Adult ADHD · Two Minutes · Anonymous
A two-minute check on attention, restlessness and cost
Fifteen questions about how attention and restlessness actually behave in your day, when the pattern began, and what it has cost you. It takes about two minutes, nothing is stored, and it cannot diagnose you. What it can do is tell you whether the pattern is the kind worth having assessed properly.
Read this first. This is an educational symptom-pattern check written for this website. It is not a validated screening questionnaire, it is not a diagnostic test, and no score here means anything on its own. NICE is explicit that ADHD should not be diagnosed on questionnaire data alone: diagnosis requires a specialist clinical and developmental assessment. A great many other things, including anxiety, depression, poor sleep, thyroid problems and alcohol, produce these same answers.
What this page does is organise your answers into the shape a clinician actually looks at, which is not just how many symptoms you have but whether they began in childhood, whether they appear in more than one setting, and whether they have cost you anything. That last part is what separates a difficult trait from a disorder.
Before You Start
Answer for the last six months, and answer as you actually are rather than as you would like to be. There are no right answers and nothing is recorded.
Twelve questions about the last six months, then three about the wider picture.
Attention
1 / 15
How often has this been true over the last six months?
What Comes Next
A pattern is a reason to look,
not a conclusion
If the check described a pattern, the useful next step is a proper assessment: a structured interview, a developmental history, information from someone who knew you as a child where possible, and active consideration of the conditions that imitate ADHD. This page explains what that involves, and this article covers the alternatives worth ruling out.
If it did not, and you are still struggling, that is worth taking seriously on its own terms. Attention problems that started in adulthood usually have another cause, and finding it is as valuable as an ADHD diagnosis would have been.
Two situations are worth naming. If you have compensated successfully for years through ability, structure or family support, you may answer honestly and still not describe an obvious pattern; this article is about exactly that. And ADHD is recognised later in women for reasons that have little to do with how severe it is; this article covers why.
Common Questions
About this check,
answered plainly
Can this check diagnose ADHD?
No. It is an educational symptom-pattern check, not a validated screening questionnaire and not a diagnostic test. ADHD is diagnosed by a specialist through a full clinical and developmental assessment, and NICE states explicitly that a diagnosis should not be made on questionnaire data alone.
What does a result of "worth assessing" actually mean?
It means your answers describe the shape of difficulty that an ADHD assessment looks at: frequent problems with attention or restlessness, present since childhood, affecting more than one part of life. Many other conditions produce the same shape, which is exactly why an assessment is the next step rather than a conclusion.
What if the result says the pattern is not there?
It does not rule ADHD out. People who have organised their lives around compensating often answer honestly and still score low. If you are struggling, that is worth discussing regardless of what this page says.
Are my answers stored?
No. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and this page carries no advertising or analytics tracking. Closing the tab discards it.
Why does it ask about childhood?
Because ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition. Diagnostic criteria require several symptoms to have been present before the age of twelve. Attention problems that genuinely began in adulthood usually have another explanation, such as depression, anxiety, a sleep disorder, a medical condition or a medicine, and those deserve investigation in their own right.
Is this the same as the two-minute self-check on this site?
No. The other self-check is a personality reflection based on the Five Factor Model. It does not screen for ADHD or any other condition. This page is about ADHD symptom patterns only.