Sasha Hamdani

With ADHD, when you're looking at the criteria, you're screening for both the inattentive symptoms, the hyperactive symptoms, and then obviously you'll get, if it's combined from both of those,

You want to check timelines, see if these symptoms presented before 12.

When you're assessing for an adult, that can get tricky because if you're asking them to recall retroactive data, that's hard.

A lot of people don't remember and a lot of people have spent so much time

during their childhood where their parents have masked, covered up, fixed kind of symptomology that it's hard to assess.

So that's difficult.

You have to really dig back to get good criteria.

And then when you're asking questions, like for example, with the inattentiveness you're asking, is it hard to stay engaged with a task?

Do you feel like it's difficult to organize things?

Do you feel like you get distracted halfway through the conversation?

You're asking things about focus and focus adjacent topics

But you also have to ask, is this present during a depressive episode?

Is this present when there's substances involved?

Did you notice this before or after you got on thyroid medication?

You're asking all of these things while you're doing a simultaneous screening for other things.

So it becomes...

Pretty complicated.

You're doing a comprehensive medical rule out.

It's confusing from a psychiatric perspective.

Like, is this bipolar?