Being diagnosed with ADHD

Once you’ve booked an assessment, the emotional tone often changes.

The suspicion stage is speculative; the assessment stage is real. It tends to bring a cocktail of feelings: anticipation, defensiveness, hope, and the nagging fear that you’ll be dismissed.

Preparation

It also tends to come with admin. Many clinicians will send questionnaires in advance, partly to structure the session and partly to gather information you may not be able to access reliably from memory alone.

For me, that meant the ASRS again, plus a long Word document with detailed questions about early life — school, childhood behaviour, and the kinds of things that become hard to reconstruct accurately as an adult.

Family

A common feature of adult ADHD assessment is that someone who knew you earlier in life is asked to contribute. It can be a partner, a parent, or someone else close. This isn’t about putting your life on trial; it’s about building a more complete picture, especially where childhood patterns matter.

In my situation, the longer questionnaire was intended to be filled in by people who knew me well. I’m lucky enough to still have both my parents, so I asked them to go through it. I think they found it overwhelming. There were a lot of questions, and many required them to dig deep and remember details they’d never previously thought about in an ADHD context.

That process can be emotionally revealing in its own right. It can also surface something that adults often carry quietly: the desire not to worry the people who love you.

When I told my parents I was pursuing a diagnosis, I was relieved that their reaction wasn’t upset or disappointment. If anything, they seemed relieved that I was talking to them. I think they half suspected I had more going on than I was saying. That was true, largely because I’ve always been worried about worrying them. That first conversation felt like a barrier coming down.

History

When family members contribute to an assessment, you can also end up with an unexpected realisation: how little people necessarily knew about you as you got older — particularly through the teenage years, when interior life becomes more private.

With the form, my parents had a first attempt at filling it in, but because it was detailed we followed up with a FaceTime to go through it together. The striking part was realising that as I moved through secondary school, there was less and less they knew about what I was like inside at that time.

That discussion nudged me into saying things out loud I hadn’t shared before. I found myself offering an honest appraisal of what I could be like to be around back then, which I think surprised them. It also felt cathartic.

This kind of reflection doesn’t have to involve “bad behaviour” to be meaningful. A person can be high-performing, well-behaved, and still privately struggle.

For my part, I was a good student and never had disciplinary bother. What I can see looking back is how a combination of neediness, impulsivity, sensitivity to rejection, and a compulsion to overdo jokes and humour caused social friction at times. I could also see how some of those traits carried into the early part of my career, before I learned to manage them better.

Challenge

Adult ADHD assessments vary in tone. Some are warm and collaborative. Some are probing and challenging. Psychiatrists or psychiatric nurses are just people too, and each will have their own style.

Either way, it helps to expect depth. A proper assessment usually isn’t a box-ticking exercise; it is an extended attempt to understand your patterns and how they’ve played out across a lifetime.

My video call started off inauspiciously.

“I’ve read your questionnaire from your parents, and I don’t know why you’re here?”

It was clearly going to be an entertaining three hours. Strangely, unlike my experiences with GPs — where I’d pre-prepared and spilled my guts — the challenging tone sharpened my focus.

The appointment lasted about three hours and consisted of probing, often challenging questions. Some were clearly standard diagnostic questions. But what stood out to me was that it felt like more than “passing me through” a diagnostic process. I’m not going to rehearse the entire discussion here; I can’t remember all of it and a fair amount was personal. What I can say is that I was able to describe how I felt inside in those early years, as well as more recently, and I said out loud things I’d never admitted.

Guardrails

One useful way of understanding late diagnosis is to look at the structures that may have contained your traits for years — and the cost of that containment.

As we talked, I began to see how a combination of being an only child, high expectations because I was seen as bright, and a very structured secondary education and work life had created a set of guardrails. Those guardrails had kept my natural tendencies in check and kept me on the straight and narrow.

But the back-pressure of coping has consequences. For me, the stress, anxiety, and lack of self-confidence and self-acceptance I’d experienced for much of my life seemed to be partly downstream of the effort required to stay contained. As responsibilities increased with age, that stress and anxiety spilled over more and more — which is where this whole journey began.

Even small behaviours can become informative in an assessment, especially if they show up consistently under pressure.

On my desk I have some Lego that I tend to fiddle with during calls. A couple of hours in, I realised I’d been constantly toying with it the whole time. I assume that hadn’t gone unnoticed.

Confirmation

If a clinician’s tone is challenging at the start, it doesn’t necessarily stay that way. A good assessment isn’t about being kind or unkind; it’s about being accurate.

As the session approached its end and his note-taking slowed, the demeanour shifted.

“Well, congratulations, you have a superpower.”

He softened noticeably.

“You meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, Primarily Inattentive type… Sure, it means you have some things you need to manage, but it means you can do things really differently to many others.”

He went on to explain that ADHD has three “flavours”: one that leans more towards attention challenges, one that leans more towards hyperactivity, and a combined type. We touched on medication, but I made it clear that at that stage the diagnosis itself was enough — I wanted to see what the extra headspace would give me.

He also said something that landed heavily in a different way:

“You should thank your parents for what they have done for you. You could have ended up somewhere very different without them.”

Relief

A diagnosis can bring a complicated emotional response. It can be validating. It can be sobering. It can be both. Diagnosis strikes many people at the heart of their identity.

Different people feel different things, some not always good and I appreciate that. My main piece of advice is to prepare yourself to feel something quite deeply.

For me, one emotion hit like a bus and that was pride — intense pride — and an overwhelming sense of relief. It felt as if a huge jigsaw piece had been put in place inside me. I realised that I’d been able to build a good life and career effectively with the handbrake on.

Now it was all about how I could use this new information.