ADHD Doesn’t Wait: Why an Assessment Is About More Than a Label

There seems to be a lot of conversation at the moment about ADHD assessments. Waiting lists, access to services, whether too many people are being diagnosed and that familiar comment that suddenly “everyone has ADHD”. But whenever I hear conversations about ADHD assessment waiting lists getting longer, or people potentially having to wait even longer for answers, I keep coming back to one thing.

ADHD doesn’t wait.

The person struggling doesn’t suddenly stop struggling because their assessment is three years away. The child struggling at school doesn’t pause until somebody gets to their name on a waiting list, and the mum who is overwhelmed by everyday life doesn’t get to put her brain on hold until she finally has some answers.

I talked about this on this week’s Mumma Chats, When a Boring Week Is a Good Week, because as I said on the podcast, people aren’t going for an ADHD assessment for a jolly. Usually, by the time somebody is asking for an assessment, there is a reason they are asking. Something isn’t working, something is difficult, or they have reached a point where they need to understand why everyday life seems to be harder for them than it should be.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 38

I spent 38 years without knowing I had ADHD and, when I look back now, there are so many parts of my life that make more sense. Things I struggled with, things I found overwhelming, my mental health after having my children and the way I coped, or sometimes didn’t cope, with motherhood.

Would knowing I had ADHD have magically made all of those things disappear? Of course not. But I would have had understanding, and I think that is the part that gets lost when people dismiss an ADHD diagnosis as somebody simply wanting a “label”.

When you spend years not understanding why your brain seems to work differently to everybody else’s, you don’t necessarily think there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. You turn it back on yourself.

Why can’t I do this when everybody else seems to manage it? Why am I overwhelmed by something that everyone else appears to just get on with? Why can I cope brilliantly with something one day and then feel completely incapable of doing exactly the same thing another day?

Eventually, underneath all of those questions, there can be a much more painful one.

“Am I broken?”

Finding out I had ADHD didn’t suddenly give me ADHD. My brain had been my brain for 38 years before somebody put a name to it. What the diagnosis gave me was an explanation for something that had been there all along.

It gave me a framework to understand myself and, probably most importantly, it allowed me to start looking back at myself with a little more compassion. There are things I can look back on now and think, Ohhhhh, that makes sense, rather than automatically assuming I failed, didn’t try hard enough or just wasn’t very good at being a functioning adult.

But apparently everyone wants a label

This is probably why I really struggle with the idea that people are suddenly desperate to collect diagnoses, because that has never been what diagnosis has meant in our family.

When we sought ADHD and autism assessments for our children, we weren’t doing it because having a diagnosis was somehow prestigious. We weren’t desperate to stick another label on them. We were doing it because our child was struggling and we wanted to understand why.

And that understanding changes things.

Before we understood our own neurospicy household, there were behaviours that could easily have been seen as naughty, difficult or something that needed correcting. Once you start to understand what is actually happening underneath that behaviour, you can respond completely differently.

Instead of only asking, Why are you behaving like this?, you can start asking, What is making this so difficult for you?

Instead of assuming a child needs consequences, you can wonder whether they actually need support. Instead of seeing a child who simply “won’t”, you can start considering whether you are looking at a child who genuinely can’t in that moment.

For us, identifying autism and ADHD wasn't about putting our children into boxes. If anything, it helped us take them out of the boxes they were already being put into.

That is why an ADHD assessment can matter so much. It isn't just about the word written at the top of a report. It can be the thing that finally makes years of experiences make sense, both for the person being assessed and for the people trying to support them.

We were lucky enough to go private

There is another part of our story that I think is really important to acknowledge because we were in a position where we could pay privately for assessments, both for me and for our children.

I know that is a privilege.

Not every family can look at an NHS ADHD assessment waiting list, decide they simply cannot wait that long and somehow find the money to get answers elsewhere. We could, and I will always recognise how fortunate we were to have that option.

But if anything, having that option makes me think even more about the families who don't.

Because while you're waiting for an ADHD assessment, you're still parenting the child who is struggling. You're still sending them into school every morning. They're still trying to understand themselves and you're still trying to work out what support they need, what is causing the difficulties they're experiencing and whether you're responding in the right way.

For adults it is no different. You still have to work, parent, manage a home, maintain relationships and somehow keep all the plates spinning while wondering why some of those plates seem so much harder for you to hold than they appear to be for everyone else.

So when we talk about somebody simply waiting another year, or another two years, I think it sounds far too easy.

They aren't just waiting for an appointment.

They're living those years.

And a lot can happen in those years.

Apparently, I was functioning too well

My own experience after my ADHD diagnosis also changed the way I think about support.

I tried to access ADHD support and essentially came up against the fact that I was functioning. I was getting through life, I was looking after my children and doing the things that needed to be done, so there wasn't a huge amount of help available to me.

But I couldn't quite get my head around that, because surely that is exactly when we should be helping people?

I was functioning because I had spent years finding ways to function. I was still doing the school runs. I was still looking after my children. I was still keeping everything moving because I had to. None of that meant it wasn't difficult and none of it meant I had endless capacity left underneath the surface.

There is something really backwards about a system where somebody can say, I'm struggling and I need some help to keep doing this, but the response is essentially that they are managing too well to qualify for it.

It can feel like you have to prove things are bad enough before you deserve support.

And as I said when I talked about this on Mumma Chats:

“I had to crumble... be at the bottom of my capacity before anybody would listen.”

That is the part I keep coming back to.

Why are we waiting for people to reach that point?

Surely ADHD support should be about helping somebody stay standing, rather than watching them wobble, deciding they're still technically upright and waiting until they finally fall over before deciding they qualify for help.

Diagnosis didn't change who I was

I know there are much bigger conversations around ADHD services, funding, ADHD assessment waiting lists and how assessments should work, and I don't pretend to have the answers to all of those things.

I can only talk about what diagnosis meant for me and what assessment has meant for our family.

My ADHD diagnosis didn't suddenly make me a different person. It didn't give me an excuse for everything I find difficult and it certainly didn't give me something fashionable to stick in an Instagram bio.

It gave me an answer to a question I'd been asking myself for years.

Why am I like this?

And perhaps even more importantly, it allowed me to change the question.

Instead of constantly asking myself, What's wrong with me?, I could start asking, What does my brain need?

Those two questions might sound similar, but they come from completely different places. One starts with the assumption that there is something wrong with you. The other starts with understanding yourself well enough to recognise that perhaps you need to do things differently.

That is why I struggle when an ADHD assessment is spoken about as though people are simply waiting for a label.

For some people, they're waiting for the first explanation they've ever had for why life has felt so hard. For some parents, they're waiting for information that could completely change how they understand their child. And for some children, they're spending those waiting years believing they're naughty, difficult, lazy or failing because nobody has yet helped them understand what is actually going on.

Life doesn't pause while somebody sits on an ADHD assessment waiting list. School doesn't pause. Work doesn't pause. Motherhood doesn't pause. Mental health doesn't pause.

And neither does ADHD.

ADHD doesn’t wait.

This is one of the conversations from this week’s Mumma Chats episode, When a Boring Week Is a Good Week, where I’m talking about autism, ADHD assessment waits and the financial guilt of not working.