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Adult ADHD -- a multi-step screening path

The ASRS-v1.1 is a good first signal, but it only measures one of several things that matter for an ADHD picture: your current symptom level over the last six months. It can't tell whether those symptoms have followed you your whole life or just showed up recently through sleep loss, a depressive episode, anxiety, or stress -- and it says nothing about how much they actually limit your day-to-day life. That real-world impairment is itself part of the official diagnostic criteria, not just how often symptoms occur.

This path walks you through several steps instead of a single test: the ASRS-v1.1 itself, the WFIRS-S for actual everyday impairment, a short reflection on your childhood, and pointers to the most likely alternative explanations. The WFIRS-S runs to 69 questions -- noticeably longer than the ASRS -- so budget a few extra minutes. At the end, you get no single combined score, but a picture that shows every signal side by side.

Why a path, why these steps?

A single ASRS score can't tell sleep loss, stress, or a depressive episode apart from ADHD -- the symptoms overlap heavily. So this path combines four pieces: the ASRS-v1.1 as a validated screener for current symptoms, the WFIRS-S, which measures how much that actually affects family, work, daily life, and self-concept, a reflection on the core diagnostic criterion of "difficulties before age 12," and pointers to the most common alternative explanations. Only all four together produce a picture a single test result can't.

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2 tests · 1 reflection question

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