Reverse engineering my ADHD test

I spent a decent amount working on ADHD diagnostics and unfortunately it sucks. To my knowledge, to this day, there isn’t a single reliable biomarker that identifies autism spectrum disorders. It’s usually correlation studies paired with questionnaires which for lack of better words can be described as “incidental” at best. Most z scored tests I know are also developed with small samples, a hundred participants with an outgroup of 20 would already be a LARGE sample. The standard ADHD questionnaire was validated on some 35 people.

There might be some hope in deep learning, particularly in observing eye movement components to deliver reliable biomarkers in the future, but I’m not so confident any time soon.

It’s dreadful and fascinating at the same time that defining and testing for ADS has been so elusive for so long…

An I risking any trouble if I were to open source this test? Based on this writeup?

I took a similar ADHD test. It seemed so easy and simple that I always wondered how it was actually supposed to catch me.

Good to know that neurotypical people mostly likely test differently than I did.

I found myself trying to come up with a system that used the position of my hands to “solve” the problem for me.

But then I worried if my system worked, I would be misdiagnosed.

It didn’t work. I was 98th percentile.

Thanks for sharing this!

> At the end, she told me she would review my exam and have the results ready in a few days.

Yeah man I can go ahead and let you know early if you want.

hi! author here, please let me know if you have any questions :-)

What a lovely mini journey. Turns something possibly stressful into something weird and fun.

Opening up devtools during ADHD test is so ADHD, almost as if he didn't even need the psychiatrist to explain the results :D

This is basically what I did to every online based quiz in school. Big respect lol.

> This performance pattern^H^H^H^H^H^H BLOG POST may indicate attentional difficulties, and taken together with other findings, an increased likelihood for the existence of ADHD.

There's a well-known issue of "construct validity" in neuroscience.

Oh hilarious and well done Null ptrs.

And brilliant picture.

Ahahah the end got me laughing

Great article!

ADHD is way more complex than just an attention issue, I mean just the amount of average daydreaming and "rumination" and the constant multi-threading of thoughts... is just next level, I believe it's not properly explained to outsiders that might just think that X guy just have a hard time going in the flow but in reality it's much more catastrophic than this and will create many more mental health issues if left unmanaged.

Most ADHD people that have jumped on some sort of strong treatment (stimulants in general) are discovering a new world in pretty much 1 hour, the first time the mind goes "quiet" is incredible. I advise everyone to read more on this website https://www.adxs.org/en - it's also friendly to scrape to be used with LLMs.

ADHD isn't a good thing to have imo, it's a serious dysfunction and it's sad to see that it's being romanticized lately in social media or plainly discredited by some people/media, and while treated ADHD can make you productive "all the time", you end up addicted and pretty much permanently require drugs to function well.

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