Let me share my thoughts with you.

These emails are about what comes up again and again in my work assessing ADHD and autism.

✦ Why the effort going in never seems to match what comes out

✦ Capacity, and why yours runs out long before anyone else's does

✦ The worry that the real explanation is that you're lazy, or just not very good at this

A few emails I've sent recently

To give you an idea of whether this is for you

The part nobody tells you about unmasking

On what happens when you try to stop performing and aren't sure who's underneath.

If you've been told you're "too much", this is for you

On where that label usually starts, and who it was really serving.

What a good assessment should actually look like

On the standard I think it should meet, and where a lot of assessments fall short of it.

Written for people who
got missed.

✦ You've stopped trusting your own read on things, because you've been wrong about yourself before.

✦You get it right by doing it three times over, or by saying yes when you meant no, and nobody sees either.

✦ Everyone around you thinks you're fine, and you've got very good at making sure they keep thinking it.

"

I had to share this email with my husband as I struggle to even recognise this is what is happening let alone articulate it so well. Hopefully it'll help him understand why I need to sit in the car alone sometimes and why I'm always saying I'm shattered despite having a full night of sleep.

hanna

Hi, I'm Emily. I assess adults and young people for ADHD and autism.

Most of the people I see are the ones who got missed, often people who did fine on paper and were falling apart underneath it. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 30 myself, which is a big part of why I do this work the way I do.

If any of that sounded like you

This is not a newsletter about fixing yourself. I don't think you need fixing. Mostly I write about why it makes sense that it's been hard.

Dr Compton-Smith

ADHD and autism, from a clinical psychologist who gets it