Dr. Kieran Kennedy

So, yeah, it's a bit of a complex mixture of your genetics and your biology, but then also what your brain's exposed to as you grow up as well.

Yeah, I love this one.

I mean, I was hoping this was going to come up because I think this is one of the hardest parts, especially for adults.

It's, well, how the heck do I go about getting this sorted then?

For New Zealand and Australia, it's very similar, really.

So I think the first port would be to see your GP, really, or if you have a psychologist, also talking to your psychologist first.

And at the moment anyway, it's then getting an appointment to see a psychiatrist who has experience with ADHD and is able to provide that diagnostic assessment.

Psychologists can also diagnose ADHD, clinical psychologists and developmental psychologists.

But I guess in terms of moving into treatment, especially medication, it would be getting a referral from your GP to meet with a psychiatrist that kind of needs to lend itself to that pathway.

there are some changes potentially coming in in New Zealand and Australia in coming years, actually, where GPs are potentially going to have further training to be able to potentially diagnose and then also treat ADHD too.

And I guess that comes from the fact that there's a real bottleneck, I think, especially for people in New Zealand when it comes to actually accessing a psychiatrist.

You know, there can be really long wait times and it can also be really expensive to get a private appointment

ADHD assessment, it sort of can be in the thousands of dollars type range.

So sort of giving GPs more scope and experience to potentially also help diagnose ADHD as something to hopefully kind of open up that access for people.

But yeah, I think if anyone is sitting here thinking, shit, I might have ADHD, it would be starting with your GP and booking an appointment there to just discuss that and then getting a referral from there.

Absolutely.

And even within psychiatry, it's still quite a subspecialised field to work in.

So, you know, if there's X number of psychiatrists in the country, there will only be a very small proportion of those psychiatrists who feel comfortable or are trained or are able to diagnose and then treat.

manage ADHD.

It's kind of a bit of a bottleneck type situation at the moment, but also, you know, ADHD really being a private psychiatric sort of diagnosis at the moment too means that the cost involved in that can be quite high.