Public schools do free screenings in other to qualify for special education or 504 school accommodations. This may only cover students in the district home area and not private school students or adults.

The down side is that some school districts have quotas on how much of the school population can be considered SpEd or 504. But a pediatric psychiatrist can make that determination regardless of the school diagnostician findings to justify accommodations.

The doctor I see for adhd set themselves up as a PCP for insurance purposes, so each visit is just a copay. You can find co-pays from free to $20 on the ACA Marketplace (Obamacare). Just find an insurance salesperson to help you, they are paid by the insurance companies so you don't pay for their help!

Testing cost me a little more and it wasn't as laborious as this makes it sound. One test was video-recorded while you clicked the mouse whenever something happened on the screen and the other was some questions about your history.

As someone who's due a diagnosis (hopefully) soon, what type of questions do they ask you?

I literally got my diagnosis in one day at my PCP as he went through the DSM 5 criteria and asked some questions about my childhood. It took 30 min and he was not a pill pusher. He does not ever prescribe stimulants. I tried his nonstimulant medication recommendations after feeling the need to have some intervention and they were terrible. When I asked to try a different treatment, he referred me to an in network psychiatrist and things were smooth sailing. The same was true for my two brothers who were also diagnosed as adults and one was diagnosed in another state also at his PCP.

All that being said, I think people make the jump to a psychiatrist too early when they can seek screening at a PCP first. I had to answer a few more questions for onboarding at my psychiatrist, but I never ran into any issues. I also did not have to pay for an ADHD screening because I had already been diagnosed at my PCP.

Man. I hate to shill, but…

I faced many of those same issues, and after a year and a half of failing to set up testing, my doctor told me to go to adhdonline.com - they offer online testing for $180, and give you results back in like a week. She’d already given me an ADHD testing referral, and she suggested that my insurer would probably reimburse me for the cost, but I have ADHD, so I never bothered with it.

It took me about 4 hours to do the test (but I did it while I was sitting through a day-long virtual meeting where I had to be present, but not ‘present’. So like, it probably won’t take focused people that long.)

And - yeah. Morally, it sucks. It’s feeding into the commodification of someone’s job and is morally kind of like using Uber or AirBNB. It’s convenient and maybe cheaper. Maybe it upsets a system that could use a little upsetting, but will likely upset it too much and have unforeseen impacts.
But it worked for me.

I'm 53 now and was considering getting an official diagnosis a few years ago, I even had the initial appointments set up.

I canceled it, because there was too much going on in my life at that moment (even got a notification I could reschedule for later)

All that made me think about what I was hoping for from diagnosis. In the end it was just having something in writing that would help me with self-acceptance.

Around that time I also was in a group psychotherapy so I talked about that and that part is now solved.

Regarding meds - I don't want to try them now as my other coping strategies are good enough at the moment and I'm a bit wary of side effects as I need to take a handful of. medicine every day, anyways.

In the end you need to decide why you want a diagnosis. If you want to try meds I'd go for it. (My son "inherited" it from me and had meds for a time, which really helped him).

In a case like mine where I didn't expect any new strategies out of it or didn't want meds - it was probably the right decision to skip it.

$5k?! A doctor's visit is $250 for me (insurance doesn't cover anything until I never reach the deductible). Also there were only like 2 tests totalling 20-ish questions. The hardest part was making an appointment, which I never would have done if I wasn't also making appointments for other pressing health issues.

Ahhahhha... I'm trying for 3 years now to get the diagnostics done. I'm in europe with government regulated healthcare and still pay my medications out of pocket, because its only covered with a formal diagnosis which I can't get anywhere.