Are ADHD waiting lists ever going to improve?

[MaddenA]

I've been told I could be waiting 7 years. Nearly bought medication a few months ago but panicked when I read about possible side effects so bottled it. Moment of madness. I'm desperate. How can it take 7 years for an assessment? I wish I could afford private.

In Surrey, schools are being told that they cannot make any new ADHD applications for assessment at the moment because the backlog is so huge.

Self diagnosis is off the scale so no, I see no sign of improvement coming.

The stupid thing is I've had an (unofficial) assessment by a friend who is trained but doesn't work in that field anymore. The results were stark. I scored highly. Probably a daft thing to do. He said he knew I had it when he first met me.

Can you pay for a private assessment?

Yeah, I'm 3 years in so far 😂

Not until everyone and their granny stops clogging up the system with cod self diagnosis. I guess the next trend will come along soon

it’s a terrible shame for the people who actually have it and require medication

I wonder how many people who actually get an assessment are found to actually have it?

Quite.

My research shows that sometimes it’s just easier and quicker for drugs to be prescribed than an actual assessment carried out

I have heard so many people saying they think they have it and listing off a load of random reasons that don't sound like adhd at all. It's frustrating. I'm debilitated. My working memory is so poor that I don't function sometimes. I can't remember anything. I don't know where anything is. My mind is insane with thoughts and permanent internal monologue but my body is overwhelmed and frozen. I don't get anything done despite trying because I can't cope with one thing at a time. I feel like a complete failure at the end of every day.

In my experience- if you go to a private ADHD clinic then they will only look at it through a lens of ADHD.. whereas in reality there are so many other overlaps with ADHD. The one I took my daughter to did a 45 min zoom call and diagnosed her there and then. Not nearly in depth enough and cost almost 2k.
I don't know if the many private clinics over diagnose but I suspect so - but equally I understand why people are driven to use these places (as I was) as the NHS lists are so long. I don't know what the answer is.

8 years waiting time for a dentist appointment I was told today. I actually laughed when receptionist told me as I assumed she was joking … she wasn’t.

The bigger question is why do so many people have ADHD?

Speaking personally, smart phone use/addiction has absolutely destroyed my attention span and memory.

I can't concentrate on anything. I wish they had never been invented. I wonder if that impact is true of more people & whether its a contributory factor in rising levels of adhd.

If you go private, I would imagine everyone who goes would get a diagnosis

Have you tried the NHS right to choose pathway? I waited 2 years in the NHS waiting list before I found out about the right to choose pathway once I did and requested a referral to one of the specialist clinics contracted through that it took less that 3 months for my assessment and diagnosis and two months later I’m stable on medication and referred back to my GP for ongoing prescriptions.

My GP said the wait here is about a year. That was back in October but I've no idea what's happening just glad to have been given a possible explanation for being quirky.

I don't know if kids are different but my youngest dc was referred and diagnosed within 4 months. Must be a postcode lottery.

Really? Here ADHD medication can only be prescribed by a psychiatrist after official diagnosis.

I think there is a rhetoric about thousands of people thinking they have adhd and ritalin being handed out like candy. My friend, who is a psychiatrist said it isn't quite true. Not in his area anyway. A huge number of people he used to see were women who were missed because adhd in girls was and still is misunderstood. It's disheartening when you start a post about a genuine concern and the comments of 'every Tom dick and Harry has adhd' roll in. Its one of the reasons I've waited so long to see a gp. The stigma, and fear of being Dismissed or not believed. I haven't told a soul apart from my friend and this post. I'm too worried people will roll their eyes at me.

1. It depends on the specific clinic I suppose but the ones I looked into are run by the same medical professionals who also work in the same capacity for the NHS; I’d like to think their medical expertise or standard of ethics doesn’t differ between their NHS clinics and their private clinics but maybe I’m being naive in thinking that.
2. I know of a few adults (support group) who went private and were flatly told they didn’t have ADHD. Several more though were also told they didn’t have it but were instead pointed in the direction of other conditions and were subsequently diagnosed by the NHS with ASD, BPD and various other mental health conditions so I don’t think they diagnose ADHD just for the sake of it.
3. I imagine they do have a high diagnosis rate though but only because the people who are willing to drop 2k-3k on an assessment, have probably done their research and are certain (mostly correctly) that they do have it. No one spends that amount of money for shits & giggles unless they are experiencing problems & looking for answers.

The GP route didn’t work for us and we’d still be suffering if we waited for NHS diagnosis. The levels of ignorance from some GPs was astounding. Other posters have covered it.

Psych is required, the disinformation spread by likes of The Times newspaper is pure malice; you go for diagnosis if you’re struggling with a disability. Because that is what it is. Disabling your every day. People who eyeroll at that? They just don’t understand. It’s a lonely world at times. You’re either in it or you’re not. And you’ll know yourself if you are.

The brain is different in people with ADHD so no, smartphones don’t make that happen. We got to point we couldn’t leave house, put it that way. Depression comes hand in hand. Other things that have happened include police turning up on doorstep due to adhd related behaviours. So it’s likely people who go down the route of diagnosis are truly struggling and it costs an absolute fortune to get the help you need. For adults with other conditions, you can’t often get any help. You just have to hope and pray you can rely on the coping mechanisms you’ve developed over time. Anger management is another connected issue around outbursts when stress post burnout builds up and poor self-esteem.

Spoiler alert, it can devastate relationships, as well as quash potential around careers and ambitions like any other disability. So when I see articles like the latest Times ableist bullshit, I get really riled. Then they print ‘people with adhd get really angry when you talk about over diagnosis’. 1 in 7 people are neurodivergent. 1 in 10 have dyslexia and it’s often co-morbid. Dyslexic? It’s likely you could have adhd also. Massive stats yet people say it’s being over-diagnosed…draw your own conclusions. Ignorance abounds.

Final word? If you’re disabled by adhd, you need to go private asap and stop worrying what others think. It’s not a ‘quirk’ of personality, it’s a condition.

Honest question, how much is a diagnosis going to help an adult? Unless you need to be medicated? I think I probably have it from self diagnosing but I don't see the point in wasting anyone's time with it. I function quite well on a day to day basis though.

I've suspected my DH was ND probably 15 years ago. I was listening to a radio programme about 2 or 3 years ago talking about adult adhd and it was like a penny dropped, they were literally describing DH. (He was next to me while the programme was on but didnt hear it because he was concentrating on something) He is also dyslexic and had a really difficult time at school.

I spoke to him about it but he was not interested in researching or looking anything up. (Probably because it would involve reading which is difficult)
It's helped explain (for me) a lot of behaviour that I've found difficult within our relationship, particularly around listening and remembering things - I felt like I was being ignored or not worth listening to for probably a decade!

Smart phone use doesn’t cause ADHD.

For women of a certain age, we didn’t have smartphones growing up yet as part of the diagnosis we had to recall our childhood.

Adhd is really Dopamine Deficiency. The reason a NT is able to do a list of jobs is because their brains get a dopamine delivered to the correct area of the brain And you get a reward

in an ADHD brain the dopamine isn’t being transported to the correct part of the brain. So we never get that reward.

Living with ADHD is akin to standing outside a large conference room with 10,000 people pairing up and having 5000 conversations. It’s that constant noise that we live with that we can’t tune out. Day to day it is having to listen to that noise and try to pick out a conversation from that noise that gives us some idea of what is needed to be done

Then we have to work on being able to actually do the task and without dopamine we either fail completely or it takes us hours to do a simple job

Adhd is something that has been with you for life. You didn’t suddenly get it by looking at your phone everyday

It depends on what age you are.

As a post menopausal woman that change in hormone levels can floor you.

Private assessment is the only option at the moment- like others have said- the huge uptick in self diagnosis has led to there being no other option. Will a diagnosis actually change anything?