How does therapy work with a diagnosis of ADHD? There’s an important difference that needs to be acknowledged first, between what “diagnosis” means in medicine and what it means in mental health.

In medicine, a diagnosis means that the cause of a condition has been identified. However, in mental health, a diagnosis only means that a consensual term is being used to describe aspects of your behaviours and feelings; these are being deemed to fit criteria which collectively have come to be labelled as ADHD. It doesn’t mean that the diagnosis has identified an actual “thing”, or cause.

ADHD is a description of certain aspects of who you are as a human being. The word diagnosis can sound like it’s found a cause of your symptoms, but that’s not true. It’s just a description of them.

When it comes to therapy for ADHD (or OCD, BPD… etc.), the therapist isn’t going to say “I know how to fix that.” Really, that diagnosis is just a shorthand for a set of ways of being. And it will be particular to you; it won’t be a universal set shared by everyone else with that diagnosis. It will be a very personal set of characteristics about how you experience life and how you get through the day.

So fundamentally, it’s just like showing up in therapy and saying anything else about yourself: “I’m high energy,” “I’m anxious,” or “I feel like an imposter.” These are all descriptions of important parts of your experience. What we do in therapy, amongst other things, is explore why you’re like that. And that why might have many different impacts, including some that sound like and are classifiable as ADHD symptoms.

Your ADHD diagnosis doesn’t tell us the cause or the cure. It’s one part of a much bigger portrait of you.