget important dates or struggle to attend to conversations. On a professional level, you may become overwhelmed by tasks that require sustained attention or jumping between projects without finishing them.
Adult ADHD can also lead to challenges with emotional regulation. You may have a short fuse, feel easily frustrated, react intensely, or struggle with restlessness and boredom.
All of this can lead to feelings of low self-esteem, especially if you’ve been made to feel like you’re not living up to your full potential.
Where to Start Your Assessment Journey
If you have even the slightest inkling that you may be dealing with ADHD, your struggles deserve the right course of assessment. Start by documenting your experiences, noting specific situations when attending to a task is difficult, you experience hyperactivity, or you demonstrate impulsive behavior, or you become particularly overwhelmed at something out of the norm. Write down your experience with these behaviors and how they impact the different areas of your life.
The next step is to seek professional support from someone with ADHD training. A psychologist, psychiatrist, or other mental health professional are all great options to perform an assessment and evaluate your symptoms.
What to Expect During the Assessment
A comprehensive ADHD assessment involves multiple components:
Clinical interviews will explore your history up through your present to see where symptoms originated
Standardized rating scales may be given to you, and potentially your close family and friends, to gain a better understanding of your experience
Cognitive testing will evaluate attention, executive functioning, and cognitive processing speed
Review of personal records, including educational background and medical history, will help identify chronic patterns
Screening for co-occurring conditions, such as anxiety, depression, or learning disabilities, will help give additional clarity
An important piece of the bigger picture is establishing when your symptoms first arose. Since ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition, it’s more than likely you’ve been living with some variation of symptoms since childhood. They may not have affected your daily functioning enough to notice when you were younger, or it’s also possible that they were mistaken for other issues.
Understanding Your Results
By the time the assessment is complete, you should receive an ADHD diagnosis or have a path forward in a different direction. Even if you do receive a positive diagnosis, having the information can be very empowering for symptom management. You finally have answers to questions and options for effective treatment.
Moving Forward
An ADHD assessment can provide very valuable information about how your brain works. Aside from that, going through the process can help you identify areas where you may need a little extra support.
Ready to take the next step? Contact us today to learn more about our psychological assessments for ADHD. Together, we can work to get answers, create healthy coping strategies, and build confidence to navigate your daily challenges.