Re: WHY bother with a assessment?

[Patte Rosebank]

Diagnoses can be amazingly insightful, even when they’re diagnosing something other than your ADD.

About ten years ago, I had an extremely unpleasant boss, who cooked up a false negative review and used it to justify terminating me on the spot. Despite having doctors’ letters in my file, explaining that I had depression and anxiety, and listing accommodations that should be made, this boss insisted on treating me like a lazy, incompetent idiot. Or, as a classic line in that review said, “Basic logical concepts appear to be beyond her limited capabilties (sic).” (Yes, he misspelled “capabilities”.)

I took the matter to the Human Rights Commission, and to prove that I had a genuine disability, I underwent a day of intense psychological testing, which found that I was in the 93rd percentile for intelligence, despite the extreme anxiety and depression I was feeling after my traumatic experience at work. Which means that, even though I felt like hell (and I sucked at the math-related tests), I was still smarter than 93% of people.

Looking at that old assessment today, I can see that several things in it support my now-recent diagnosis of ADHD:

(1) I have tremendous difficulty in filtering out important information from all the information coming at me. So I often miss important details because I’m distracted by everything else.

(2) I feel the need to race through things as quickly as possible, in order to move onto the next thing. This often leads to mistakes.

(3) Because of (2), I often interrupt, and say or do things without knowing all the facts.

(4) I am a very caring, eager-to-please person, so I feel pulled in multiple directions, trying so hard to please other people, that I don’t know who I am. And I feel terribly guilty when I fail to live up to their expectations, or what I perceive their expectations to be.

(5) Despite all this, I still have hope that things will get better, or that someone will save me from it all.

(6) I have a socio-emotional age that is far less than my physical age. (What really clinched this one is that I saw animals in every single one of the Rorschact Test pictures.)

So, even though the assessment was intended to be a formal diagnosis of anxiety and depression, it also seems to have diagnosed symptoms of something I never imagined I had, until just a few months ago!

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