Maybe it's not as bad as you think? I say this as someone who has inattentive ADD. I wasnt diagnosed until later in life and I had to develop tools to overcome my deficits.
I'm not medicated now and I'm managing life very well.

I think it's a rare teen who has amazing focus. Plenty of teens are messy and have trouble focusing on work. Especially now when screens have reduced their attention spans.

Why don't you talk to an executive functioning coach? See what they can do for you.

It is not just the surveys that they use to determine ADHD. They use many things including their own observations ( they spend 4 hours with your kid) and also objective measures like the TOVA - https://www.tovatest.com/. Your kid doesn’t have ADHD; if they do, it’s obviously extremely mild. You should be happy that your kid doesn’t have it! I have it, as well as my teen, it’s not fun and there isn’t an easy fix. Too many people have normalized it like it’s no big deal or that medication (is harmless) or will fix everything.

Ask the school for reimbursement. If the school recommended the eval to identify a LD such as ADHD, they should have paid for it. The subject is covered in Wrights Law.

Anonymous wrote:A good evaluator will override what is in the surveys. That's what happened with DS. Teacher said no concerns for a number of things but parent form showed concern for many things so they gave a diagnosis mostly based on their interview with us.

You should talk directly with the evaluator.

Our case was parent had strong concerns, but nothing adhd came up in the nice, quiet 1:1 testing environment. Teachers survey then came in similar to parents and ex of adhd was granted mainly base on the two surveys.

Oh well.

Just in monitoring mode until late middle school now.

I'd recommend starting by sharing the report with your own pediatrician or psychiatrist. Hopefully they'll have enough information to make the call on ADHD, especially with your input. The potential helpful news is that the school is saying he meets the criteria. That should ultimately be helpful in getting him the appropriate accommodations through a 504 plan or the appropriate accommodations and specialized instruction through an IEP.

Best,
Rich
Rich Weinfeld, Special Education Consultant

Anonymous wrote:Why on earth it takes a $5000 report to get a medical trial of ADHD meds is so, so privileged and crazy around here. Talk about needing money to get the simplest of care.

We really should treat this more like coffee—if it works, great.

getting a medical trial of ADHD meds doesn't require a neuropsych. You can make an appointment with a regular pediatrician or a psyschiatrist. It does not have to be expensive.

Once you have the medical diagnosis from a health professional, you do not necessarily need a private neuropsych to get an IEP or 504 at school, and, in any case, the school has a legal obligation to assess kids in all areas (like a full psychoeducational assessment) to identify a kid with an educational disability.

Op, a couple of thoughts:

With my older DC, we paid for a full neuropsych and DC did not get an ADHD diagnosis because you have to show clinical level indicators in 5 categories and DC only showed them in 4. But DC showed significant deficits in those 4 areas, so tester emphasized that just becasue DC didn’t have a diagnosis, didn’t mean DC didn’t need help/accommodations. So we found doing the testing to be valuable for getting accommodations even without a diagnosis.

We also follow up testing with therapy and the psychologist who did the therapy for DC did their own evaluation and diagnosed DC with ADHD. So DC got the diagnosis anyway.

With DC2, Neuropsych showed deficits at home and in the testing but teachers reports showed nothing. The tester still gave a diagnosis of ADHD even without showing in two places, maybe becasue the testing showed attention problems.

Why on earth it takes a $5000 report to get a medical trial of ADHD meds is so, so privileged and crazy around here. Talk about needing money to get the simplest of care.

We really should treat this more like coffee—if it works, great.

Is the report worthless simply because it didn't give the diagnosis you expected or wanted? This information is valuable, too. If accurate, it tells you what not to focus on. Depending on what testing was done, there may be other areas to consider now that you have ruled out attention as a factor. Can you share more about what testing was done?

What specific tests were completed?

Option 1: your teen has mild inattentive ADHD but can compensate so well that it's borderline diagnosable.

Option 2: the psychologist evaluating your teen did not do it correctly. Where did you go? At Stixrud, my child has consistently done DISMALLY at the specific attention exercise: 20 or so minutes of pressing on a button if you see something or not (a flash of light? I can't remember). This is intended to bore kids so much that they cannot hyperfocus, and any existing attention issue is revealed. My son presses the button randomly because he starts daydreaming and can't remember if he saw something he needed to press the button for or not, so his score is always terrible!

There are other tests that measure attention, memory and processing speed as well, I can't remember them all.

A decent psychologist would know to interpret the questionnaire given the results of the testing. A full neuropsych lasts for 8 hours over two days at Stixrud.

A good evaluator will override what is in the surveys. That's what happened with DS. Teacher said no concerns for a number of things but parent form showed concern for many things so they gave a diagnosis mostly based on their interview with us.

You should talk directly with the evaluator.

What kind of testing did you have done? A full neuropsych would have done more than just considered the questionnaire. As PP suggested, maybe the exit interview will give you more insight.

Years ago when we first had my son tested, my results and the schools results were definite and unequivocal for ADHD. My spouses were not. What everyone realized as that spouse only knew kid in context of activities where he hyper focused. Anyway, we had two settings so no issues. But maybe you can tease out some factors about the way you answered questions that would help.

Have you had the exit interview with the neuropsychologist yet? If not, when you meet with the explain your concerns and see what they say.

We had a similar experience with our HS-aged kid- expecting inattentive ADHD but didn’t qualify. Instead, just identified as having relatively low processing speed. I’m not sorry we did the evaluation, because we have another more complex kid and I wanted everything on the table.

We are still got our kid an executive function tutor to help address the issues that led to the testing. A lot of the recommendations for people with ADHD also can work for people without the diagnosis.

I have never heard of brain scans being used to identify ADHD, so I would definitely do more research there before spending money on it.

After years of teachers encouraging us to have our DC tested we received our report that says he doesn’t have ADHD. He has apparently normal attention. I was shocked and honestly don’t believe it. I feel like I just spent thousands on nothing. The reasoning was that our answers on the fill out survey weren’t enough indicators at home although the teacher did have indicators. It needs to be two settings but our interview didn’t count. Our interview we did discuss the ribs of ways we feel the focus in an issue. Everything from lack of tidiness to being late to needing to oversee that the homework gets done etc etc. This seems to have been totally discounted. Some of the testing child did was above average in focus but I know my kid. They can focus situationally ie score high on tests but the other stuff a mess. I am now feeling like I should have filled out survey differently but some of the questions were really out there. Child not depressed and doesn’t have hyperactivity etc. I remember thinking I want to pick none of the above but had to pick something. More
the inattentive kind. Child was actually concerned because they know (teen) that they have focus issues because they are self aware. Child wondering what they can do to improve focus. I felt like the whole process was just a fill out survey and the write up looks rote. I am considering spending the $$ to go to Amen clinic for brain imaging but this is so expensive but thought maybe a look at the brain will show something definitive. I feel bad for my kid because it has taken me years to address this because we are concerned about long term effect of medicine. We have also considered going to a psychiatrist to see if they can review report for other perspective. Would love to see if anyone has been through this.and what did they do? FWIW I am now not opposed to medicine but would want to make sure it was not first thing to do if that makes sense. What I do know is doing nothing will not be helpful for hs.