Methodology

How the screening works

This is an educational screening tool, not a diagnostic test and not a medical device. It cannot confirm that you have ADHD and it cannot rule ADHD out. What it can do is organise your own answers into a structured picture that may be useful when you talk to a clinician.

Where the questions come from

The 88 questions are written specifically for this tool. They are informed by the symptom domains that are established in adult ADHD assessment, but the wording is original. No proprietary or permission-restricted questionnaire is reproduced here — in particular, the ASRS checklist is not included.

What is measured

• Current inattention — 18 questions covering nine symptom clusters, two questions each.
• Current hyperactivity and impulsivity — 18 questions covering nine symptom clusters, two questions each.
• Executive functioning — 12 questions on planning, time, memory and follow-through. These are supporting indicators, not additional diagnostic symptoms.
• Functional impact — 10 questions on whether the difficulties actually interfere with life.
• Cross-setting presence — 6 questions, with a “Not applicable” option so that settings which are not part of your life do not count against you.
• Childhood pattern — 10 retrospective questions about before approximately age 12, with an “I’m not sure” option that is tracked separately and never scored as zero.
• Other contributing factors — 10 questions about sleep, stress, mood, health and circumstances. These never subtract points; they raise contextual notes.
• Persistence — 4 questions about how long the difficulties have been present.

Why childhood, impact and settings matter

Adult ADHD assessment does not look at current symptoms alone. Clinicians also consider whether difficulties began in childhood, whether they show up in more than one setting, whether they have persisted rather than appearing recently, whether they meaningfully interfere with everyday functioning, and whether something else could produce similar experiences. This screening follows that same shape, which is why the consultation recommendation is rule-based rather than a simple score cut-off.

How the clusters are counted

Each core symptom cluster is represented by two questions. Those two are aggregated back into one cluster, so 18 questions are never treated as 18 separate symptoms. A cluster is treated as elevated when the average of its two answers is at least 2.5 and at least one was answered “Often” or “Very often”. For adults, the established diagnostic framework considers five or more symptoms within a domain — but reaching a similar count here does not mean you meet diagnostic criteria. It means your answers show a pattern similar to the symptom threshold clinicians may investigate during an assessment.

The 0–100 index

The overall ADHD Screening Score is a product-specific composite. It weights the stronger core domain at 45%, the weaker at 15%, functional impact at 20%, childhood pattern at 10% and cross-setting presence at 10%. If a component is unavailable — for example if you did not recall childhood — its weight is redistributed across the others rather than counted as a zero.

This index has not been clinically validated. It is not a probability, not a risk score, and has no established sensitivity or specificity. It describes the pattern in your answers and nothing more.

What this tool deliberately does not do

• It does not use an AI model to interpret your answers. All result text is produced by fixed rules, so the same answers always produce the same report.
• It does not attempt to assess acute mental health crises. It is focused on ADHD screening only.
• It does not diagnose the other factors it asks about, such as sleep problems or anxiety. It only notes that they can affect the same abilities.

Further reading

These organisations publish authoritative public information about ADHD. They have not reviewed, approved or endorsed this website.

• CDC — ADHD symptoms and diagnostic principles
• National Institute of Mental Health — ADHD in adults
• NICE NG87 — ADHD diagnosis and management
• Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) — official information from the rights holders

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Privacy

How your answers are handled

This questionnaire collects health-related information about you. It is built so that the answers stay with you.

Your answers

• Answers are held in your browser’s memory only, for as long as the screening is open.
• They are not written to a database, not written to browser storage, and not sent to a server while you answer.
• Refreshing or closing the page discards them. That is intentional.
• Your scores and answers never appear in the address bar, so nothing about your results is in your browser history or in a shareable link.

Your results

• Scores are calculated in your browser. Result text is generated from fixed rules — no AI service sees your answers.
• Results are not stored and cannot be retrieved later. There is no account and no result URL.

If you ask for the report by email

• The PDF is generated in your browser and sent, together with your email address, to our sending endpoint in a single request.
• The endpoint passes it to our email provider and discards it. We do not save it, and request bodies are not logged.
• Your email provider and ours necessarily process the message and its attachment in order to deliver it. That is unavoidable for email delivery — if you would rather nothing left your device, download the PDF instead.
• Your email address is used only to deliver the report you asked for. There is no newsletter, no marketing and no list.

Analytics

If analytics are enabled at all, they record only that an anonymous event happened — that a screening was started, completed, or that a report was requested. No answer, no score, no profile and no email address is ever sent to an analytics service. Analytics can be switched off entirely with one configuration flag.

Third parties

No web fonts, trackers or advertising scripts are loaded on the pages where you answer questions. The PDF library is loaded from a public CDN on the results page only, and receives none of your data.

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