(warning and TL;DR : long and kinda ranty - I do want advice but this also ended up being me venting about my frustrations with two separate medical professionals)

I've suspected most of my adult life that I have some form of ADHD; some mornings I face debilitating initiation paralysis that causes me to be up to 2 hours late for work; I forget conversations happened and my mind is in a constant jumble of starting 5 tasks and finishing neither; sometimes I hyperfocus and sometimes I lack any focus - seemingly at random - and other tiny tidbits that upon a cursory glance through medical material, scream ADHD to me.

I've learned to cope with most of it, and thankfully I have a pretty chill job that lets me be flexible with my schedule without issues, but when you look at everything in context, it's pretty clear that my quality of life could be so much better if I sought professional guidance and medical attention.

So I did just that; went to my clinic, scheduled an appointment with a psychologist, and I dragged myself there.

I did my best to be objective and factual about my behavior, I made notes of stuff I did and symptoms I experienced over the course of a week, and answered every question as openly as possible, and yet everything felt wrong.

The psychologist didn't see ADHD in me, and instead chose to pursue my childhood and familial history, narrowing down on signs of anxiety. That felt viscerally incorrect to me, as it didn't reflect how I perceive my behavior. The way I understand anxiety doesn't align with how I think and behave. I don't worry about things when I am stuck in bed - I am pleading with my body to let me move so I can do the things I enjoy. I don't dread going to work - I want to go to work, and my brain says no. That is not anxiety, no matter how you frame it; at best, any signs of anxiety I may have are a byproduct of my struggles with executive dysfunction.

At the end of the session she recommended I return for a few more sessions so we can build a proper profile of my background and identify what we need to work through. But before that, she mentioned I could also see a psychiatrist, and ask them to refer me to her so the sessions could be paid for by national healthcare (I'm Romanian, for context).

So I did that, booked an appointment with a psychiatrist that seemed alright, and I basically hit the same brick wall I did before. My issues aren't neurological, they're behavioural - and I just need some counseling and discipline. And my inability to make my body move in the mornings could be just a sleep hygiene issue.

You've all heard or read about women having debilitating period pain and just being told to drink water or eat healthier or maybe go for walks more often, right? This felt like that; I'm facing a clear disconnect between my brain and my body, I have my daily life disrupted by things that are 100% out of my control, but apparently I just need discipline and better sleep. I don't buy it, as much as I want to.

I got so frustrated during the session that I started involuntarily masking and going along with the motions just to have it over. Internally I was on the verge of tears but I put a pretty smile on and left the room upbeat. That is not normal. I need help.

But they just don't seem inclined to want to offer it. I am a firm believer of Occam's razor but the psychiatrist's conclusion didn't feel like the simplest one - it felt like a massive oversimplification.

I did get a recommendation to take the DIVA-5 test (because neither of them were qualified to do it) so now I'm searching for a psychologist that is certified (which are rare, and pricey, from what I can see).

But until then, I just feel disappointed, misunderstood, and honestly quite angry. I asked for help and was given what amounts to scraps. My lived experiences were invalidated in front of me, in the places that were supposed to validate them and guide me towards finding an understanding of my behaviors and my mental health, twice in a row.

Those of you who got diagnosed, how many tries did it take? Is this the norm, just hopping from clinician to clinician until you find one that clicks and feels right? Or did I get massively unlucky?

Also, has anyone else taken the DIVA-5? How did it go for you?

@RoyalHenOil's comment in another thread got me thinking, and I feel like it might be helpful for me to hear what other Tilderinos have to share about this. I've wondered for years if I might have ADHD. Any time I've looked into it, it never seems like I check enough boxes for that to be an accurate label. But I've also gotten the impression that many psychological things like ADHD might be better understood as a spectrum (or even a region?), so lately I keep coming back to the possibility that I just have some other/related flavor of executive dysfunction. Or maybe I just haven't figured out how to "adult" properly yet for other reasons. I don't know, but it feels like being able to name the way my brain works would help things somehow.

I tried for hours to write up an explanation of my experiences, but I couldn't come up with anything that felt accurate and was a reasonable length, so the five-second version is this: The thing I keep coming across and identifying with is the "hyperfocus mode" that some people report. I enjoy this but also feel like it must have something to do with my struggles in some areas. I can prioritize tasks effectively plenty of the time, but I also can't at other times. If I used an Eisenhower matrix, things in the "important but not urgent" category would mostly be gathering dust (except for ones I happened to focus on). I don't really have any control over the "hyperfocus mode" and its target changes unpredictably.

There's an exhausting amount of nuance I could add to the above. I'd really love to hear from anyone who's had experience with any sort of divergent executive function that doesn't seem to fit into any of the currently available boxes we use to understand these things.

Addendum: I reread RoyalHenOil's comment just now and I think responding to it directly might be easier than writing out my own explanation from scratch, so I'll include that response here for anyone who feels like reading it.

I don't mean this in the sense of "if I have a sex dream that involves my mother, does that mean I am attracted to my mother?", I know that dreams aren't a literal representation of our desires in that sense.

What I mean more is, is there any study or anything that has been done to see if a dream's content indicates anything about what problem the brain is trying to work out?

Like does a dream about sex indicate that a certain lobe in the brain is particularly active at that moment?

Or like I have had negative dreams that cause me to feel anxiety when I wake up that involve my family or where I was in the middle of an ICE raid recently, does that indicate anything in particular about what my brain was doing while I was asleep that caused me to feel anxiety and that happened to manifest as ICE raids?

not sure if this was the right sub for this question.

For the past year, I've finally been able to have a strong, lasting, cleaning routine. It took me my whole life, but I was never able to go past my own argument of "who cares"? Who cares if the dishes aren't done? If the laundry isn't folded? Only I can judge me. It doesn't matter, ultimately.

But silently, I wasn't happy with that, and I've known I wasn't happy for years, kinda like an addict saying he'll stop but he never does.

One day earlier this year, during winter, while on a good cleaning day, I took some time to look at my old notebooks from college. I remembered a page I had written during some off-time on an internship. I had written a full page of the same line: "I like it when...". I had wanted to just do some introspection and list every thing I liked that came to mind. Stuff like "I like it when I eat pizza", "I like it when I play boardgames with my friend", etc.

Those notes were five years old, you know what was the very first thing on the page? That's right: "I like it when my apartment is clean"

It hit me like a fucking brick. I almost cried right there.

From then on, it was over. The cleaning me had won over the lazy me and I've since been able to keep a clean apartment :)

So, what's your story? How did you overcome a challenge in your life?

I'm a member of a hacker space. In the last few months two different people have came in desperate for help because they have a relentless hacker after them. In each case they are a completely mundane person who would have little reason to earn the focus of a dedicated expert in device infiltration. They claim that no matter what they do, what device they use (new phone, new laptop, hardened security OS, even their blueray players) it will get hacked as though they have an aura about them. When pressed for any kind of evidence they have none. The previous events they claim as evidence are always shaky. Often their claim is just that something didn't work right on their computer - thus it is hacked. It's never anything concrete like their bank account getting emptied.

One is a middle-aged woman who thinks that her upstairs neighbor is seeking revenge after she put in a noise complaint. Another is a woman in her 20s who has no understanding of what initiated it. The older woman is at the point where she believes every TV has a camera in it that can get hacked to watch her. When we look up the model numbers and see they have no camera in the specs she waves it off - to her those were just exceptions. In both cases they've turned to technological solutions they don't understand in a blind hope for refuge. Secure DNS (like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1), GrapheneOS, stateless Linux laptops, etc.

I don't feel like these people are schizophrenic. We've had such people show up before and their delusions are on a different level. One guy thinks a well known actor stole his UFO designs and is trying to get him put in jail. These other people feel more like they're in self-imposed conspiracy theories, not unlike what happened to that ChatGPT user. At first I felt like this was a technological form of FDIS (to be clear I have no training in psychology). But there have been no attempts from either person to factitiously create devices that appear compromised. So I suppose this is more of a delusion, perhaps founded on a desire to be more important than they really are.

Does anyone know more about this kind of situation? I don't think there's much I can do for them. But I'd love to understand more about this topic if anyone has seen stuff like this before or has formal training.