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Reverse engineering my ADHD test

110 pointsby hazeboothlast Thursday at 4:49 PM34 commentsview on HN

Comments

a2damtoday at 10:07 PM

> 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.

flysand7last Thursday at 10:43 PM

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

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usernametaken29today at 10:22 PM

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…

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izzylanlast Thursday at 10:40 PM

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.

_fwlast Friday at 11:15 AM

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!

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nullpt_rstoday at 6:18 PM

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

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doawootoday at 6:26 PM

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

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sbiru93today at 6:23 PM

Ahahah the end got me laughing

pixel_poppingtoday at 6:22 PM

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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