ADHD
Self-Evaluation
Isabella DePhillipo
Please answer the questions below, rating yourself on each of the criteria shown using the scale on the right side of the page. As you answer each question, place an X in the box that best describes how you have felt and conducted yourself over the past 6 months. Please give this completed checklist to your healthcare professional to discuss during today’s appointment.
1. How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project, once the challenging parts have been done?
The rush of picking up something new is a high like no other, which makes it a high like any other. My current list of the unfinished includes, but is not limited to:
Seven (7) half-read novels
Eighteen (18) writing projects
Four (4) still-life drawings
Ten (10) Duolingo language courses
2. How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?
How to clean your room if you have ADHD:
Step 1: Make the bed.
Step 2: Throw out all the trash on your desk.
Step 3: See that the trash is full and resolve to take it out.
Step 4: If you’re leaving the bedroom with the trash, might as well gather up all the dishes in your room as well and put them in the kitchen sink.
Step 5: Walk into the kitchen, then realize that you have brought neither trash nor dishes along with you.
Step 6: Re-enter your room. The moment you walk through the doorway, you will forget why you have come in, and you will not remember again until tomorrow when the sight of the unmade bed reminds you.
Step 7: Repeat daily.
3. How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?
Self-preservation has made me a skilled liar. I haven’t been feeling well, I took a Benadryl and it made me sleep right through the meeting. I know my phone was in my bag the whole time, someone must have taken it from me. Sorry for the delay in logging in/submitting the assignment/responding to your email, I’ve been having connectivity problems. How strange, I didn’t see your text/call/email/voicemail/letter, something must have gone wrong when you sent it.
4. When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?
pro·cras·ti·na·tion
/prəˌkrastəˈnāSH(ə)n/
noun
the action of delaying or postponing something.
Example: "I always thought I was someone prone to procrastination, until I learned that for most people procrastination is not a perpetual state of being that only stimulants can cure."
5. How often do you fidget or squirm with your hands or feet when you have to sit down for a long time?
The simple answer is always. For more, refer to questions 12 and 13.
6. How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do things, like you were driven by a motor?
There’s an old myth about vampires that says they compulsively count things. If you were faced with one, legend had it all you had to do was throw some stones in front of them and flee while they counted each one. This is where The Count on Sesame Street comes from. Once, while at a stranger’s house party, I somehow found myself held hostage alphabetically organizing the contents of their spice rack.
7.How often do you make careless mistakes when you have to work on a boring or difficult project?
The only F I ever received was on a ten-page lab report for AP Biology senior year of high school. It was the perfect combination of a topic I didn’t care about and didn’t know enough about to effectively fake my way through it; a rude premonition for adulthood, one which could only be seen in hindsight.
8. How often do you have difficulty keeping your attention when you are doing boring and/or repetitive work?
Refer to questions 7 and 13. The fact that I have had to refer you to question 13 twice now means that this self-evaluation I found on the internet is boring and/or repetitive, which seems to defeat its purpose.
9. How often do you have difficulty concentrating on what people say to you, even when they are speaking to you directly?
I’ve heard it said that some people with ADHD develop the ability to lip read without ever realizing it. For some people, the combination of hearing someone talk and looking at their lips forming the words is like having subtitles on the TV. During the COVID pandemic, I noticed myself staring at people’s masks a lot.
10. How often do you misplace or have difficulty finding things at home or at work?
All my life I have been the designated misplacer of things. Once a week in elementary school I left my jacket in a classroom or on the bus. The most expensive thing I ever left behind somewhere was a pair of new burgundy Doc Martens, at a skating rink in the ninth grade. I always leave myself a five-minute window before I have to leave the house to track down my wallet and my keys. Not once have I ever entered a parking lot confident in the location of my car. When I was diagnosed at age 21, for some reason everyone was surprised.
11.How often are you distracted by activity or noise around you?
One noise at a time seems to be my body’s strictest rule. If I’m watching TV and my sister walks into the room with a podcast playing, both voices I’m hearing might as well be in another language. Talking during movies infuriates me, though it doesn’t count if I’m the one talking. I’ve always been a note-passer; if you try to lean over and whisper something in my ear while a teacher is lecturing, keep in mind that I can’t hear a word you’re saying.
12.How often do you leave your seat in meetings or other situations in which you are expected to remain seated?
A lot of people, my parents included, are of the mind that all kids are a little ADHD nowadays because of shortened attention span and the instant gratification of the internet. I think, with no proof, that in some ways this is true. Do we all need an Adderall to get through this lecture? No. Will we all start bouncing our legs at some point instead of getting up, because we’ve been taught both not to interrupt and that all information is vital? Probably.
13.How often do you feel restless or fidgety?
Optimal occupation of the senses works in the rule of three: eyes, ears, hands. In the classroom: eyes on the professor, ears on the lecture, hands taking notes. Driving: eyes on the road, ears on a podcast, hands drumming on the steering wheel. “Relaxing” on the couch: ears on the television, eyes on the subtitles, hands poorly rendering a sunflower. The only exceptions to the occupational rule of three are daydreaming and sleeping; if I am staring at you and appear to be listening to you but my hands are still, know that I am no longer in the room.
14.How often do you have difficulty unwinding and relaxing when you have time to yourself?
I take great pleasure in crafting to-do lists. Often I will have multiple going at the same time: lists of things to do in a day, lists of overall things that need to be done, lists of things I want to do five/ten/fifteen years from now. All hobbies can easily be turned into things to-do: lists of books I want to read, lists of shows I want to watch, list of art projects I want to tackle. My final year of undergrad, I needed just three more courses to graduate; I took eight. There is always something to be doing.
15. How often do you find yourself talking too much when you are in social situations?
Anxiety and ADHD operate with each other like two sweaty, shirtless high school jocks from the eighties playing tug-of-war with an old rope over a mud puddle.
16. When you’re in a conversation, how often do you find yourself finishing the sentences of the people you are talking to, before they can finish them themselves?
I read good books with a pencil, to keep speculation contained within the confines of the margins. If I don’t do this, I’ve found that I won’t notice I’ve stopped reading and started thinking about what I’m reading until I’ve been staring at the same page for vast, unknown quantities of time.
17. How often do you have difficulty waiting your turn in situations when turn taking is required?
ADHD is well-known to be severely under-diagnosed in girls. The typical traits associated with ADHD manifest in boys much more often; the fourth grade teacher sends a note home to the parents of the boy who keeps interrupting her class, but she doesn’t notice the girl sitting next to him who can’t sit through a lesson without cutting up erasers underneath her desk. I don’t know if ADHD is actually different in girls; do girls really mature faster than boys, or do we make it so?
18. How often do you interrupt others when they are busy?
“Hi there, so sorry to bother you, I can see from the things on your desk and the look on your face that you’re clearly busy with something but I have a thought that needs your attention and my brain holds thoughts like water in cupped hands. This particular thought is so important that I’ve written it down in my planner and my wrist and the sticky note in my pocket but none of these steps have been foolproof in the past and my foolery needs to be thoroughly proofed. I’ve been repeating this thought out loud over and over in the car and I kept repeating it in my head over and over on my way to your office, drops of water leaking from between my fingers all through the parking lot and down the hall, and I know it is so terribly inconvenient for you to pick up the cup on your desk and let me pour my water into it but if I don’t do so right now it’s all going to fall to the floor and neither of us will get any of it, so here I am. Sorry. So sorry.”
Isabella DePhillipo is a writer from Southern California. She enjoys family time in the kitchen, long walks in the woods, and the written word in all its many forms.