[throwaway092323]

> Self diagnosis is not reliable

Professional diagnosis is not reliable either. ADHD and autism are often misdiagnosed as one-another, especially in girls.

> If you don't have an official diagnosis you can't be certain you really have ADHD

A lot of the time, the mental health professional making the determination doesn't have specialty in ADHD/Autism. All they're doing is looking at symptoms and making their best guess. Which is exactly what people are doing when they make a self-determination. In many cases, people with high-functioning autism know more about autism than the people who are supposed to know. And it's not like the diagnoses can be validated when we're still figuring out what autism even is.

[cja]

Professional assessors should know much more about the condition for which they are assessing and its signs than any one person who may or may not have the condition. A professional should also know the other conditions with similar symptoms.

I learned about ADHD for six months until I first consulted an expert about the possibility of my having it. He was able to recognise symptoms in me that I hadn't noticed.

[odyssey7]

Glad you got a good provider, but that’s anecdata. You kind of acknowledge this with the word choice “should.”

As the old joke goes, “what do you call the person who graduated last in their medical school class?”

One estimate [1] states that over 400,000 people die due to medical errors in the US every year.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23860193/