Adult ADHD: organising daily life

This resource supports professional care, it does not replace it. You will find here the description of symptoms clinicians use, but reading a description does not allow you to diagnose yourself: in adults the diagnosis requires an interview, evidence about childhood, often an informant, and the exclusion of other explanations — several of them very ordinary, described in section 6. No decision about medication is ever made by reading a text. And if what you mainly recognise is lasting sadness, overwhelming anxiety or thoughts of death, that is what has to be assessed first, this week.

1. Before you start

You have three task apps and you open none of them. You pay late fees on bills you had the money to settle. You lose your keys twice a week, your bank card once a quarter. You start a project with impressive energy and abandon it a third of the way in. You know exactly what needs doing — you could explain it to someone else in three minutes — and you do not do it.

And for twenty years, people have been explaining that you just need to get organised.