A clinician’s own ADHD is neither a qualification nor a disqualification. Check two things before you commit: how well the clinician connects with your child and how much ADHD training they have.
When ADHD treatment works, many adults begin to drift out of it because success hides the reason for the treatment, ADHD itself makes the logistics of staying in treatment harder, and quieter fears pull the other way: rising expectations, losing help and sympathy, fading novelty, the rut, not feeling deserving, and the familiarity of failure. The piece gives an adult reader seven actions: say out loud what success would cost, recruit a witness to hold the memory, set a stopping rule in advance, replace a quiet lapse with a planned trial, remove logistical friction, treat side effects as a reason to call the prescriber, and schedule a quarterly review.
Everyone around you seems to have a plan. You have a diagnosis, a few half-started directions, and a suspicion that choosing wrong costs you more than it costs them. Part of that is true. None of it means you should wait until you are certain. Certainty is not coming, and the research points somewhere more useful: the setting you choose changes how ADHD shows up.
ADHD is not a different condition across racial groups, but the route to the diagnosis is. Black children are markedly less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and markedly more likely to be coded with a disruptive behavior disorder on comparable presentations, and the recent national rise in diagnosis has not reached them. Much of the divergence is built into the informant data before the clinician sees the patient: parent and teacher ratings differ in a race-patterned way, so treating rater agreement as confirmation inherits the gap. The corrective is already in the AAP guideline. A second risk runs the opposite way in some school systems, where accountability pressure has been shown to push low-performing students toward disability classification. Six changes in reading, sequence, and attention are described, none of which lengthen the visit, along with one dermatologic caution specific to the methylphenidate patch.
A new national study of preschoolers finds that not all ADHD symptoms carry the same weight at ages 3 to 5 – and the two that matter most aren’t the ones most parents expect.
The person who places a phone call controls its timing, topic and ending, so a person with ADHD does best by being the caller whenever possible. This article gives a practical method: ask to call back when the other person calls first, prepare a six-line cheat sheet with a maximum time, run the call by the sheet, and close by stating decisions, changes, and who does what, when and where.
This isn’t a piece about whether to vaccinate. It’s about where to get an answer you can trust, at a moment when the official answer itself has been unusually unstable.
Spanish and English. No blood test, scan, or brain-wave measure can diagnose ADHD, yet diagnosis is not guesswork: it rests on defined criteria, several informants, and ruling out lookalikes. For Latino children, a large study points to missed or delayed diagnosis more than to too many.
A working code list for ADHD and the conditions that travel with it, in all three systems at once.
Important: Read Before Using This List
This list of DSM-5-TR, ICD-10-CM, and ICD-11 codes is provided for general informational and educational purposes only. It is provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty as to accuracy, completeness, currency, or fitness for a particular purpose.
Do not rely on this list without first verifying every code yourself against the official, current sources, such as the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR, the CDC/NCHS ICD-10-CM code set, and the World Health Organization’s ICD-11. Coding systems are revised on a regular schedule, and this list may contain errors, omissions, or outdated entries. Additions, deletions, and corrections are likely over time.
We may or may not update this list. If we do, we make no commitment as to when or how often, and the absence of an update does not mean the list is current.
This is not medical, psychiatric, diagnostic, billing, or coding advice. It is not a substitute for professional judgment, and it must not be used to diagnose, to treat, or to submit claims. Diagnosis and coding decisions belong to qualified, licensed professionals working from the official sources. To the fullest extent permitted by law, The ADD Resource Center and its author accept no responsibility or liability for any loss, harm, or consequence arising from the use of, or reliance on, this list.
Social anxiety, rejection sensitivity, and RSD get blurred together. Here is what each one means, how to tell them apart, and where ADHD fits.
A widely syndicated New York Times piece late last month asked whether ADHD is really about attention. It is a fair question, and not a new one. Volkow and colleagues concluded in Molecular Psychiatry in 2010 that “disruption of the dopamine reward pathway is associated with motivation deficits in ADHD adults, which may contribute to attention deficits.”
September’s most-read articles at https://www.addrc.org