2-Question ADHD Screening Test

Can you determine whether someone has ADHD with two questions? Well, not definitively, but it turns out you can get a pretty good idea.

In a 2017 study, a group of researchers from Brown University identified two symptoms that are especially helpful in separating people with ADHD from people without the disorder. These symptoms aren’t reliable indicators 100 percent of the time, but the researchers found that in a group of over a thousand people, a two-question test that asked about the symptoms was accurate for about nine in ten people.

These two symptoms are:

• Do you often have difficulty sustaining attention? In other words, do you often find it hard to keep your attention focused on one task for a prolonged period of time?
• Do you often feel fidgety? In other words, do you often have trouble sitting still or find yourself fidgeting?

If you answered “yes” to both questions, there’s a good chance you have ADHD. If you answered “no” to both, that makes ADHD less likely. And if you answered “yes” to one and “no” to the other, well, you’re going to need more than two questions to figure things out.

As with any ADHD test, there are some caveats: it’s possible to get a false positive or a false negative. And just because the two-question test was accurate for the group of people in the study doesn’t mean it’s equally accurate for all groups of people. Still, if both questions rang bells for you, that’s a telltale sign that you may want to talk to a mental health professional about being evaluated for ADHD!

Image: Flickr/duncan c