Research Recap with Skye: Current Methods and Issues Surrounding ADHD - Part 2

William Curb (0:06)

Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, at ADHD.

On this podcast, I'd like to share tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work your ADHD break. Today, I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.

In this episode, we're actually going to be discussing a paper called Evaluating Attention-Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder ADHD, a review of current methods and issues, which is a continuation of what we were talking about last week, or two weeks ago, depending on how I released this. This is going to be our part 2 on this because this was such a long paper, just so much densely packed full of stuff. And so now I will want to give you guys just a little heads up that our original plan for this was that we were going to discuss this one week apart from each other and life got in the way. And so it's been three or four weeks. Hopefully, we don't go over too much of the same stuff as we discussed last time.

Skye Waterson (1:13)

Yeah. But if you remember what we discussed last time or what we discuss now, and you are able to track the discrepancies, then well, you're a better person than me.

William Curb (1:23)

Yeah, I had to definitely look over what was in that transcript and what was what we did and what hadn't been hit yet.

Skye Waterson (1:30)

Yeah. Yeah. But I will say we were just talking about it before. Like the reason we are diving into this paper a little bit more in-depth is just because it's such a great overview of ADHD.

We were both saying that these two episodes side by side could literally be given to somebody if they had no idea what ADHD was. And by the time it was done, we'd be pretty well-versed in most of the questions you'd get asked.

William Curb (1:54)

Yeah. And so in the first half, we were just going over what kind of paper this is, which is a narrative and it covers all presentations, DSM history, diagnosing kids versus adults, a lot of evaluation tools and stuff.

Yeah.

Skye Waterson (2:10)

Yeah, exactly. And in this section, we're going to go through clinical interviews, like how do they work, some of the more like executive functioning tests that they do as well, including the Stroop test, which is one of my favorites.

And then we're going to talk a little bit about gender differences and some of the limitations of the DSM diagnosis and ADHD diagnosis as it exists right now.

William Curb (2:35)

Yeah. And so clinical interviews are often was considered kind of the gold standard of doing a diagnostic criteria for ADHD because self-assessment can also often be flawed in many ways with people either under-reporting or over-reporting their symptoms depending on.

People can sometimes be looking for that diagnosis or just being like, no, I'm normal. Even though they're having their strut, they're not quite aware how much they're actually struggling.

Skye Waterson (3:02)

Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why they said, you can have a structured and an unstructured interview, but it really is about the quality of the interviewer as well, which is one of the reasons why if you had the DSM, for example, and you just went through it with a friend, that would not be considered a diagnosis at that point because we need an expert who understands how to ask these questions to go through it with you.

William Curb (3:30)

Yeah. One of the funny things I'll see on social media and stuff is people will be talking about questions they answered in one of these things, and I think this is when I've heard for autism assessments where it's like, oh, would you rather go to a library or to a party? So people are like, that answer is what's important. But what's more important to the interviewer is how you answer the question.

Skye Waterson (3:53)

Yeah. That's a really good point.

And library potty, anyone. That's my answer.

William Curb (3:59)

Yeah. Because when you're like, it depends, and you like list all the things, it's getting you to explain your thought process, which is way more evaluative than the actual question itself. Yeah.

Skye Waterson (4:11)

Exactly. Exactly.

And what tools are commonly used? So they've got the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children. So the DISCV, that's a structured interview based on the DSM. And it has approximately 3000 questions. Yeah.