| Honestly a lot of these diagnosis issues are incredibly difficult. depression with anxiety is dramatically more difficult to treat than either or. Bipolar can come across as ADHD in certain parts of the cycle or just usually depression. In fact, you can even have uni-polar depression that does not respond to traditional anti-depressants and you don't necessarily exhibit hypomanic episodes. Relying on patients to know and understand what they are experiencing other than "this is just normal I assume everyone else experiences this" is not reliable. Having something that can reliably diagnose and find markers for these conditions would be _huge_. I wade through whitepapers and books on this stuff because of my own issues. I don't expect the average person to even remotely know about all of this; it's a lot and very subtle. To add on to all of this, people tend to not seek treatment until there IS a problem. Sometimes this can be really life alteringly bad, sometimes it's benign. But it would be helpful if people could just "take a test" and know or at least have an idea. The issue with being "objective" is also that your doctor has to be "objective" and I've had a lot of friends that are clearly ADHD and end up with DRs that think they are just trying to get medication and don't have ADHD. Worse yet; they do get medications and they have to cycle a few different ones because of the way they tolerate it. It would be really nice if we had an idea to correlate your ADHD, your body chemistry, and which drugs would be most effective for you rather than the 3-12 month ordeal of figuring that out. |