Part of the comprehensive diagnosis intake process is to review your or your child's health history. This will include completing intake forms that will ask you about your health history over time, your family's health history, and any past or current health issues. It is important to get a complete picture of your and your family's health history in order to help your intake specialist understand your or your child’s development over time as this helps your clinician with the diagnosis process for ADHD and other co-occurring disorders.

Another important part of the diagnostic process is to obtain information from independent sources such as the spouse or other family members who know the person well. This is an important part of the process because it allows the clinician to get more detailed information and another perspective of how the individual may be impacted by their symptoms and also how they are functioning overall. It is also hard to remember things from the past or from your childhood so having another source of information can help close those gaps.

Your clinician will also ask you about ADHD symptoms and the impact these symptoms have on your daily functioning. During an evaluation, the clinician will try to determine the extent to which these symptoms currently apply to the adult and if they have been present in childhood. We assess symptoms in a number of ways, including through a clinical interview, by using assessment tools, and, for children, having a parent/guardian and teacher complete rating scales.

When evaluating a person for ADHD, our practitioners refer to and build on the criteria laid out in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fifth edition (DSM-5). This set of criteria is a useful starting point but, in order to form an accurate diagnosis, our therapists also draw from years of training and experience working with people who have ADHD, while taking into account the individual’s specific symptoms and circumstances.