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One of these days, I really ought to go talk to a Qualified Medical Professional about the whole ADD thing.
It is, I think, a fairly familiar story. Difficulty paying attention but bright enough to get good grades anyway, not so hyperactive as to annoy teachers, and thus ADD coped with haphazardly until old enough to look up symptoms when no longer under parental insurance plan. Yadda yadda. But as I have some reasonable form of health insurance right now, I should probably actually go address this. Caffeine and multi-tasking can only go so far to help me cope when crunches hit, and I've learned enough about proper study skills as a "returning student" to realize just how poor mine used to be. And just how much attention is required to study properly these days.
Of course, I'm writing about this now as an expression of frustration on not being able to focus on studying for my Greek final tomorrow. Which would be less of a problem if I'd been doing this sort of not-quite-studying for a week, like I planned, but a nasty cold has seriously reduced my ability to focus from its already pathetic levels.
(You want "has difficulty focusing"? I can't play video games I deeply enjoy, with lots of exciting action that requires concentration at regular intervals, unless I can window them on my computer, or pause them on the console, for regular breaks to read a few pages of a book or chat to someone or check forums or get a snack or...well. Let's just say the dragons of Skyrim are usually two-pause battles for me.)
In sadly related news, I've gotten a fair amount of writing done lately, but mostly out of avoiding the studying I should be doing.
My brain is very tired. I'm looking forward to the end of the semester. Which comes at 10pm tomorrow, when my last final is done. Now, if only I could get through this Antiphon review one more time, and move on to Lysias...
It is, I think, a fairly familiar story. Difficulty paying attention but bright enough to get good grades anyway, not so hyperactive as to annoy teachers, and thus ADD coped with haphazardly until old enough to look up symptoms when no longer under parental insurance plan. Yadda yadda. But as I have some reasonable form of health insurance right now, I should probably actually go address this. Caffeine and multi-tasking can only go so far to help me cope when crunches hit, and I've learned enough about proper study skills as a "returning student" to realize just how poor mine used to be. And just how much attention is required to study properly these days.
Of course, I'm writing about this now as an expression of frustration on not being able to focus on studying for my Greek final tomorrow. Which would be less of a problem if I'd been doing this sort of not-quite-studying for a week, like I planned, but a nasty cold has seriously reduced my ability to focus from its already pathetic levels.
(You want "has difficulty focusing"? I can't play video games I deeply enjoy, with lots of exciting action that requires concentration at regular intervals, unless I can window them on my computer, or pause them on the console, for regular breaks to read a few pages of a book or chat to someone or check forums or get a snack or...well. Let's just say the dragons of Skyrim are usually two-pause battles for me.)
In sadly related news, I've gotten a fair amount of writing done lately, but mostly out of avoiding the studying I should be doing.
My brain is very tired. I'm looking forward to the end of the semester. Which comes at 10pm tomorrow, when my last final is done. Now, if only I could get through this Antiphon review one more time, and move on to Lysias...
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I actually got my diagnosis right after a therapist (who ended up not being the person I saw regularly) did tests on me -- this was several hours, and included a written report with the results of the tests, and another meeting to discuss the results. I think the tests counted as two meetings, the discussion as another, and (possibly) the written report as a fourth, for the purposes of insurance billing.
If your therapist has already tested you, s/he might already have a diagnosis, and would just need to put it in the right paperwork format to be filed with your insurance company.
The office staff took my insurance information (I had already made sure that the people I was working with were "in network" for my insurance company), learned immediately what my copay for each visit was, billed me (I paid then, but I think I could have done it over a longer period of time), and then sent off to my insurance company for the rest. I wasn't involved in that at all -- in fact, I've never even got any paperwork from my insurance company about my therapist office visits, although I think I could probably look up information online.
Then, after I had my diagnosis, I presume it was submitted to the insurance company to justify my having continued office visits, but again, the therapist's office staff did all of that. I know from the booklet that I got from the insurance company that I have coverage for 30 office visits for mental health purposes per year. I meant to keep track of this, but I didn't -- but it turns out that the office staff also keep track, and report to my therapist if I'm in danger of running out, so we can make different scheduling arrangements.
My therapist is a psychologist, so can't prescribe, although she did give me some written material about medication and encouraged me to try it. When I decided to try it, I had two options: I could make an appointment with one of the psychiatrists in my therapist's office, or see my regular doctor. I decided to see my regular doctor, because (1) the copay to see her was less, (2) I thought, correctly, that she would be friendly to the idea of me taking ADHD medication, and (3) my therapist thought, again correctly, that I would respond well to a basic kind of prescription, and that if this didn't work for me, I could always see the psychiatrist later for problem-solving or fine-tuning. (With a different kind of medication I might have had a third option -- try it out with a free sample -- but Adderall is a controlled substance so therapists don't get samples.)
In short, I was initially very worried about how the insurance would work, but it turned out that my therapist's office staff handled everything. (They were also very very good at telling me how much things would cost and how long things would take, but that might just be luck on my part.) I think this is probably the case for most doctors' and therapists' offices, because insurance filings are nightmarishly complicated for everyone and it's in the offices' best interests to take over all the work so the patients can't mess it up. I suspect that the staff where there a lot of clients with ADHD are particularly keen to help and simplify matters, because people with ADHD are expected to be disorganized (this amuses me because I've become extremely organized, especially with my finances, as a sort of coping mechanism). However, I think things are more likely to be simplified with a therapist's office that's large enough to have office staff, and there might also be regional differences in how things get filed.
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But it's good to know what sorts of things might come up (it never occurred to me there might be multi-hour testing, ye gods!), and I can apparently call an 800 number for the insurance company to ask for help in figuring out what to do.
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I don't know if my testing was unusually long. I had an interview with the therapist, and then did a bunch of quantifiable tests. It wasn't all to test attention specifically; some of it was testing memory and verbal, numeric, etc. abilities, but I think they wanted that information as context for the results of the attention test.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I actually had testing on two different days. The first day I think I was tested for about two hours, then in between the therapist analyzed the results, and then on a later day I did more tests (chosen either because they depended on the results of the previous tests, or because they could be analyzed quickly) and then reviewed the results with the therapist. I found it all interesting, but surprisingly tiring.
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(I suspect I procrastinate over-much on this particular topic less because of the inability to focus well and more because I find myself worried that if I seek a diagnosis and actually try drugs, I'll discover that I was wrong, and it can't be fixed by medicine, and it was My Fault All Along, and...well. Issues! I've got some.)