Dr. Yath Ramesh

Life can be more difficult for you from a young age because of the fact that you were dealing with ADHD symptoms.

But at the same time, you have all the criticisms that you have throughout your life because of the fact that you have ADHD symptoms.

And I'd say there's a third segment to this now as well, which is that you're constantly trying to...

address this and trying to learn strategies while society might be challenging the diagnosis and challenging you and so for all those reasons it can be very distressing.

So with female patients, what I see is the combination and the complication of how all of the things that I just mentioned can affect emotional dysregulation, how they can interact with the menstrual cycles and menopause, as we talked about as well.

But also the fact that it's difficult for some of our female patients to get the right type of individualized support that they need to be able to handle all of that complexity.

And all of that absolutely causes more distress for them.

Okay, so ultimately what we're trying to do with an ADHD assessment is to identify a pattern of symptoms that have existed from your childhood, persisted into your adult life,

which are to do with how you regulate yourself.

It could be to do with inattention, to do with your activity levels, or I guess in the case of autism as well, to do with structure and routine and how that influences regulation.

What we're looking at is to see how that affects you across multiple settings, and we're looking for impairment.

And this is where there is a subjective element here, because on a superficial level, impairment can be quite obvious for some people, but not for others.

If you're very good at masking, you can go through a lot of domains without actually showing an impairment.

And a typical one would be, oh, I was academically really good at school.

Yes, it's possible to do really well at school academically, but be masking at the same time.

So we look for that as well.

And I think that this is where the subjectivity element probably gets questioned a little bit.

I get asked probably more frequently than I expect by people about

Isn't it just that we all have a bit of ADHD in us, and aren't we all a bit on the spectrum?

Well, first of all, if you go through the process of an ADHD assessment, you find out that actually not all of us are all on the spectrum.