32 y/o male. I took an in-person assessment earlier this year. It was an 8 hour battery of tests split across two days. In no particular order:

- Clinical Interview

- Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV)

- Wechsler Memory Scale – Fourth Edition (WMS-IV)

- Conners Continuous Performance Test – Third Edition (CPT-3)

- Delis-Kaplan Executive Functioning System, selected subtests

- Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)

Are you familiar with any of those? I did some research after receiving my report and apparently the combination of tests listed above are well-respected, about as good as it gets. I’m curious what your take is.

The subjective part of the assessment was actually the clinician making sense of the data. My cognitive assessment (IQ and its subtypes) scored fairly high, I averaged something like 115 (84th percentile). But my memory assessment scores (audio/visual memory/working memory, immediate/delayed memory) tanked tremendously, I averaged around 90 (30th percentile).

My positive diagnosis was based on the variability of scores and the clear cognition-memory gap. The results made sense, aligned with my experience in life (I fell asleep in almost every lecture in college, sustaining attention while taking notes was a heavy audio-visual working memory exercise for me).

I personally haven’t adopted any of this as my identity but it opened a door to do some metacognition and reflect on how I interface with the world. Also the stimulant medication didn’t magically fix everything, sometimes the hyper focus is worse, but there was one HUGE benefit that I didn’t realize I was missing - emotional regulation. I’m a heavy ruminator and pretty much suffered in silence most of my life, my inner dialog is much more organized and calm, and I can comb through my thoughts easier now.

P.S. I cannot recommend enough - check out “HealthyGamerGG” on YouTube. He does some deep dives on ADHD and other diagnoses. Classically trained psychiatrist with something like 5 years of training as a Buddhist monk. Very insightful guy who’s both data-driven and spiritual, helping a lot of people.

Reverse engineering my ADHD test