Any experience distinguishing anxiety and ADHD?

[Anonymous]

My DD, 9, is showing signs of something -- we know she's anxious but now, all of a sudden, is extremely disorganized, tuning out, etc. How do we determine whether it's ADHD, the anxiety, or both?

[Anonymous]

My had similar concerns with our 8 year old. We were concerned about both anxiety and ADHD. It can be very hard to distinguish between them because many of the external behaviors are similar. We took her for a neuropsych eval last year to help us figure things out. For us, the psychologist does not think she has ADHD. She thinks the anxiety is primary, manifesting in ADHD-like behaviors. We also discovered that she was highly gifted and was very underchallenged in school, creating boredom and disorganized behaviors. The reason we agree that it is not ADHD is that 1) she does better when she is given MORE challenging/complicated work, 2) she has no trouble completing school assignments (but she experiences great stress about it), 3) it goes in phases depending on how stressed she is and 3) she does not exhibit the disorganized behaviors all the time or when she has adequate time to plan and prep. We are watching the behaviors because if her issues get worse, then we may need to re-visit the diagnosis.

We have DD in CBT therapy for the anxiety, which is helping a lot. She is seeing a different therapist than the one who did the evaluation FWIW, and the therapist agrees with the diagnosis. But we are also implementing systems that help with executive function issues. We got a lot of ideas from the books: Smart but Scattered and Late, Lost and Unprepared. We also got her a 504 plan for school with the anxiety diagnosis, but many of the accommodations are for exceutive function type concerns.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

PP, thank you so much for your response. That sounds exactly like my DD, including the gifted part -- she has a very high IQ as shown on a WISC, and is bored in school.

I am very interested to hear that anxiety is the basis for a 504 -- I didn't know that was possible.

How did you find your therapist? And can you recommend a neuropsych for the diagnosis?

[Anonymous]

We are in NoVA, so I'm not sure our recommendations would help you?

We originally called George Mason for the neuropsych evaluation, but they had such a long wait list we went to one of the psychologists on their referral list. Our testing was done by Dr. Dianne Hoekstra in Falls Church. She was very thorough, but she is in single practice and it took several sessions to get all the testing done. DD is in therapy at InStep in Falls Church/Merrifield near Inova Fairfax. We wanted a therapy group with other services as well and they have classes and social skills groups as well. I will freely admit that we also picked it because it is extremely convenient to our house and her school.

Yes, the 504 was very easy to get. We did not think about it, but the therapist suggested it. Anxiety is considered an "other health impairment" under IDEA. The therapist wrote a letter and that was really the basis for the 504. We had write up a small document stating how this impacted her at school (not just in the classroom FYI) but we also talked about her stress over homework.

[Anonymous]

Thanks -- we are in MoCo so will probably have to find other resources. But your post helped me immensely -- thank you again.

[Anonymous]

If we lived in MoCo I would defintiely look into this place:

http://www.alvordbaker.com/

I recently heard two of their psychologists give talks (Bonnie Zucker and Mary Alvord) and both were fabulous. They spoke at a conference about gifted children with various learning disorders. I think they would be a wonderful choice.

Good luck!