32 y/o male. I took an in-person assessment earlier this year. It was an 8 hour battery of tests split across two days. In no particular order:

- Clinical Interview

- Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV)

- Wechsler Memory Scale – Fourth Edition (WMS-IV)

- Conners Continuous Performance Test – Third Edition (CPT-3)

- Delis-Kaplan Executive Functioning System, selected subtests

- Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)

Are you familiar with any of those? I did some research after receiving my report and apparently the combination of tests listed above are well-respected, about as good as it gets. I’m curious what your take is.

The subjective part of the assessment was actually the clinician making sense of the data. My cognitive assessment (IQ and its subtypes) scored fairly high, I averaged something like 115 (84th percentile). But my memory assessment scores (audio/visual memory/working memory, immediate/delayed memory) tanked tremendously, I averaged around 90 (30th percentile).

My positive diagnosis was based on the variability of scores and the clear cognition-memory gap. The results made sense, aligned with my experience in life (I fell asleep in almost every lecture in college, sustaining attention while taking notes was a heavy audio-visual working memory exercise for me).

I personally haven’t adopted any of this as my identity but it opened a door to do some metacognition and reflect on how I interface with the world. Also the stimulant medication didn’t magically fix everything, sometimes the hyper focus is worse, but there was one HUGE benefit that I didn’t realize I was missing - emotional regulation. I’m a heavy ruminator and pretty much suffered in silence most of my life, my inner dialog is much more organized and calm, and I can comb through my thoughts easier now.

P.S. I cannot recommend enough - check out “HealthyGamerGG” on YouTube. He does some deep dives on ADHD and other diagnoses. Classically trained psychiatrist with something like 5 years of training as a Buddhist monk. Very insightful guy who’s both data-driven and spiritual, helping a lot of people.

I’m going to say that as you perform more clinical tests typically your chances of a wrong diagnosis will decrease proportionally. However particularly in the case of ADHD tests, if you know the test questions and the symptom description I think you could cheat your way to a diagnosis. If you went to all of these tests in earnest, without looking them up, just providing spontaneous responses, and all of them come back positive, I’d say chances are you have ADHD.

> I’m curious what your take is.

I'm not OP but that seems like a very respectable diagnostic track. No test is 100% reliable, so you'd want multiple tests. Even then the results can realistically only be interpreted by a psychologist that is familiar with your situation (hence the clinical interview). So this seems perfectly proper.

> Also the stimulant medication didn’t magically fix everything

Sadly there is no medication that fixes adhd. The only thing these medication does is make it easier to deal with by alleviating (some of) the symptoms. Personally I've noticed from my medication (methylphenidate) that it make it easier to stay focused on whatever task I'm doing, but if that happens to be scrolling reddit, I can still waste hours, perhaps even more since I would have otherwise distracted myself from reddit long before. So it's not perfect, but it does enable me to concentrate 8h+ at work, and that's ultimately the main benefit it brings me.

Be careful and approach `HealthyGamerGG` with a bit of healthy skepticism. I have benefited from a number of his videos, but recently small things have lead to me growing concerned that as his reach/influence grows, the same motivations that existed early on mutate as with many influencers. Not suggesting anything negative per se, just recommending a variety of sources and validating his claims. For another source, Dr. Barkley's videos are very good.