Is anybody here familiar with this thing?
I’m talking to a psychiatrist to get assessed for ADHD, but in order to start treatment, if necessary, I’ll first have to do this neuropsychological assessment called the WEIS test. It’s expensive as shit, more than 2k, but seems to be the only way for me to get any kind of treatment. I can either pay that amount or wait 8-10 months to get it through my health insurance.
I did some digging and apparently it’s this assessment of intelligence that can only be applied by qualified professionals. It frankly sounds like I’m about to get my brainpan measured. Have any of you taken this exam? Is it as stupid as it sounds? Has it helped you receive and/or validate a diagnosis?
Honestly it fucking sucks to me, having to jump through all these hoops just to have somebody listen to me and say “you have/don’t have ADHD”.
Haven’t done it but it appears as though this is a test that will guide identifying particular learning and developmental disorders like stuff to do with visual-spatial learning and auditory processing etc.
Sucks that it’s expensive but tbh it’s not the worst thing.
Honestly with late-diagnosed ADHDers and autistic folks it’s my unprofessional opinion that you’re very likely to see a… let’s call it a lopsided skill tree. However you want to slice it, there’s very often a good degree of intelligence or aptitude, especially in particular domains, and this is typically used to compensate for developmental disorders or deficits that exist elsewhere. Of course, some people are just straight-up ADHD or what have you and they don’t have any other comorbid developmental disorders too but they’re pretty common.
It’s hard to say whether or not it’s going to be of any particular use to you personally but it may help rule certain things in or out and it doesn’t hurt to be thorough.
I also suspect that if the psych is going to personally conduct this test with you that they’re probably doing that magician’s sleight of hand thing where they’re directing your attention on one thing in order to get you to ignore the real stuff that’s going on elsewhere. I probably shouldn’t spoil the intention of the test but, fuck it, I’d say that unmedicated ADHDers are generally going to be expected to perform well at the start of the test and when things change up significantly (e.g. going from visual tests to verbal instructions) but that there’s going to be a fairly apparent dip in performance when the subject has either hit the wall (you know the one) or they are unable to compensate in a particular domain that is being tested where there’s a weak spot. If the psych is good they’re probably going to throw a few curveballs at you like interrupting the task of the test to get you to read an analogue clock or asking you about something that you mentioned in conversation earlier or asking you other questions which will pull your attention away, such as asking you to explain how you performed under exam conditions in school. This will be to assess your ability to refocus on the test and your ability to not get frazzled or to collapse in a barely-functional heap because you can’t shift your attention in an even way. This will also be used to assess frustration tolerance etc.
Obviously this is just pure speculation but yeah, that’s what I’d be expecting going into this.
Yeah, I’m sure that it will at least be a box that will be checked. I’ve never taken any of these actual evaluations, I’ve only done self-assessment questionnaires online like the RAADS-R (got >140, which lit up some red lights), so I truly don’t know what to expect.
I’m not gonna lie: what scares me the most is my test results being “welp, looks like there’s nothing wrong here, you’re just a bit smarter than average, just carry on and meditate a bit, maybe do some therapy sessions and you’re golden”. I did therapy for almost a decade (until a year and a half ago) and I still feel like shit.
In fact, I’m really surprised that I have to go through all this just for an assessment. I remember going to a psychiatrist a decade and a half ago, telling him I was feeling anxious, and walking out ten minutes later with a Ritalin prescription, which in retrospect is kinda fucking wild. Things seem to have changed a lot since then.
Sorry, I’m rambling a bit.
Don’t stress too much. Go into it with an open mind, give it a decent shot, don’t be afraid to be open about explaining what’s going on for you.
For example, I’m terrible with visual-spatial learning tests. If you ask me which image is the mirror of a shape I’m going to struggle like fuck because there’s a hole in my brain where my visual-spatial reasoning is supposed to be and I’d be pretty upfront about that, partly because that’s how I am and partly because imo it’s kinda important to put your cards on the table with these assessments so they can get a handle on whether you happen to make a lucky guess or if you’re actually engaging in processing to arrive at the correct conclusion based on logic.
Like when I did my autism assessment, I explained that I’d be able to describe how people form friendships based on what I’ve observed and that I’d be able to provide a textbook answer but when it comes to the application of this knowledge it’s a very different matter for me and I don’t really get how it’s done. This was me doing a very honest self-assessment and it wasn’t an attempt to skew the results, it was just me being like “I could explain the basics to an alien who is visiting us just like how I can explain the basics of how to paint but that doesn’t mean imma be able to do a good job of painting a landscape” kinda thing. It’s the snapshot of what’s going on in your brain which, if you’re capable of providing it with some degree of objectivity, can be really useful in a diagnostic process.
Yeah, I hear you but a diagnosis isn’t the be-all, end-all. It’s rare for a person to be falsely diagnosed with autism or ADHD but on the flip side it’s not wildly outside of the realms of possibility that you will get a false negative diagnosis. That fact isn’t going to replenish your bank balance though and I get that.
I think if you get the chance it’s gonna be really worth drilling down into this and articulating it with the psych. Again, going back to my own autism assessment in my additional notes I described that I have very clear indications of being dyslexic, dyspraxic, and dyscalculic (?? Is that even a word?) but I have no intention of seeking out a diagnosis for these things - it was my way of being like “Yeah, I have a really strong case for why I fit all of these things and it has a lot of descriptive power but also I don’t care for collecting diagnoses and that is not something that’s going to serve me - either I am those things and I’m at the point in life where I just deal with it and compensate as best I can, like I have already been doing, or otherwise I just suck at maths, I’m very clumsy, and my handwriting is garbage” and it’s only useful insofar as it’s indicative of comorbid developmental disorders that are super common in autism especially so it was worthwhile bringing it up.
Haha yeah, depending on which country you’re in and what era this was it might have been a bit like the wild west of ADHD diagnoses.
On the other hand, I have a comrade who is well into adulthood who just screams ADHD and it took until they were describing their symptoms of RSD blow by blow in their own words where I finally cracked and was like “DidyaeverwonderifyouarentbipolarbutinsteadyouvegotADHD??” because I couldn’t hold it back any longer. He got to a psychiatrist and I knew exactly what happened before he told me but the report back was a very quick turnaround time before the psych announced unequivocally “There’s no doubt in my mind that you have ADHD” and, who knows, you might be in that category yourself which might explain your Ritalin-in-10-mins-or-your-money-back experience?
*gestures broadly at my entire comment history, including this comment* lol
You’re alright. I get that conflict of wanting to do well but also not wanting to mask your symptoms while not wanting to subconsciously exaggerate the symptoms because you’ve somehow convinced yourself that this is what it is yet wanting to have the answer to what’s going on for you but not wanting to pin all your hopes on a diagnosis if it happens that it doesn’t truly fit, and all of that stuff. It’s gonna be a bit of a conflicted jumble and you wanna know the worst part about it?
If you have ADHD, you’re probably going to be conflicted about it well after you’re appropriately medicated, you’re responding well to the meds, you notice significant improvements and positive changes, and people around you remark on how you’re handling things so much better all of a sudden. Those old thought patterns die a slow, agonising death and there’s still some days where I think if someone made a convincing argument to me personally I’d be halfway to doubting that I’ve got ADHD. It doesn’t go away, it just gradually recedes over a long period of time lol.
People who aren’t autistic or ADHD or auDHD don’t spend much time thinking about this stuff, except if there’s something big like full-blown hypochondria going on behind the scenes. It’s like being trans - cis people really don’t entertain the thought of what it would be like and feel like and look like and what sort of clothes they’d wear and what name they’d pick for themselves and… you get the idea, right? If you’re not trans and someone asked you then you might entertain the thought for a little while before being like “Nahhh”. But you sure as hell don’t spend your time preoccupied with these thoughts.
It’s a similar deal for this type of neurodivergence - people don’t spend time doing and redoing the RAADS-R multiple times or researching how close to the threshold they are or anything like that. People who aren’t neurodivergent generally aren’t preoccupied with what the results of this sort of assessment will be either - imagine if you were taking a test to assess how much you are politically liberal. You aren’t going to fret or worry and you won’t have an urgent need for clarity about the process to try and better understand what the outcome will be. You’d probably shrug your shoulders, nonchalantly waltz into the test and complete the thing half-heartedly without much investment in the whole process. That’s the sort of attitude I’d expect the average neurotypical person to approach this assessment with - nonchalance and maybe some idle curiosity at best.
I guess on that note it might be worth dropping the idea that you might be autistic with the psych. I think it would be a good idea to just do the WAIS first and let them get a sense of how your brain works and then in the subsequent appointments maybe bring it up when it’s relevant.
Psychs generally don’t take kindly to people who seem to be diagnosis-seeking but if you’re like “Idk, seems like it would be worth mentioning because I came up high on the RAADS-R when I did it and it might be a confounding variable. I’m not looking for a whole new identity to adopt or for some diagnosis to hide behind as an excuse - either I’m a socially awkward oddball who gets really fixated on subjects and who misses cues or I’m all of those things and I’m autistic but either way it is what it is and a label doesn’t change that fact” then they are probably gonna be receptive to it.
I mean, ultimately you’re going into this to try and understand yourself better and to arrive at the truth about who you are/what condition(s) you have, so if you approach it from that perspective with a healthy degree of skepticism and openness and honesty then you’re gonna be totally fine.
You’re in limbo right now and, in a sense, you have been for a long time. But you’re still the same person that you were yesterday and you’ll still be the same person the day after the psych provides you with their expert opinion (a terribly undialectical thing for a Marxist to say, but you get what I’m driving at here). You’ve got this.
Goddamn, I don’t even know what to say. This is an absolute load-bearing post for me now, I’m saving it to reread multiple times, and you are a legend. Thank you so much for your kind and wise advice.
Agreed, definitely agreed. I once brought up ASD during a session with my former therapist, in that kind of joking but not joking kind of way, like “sometimes I think I’m on the spectrum, ha-ha”. She agreed with me on that, but disagreed even a bit brusquely when I brought up how I identified with ADHD symptoms and behaviors. I felt like she was aggressively against an ADHD diagnosis, and made it seem like she expected someone with ADHD to just get up and leave in the middle of a session, or to altogether forget it, or some other cartoonishly oblivious Mr. Magoo-ass behavior.
I don’t know what her experience tells her, but I now look back and disagree with her assessment. Maybe she became skeptical due to that ADHD diagnosis wild west you mentioned in your comment, but I still remember that her reaction made me feel very deeply invalidated, like some kind of terminally online kid (which I’m absolutely not, trust me). I’ll talk about ASD with whoever my new therapist/psychiatrist might be, but I’ll take it slow - I don’t want to get stonewalled again.
Lol I don’t think so. This was a psychiatrist referred by my health insurance, and the closest cultural reference that I can think of would be of a doctor who worked out of a dingy office in a strip mall in the US. Real Saul Goodman vibes. The whole thing simply felt off. Literally the only thing I said was that I was anxious, and he gave me Ritalin, without asking any further questions or even telling me what it was gonna do to my brain, lmao
I do, yeah. I had never thought of it this way, and it absolutely makes sense. I would have fun with the idea for a few moments, and that’s the whole extent of it.
Funny story, a friend shared one of these silly personality quizzes in our group chat a couple weeks ago. It was just some stupid classic Buzzfeed-style slop, and we started chatting about personality and IQ tests and whatnot. I went all “you call that a knoife?” and sent them the RAADS-R, lol, and they all treated it like a funny little thing, we talked a bit about it and that was it. None of them ever mentioned it again, but it had been on my mind before that moment (I had done it some time before) and it has been on my mind since then (I did it again later, with results similarly very well within ASD numbers).
I read about it, I did other tests, and I think about this stuff all the time. Like I said, my former therapist pushed me away from even thinking about ADHD three years ago, which led me towards eventually reading up on bipolar II and thinking that was what was happening to me. I just wanted answers. Surely this can’t be as good as it gets, etc.
I no longer believe that I’m bipolar. I’m still on lithium, but now I’m not even sure that it’s doing anything for me aside from making me feel tired and also making it very difficult to take a shit regularly. I thought my impulsivity was hypomania. I no longer believe that either. I thought long stints of getting fuckall done were depression cycles. Once again, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. These things are slightly muted by the lithium, but still there.
Agreed. Back to the thing with my friends and the RAADS-R, one of them was actually trying to kind of dissuade me, even reassure me that it’s nothing, it’s just a test, it doesn’t mean I’m autistic. The thing is, he was talking to me as if I had just posted a picture of an MRI showing a lump in my brain or something, like “surely it’s nothing to worry about”. I told him that this is not going to change who I am. If I’m truly autistic, then it’s just another way to understand myself. It’s not a disease, it’s a door that might lead into a path of healing and reconciliation with an estranged part of who I am.
Once again, thank you enormously for your words. I’m not exaggerating when I say that your comment really made a difference to me. Much love, comrade!
This is beautiful. ❤️
That’s very kind of you to say.
So much of this comes from hard-learned lessons that I’ve had to fumble my way through personally at some point, so if I can help make it a bit easier for someone else then it makes it all worthwhile.
That Ritalin story is wild. I just can’t wrap my head around how a doctor would be like that at all.
With regards to therapists and talking about ASD, take it at your own pace but also don’t put too much stock in what they say or how they react - most people really aren’t up to speed on ASD at all, professionals included, so if you get some skepticism or disbelief just keep in mind that they might have a really stereotyped understanding of ASD. Also if you are auDHD it really can feel like its own separate thing a lot of the time because of how the two conditions interact and compensate and stuff.
The bipolar diagnosis stuff is also super common for late self-identifying neurodivergent folks. If you make it through to adulthood as an undiagnosed ADHDers or autistic person but you haven’t gotten a diagnosis of a mood disorder, you’re basically a unicorn imo.
Much love to you too, comrade. I’m just glad to help.
Why must your comments be so good, yet hurt so much.
Gut churning realization when I was going over your list thinking “I haven’t thought about clothes” but no, i have actually thought about clothes.
Hi, it’s Edward
Hi! Glad to see you’re still hanging out with us here ☺️
I really do wish it were easier.
You know, there’s this Chinese phrase that I like, 不破不立 (bù pò bù lì), which literally means “no destruction, no construction” but a more aphoristic translation would be “without destruction there cannot be creation”. It feels very Taoist to me but I’m not sure of its origin.
In western culture we are pretty obsessed with building up and building towards and building on, very often to the exclusion of getting rid of the things that weigh us down and hold us back. Anything that we let go of is almost always framed in terms of loss and in it being somehow detrimental to us, which conceals the fact that the act of letting go can often be liberating. But I don’t think it must be seen from this perspective; in time, the old must necessarily make way for the new and so the passing of old beliefs, of the old ways of relating to ourselves and to the world, is also representative of our opportunity for change, growth, and ultimately for hope.
I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t feel what you’re feeling, far from it. But I do wonder if that pain you’re feeling might also have the seeds of hope growing within it too.
In any case I hope you’re doing okay 💜