Getting Started

Preparing for an AuDHD Assessment: What to Know

The iamaudhd screening starts with 20 free questions. The full assessment adds 150 more across three life stages. It takes most people 25–45 minutes. This guide explains what the experience is like, how to answer in a way that gives you the most accurate results, and what to do with what you find.

Answer-first summary

Quick answer

The best way to prepare is to answer from lived patterns, not idealized versions of yourself. Think across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and note where masking or compensating changed what others could see.

Before you begin

You do not need an account to start the assessment. No personal information is collected during the screening itself — your answers exist in your browser session until you reach your results. If you want to save your results or unlock the full report, you'll have the option to do so at the end.

The best conditions for completing the assessment are: a quiet space, enough uninterrupted time (plan for 45 minutes if you tend to reflect carefully on questions), and a general mood of honest self-examination rather than self-judgment.

If possible, avoid completing it during a period of acute stress, sleep deprivation, or immediately following a significant event. Your baseline experience — not your worst week or your best month — is what produces meaningful results.

There is no pass or fail. There is no right answer. The only outcome that undermines the value of the assessment is answering how you wish you were rather than how you actually are.

How the three life stages work

The assessment moves through three separate windows of your life. Each stage is scored independently and contributes differently to your overall results.

Childhood

roughly ages 5–12

Questions focus on school behavior, early social experiences, sensory responses, and how you related to peers and structured environments. These are often the most revealing questions for autism traits, which tend to be clearest before years of social learning obscure the baseline.

Tip: You may not remember specifics. That's fine — answer based on your general sense of what childhood was like, not a precise memory. If you genuinely can't recall, use the skip option.

Adolescence

roughly ages 13–17

Questions cover social dynamics, identity, academic pressure, emotional experience, and early coping strategies. Adolescence is often when masking intensifies and the gap between internal experience and external performance becomes most pronounced.

Tip: This stage tends to surface ADHD traits that school structure previously compensated for, as well as social camouflaging patterns that started in early secondary school.

Adulthood

your current experience

Questions address present-day functioning: work, relationships, executive function, sensory experience, emotional regulation, and self-perception. This stage is scored differently from the others — skip options reflect present experience rather than memory.

Tip: Answer for how you actually function, not how you think you should function or how you function on a good day. The assessment is most useful when it reflects your real experience.

How to answer honestly — even when it's complicated

Many people who suspect they have AuDHD have spent years minimizing their own experience. “Everyone feels that way.” “I'm just sensitive.” “I manage fine.” These are the products of a lifetime of masking, and they show up in how people answer screening questions.

A few principles that tend to produce better results:

Answer for your internal experience, not your external performance. If you can hold a conversation but it costs you enormous effort and you need hours to recover, that's a relevant signal — even if the conversation “went fine.”
Answer for your natural state, not your compensated state. If you are only organized because you have built an elaborate system to compensate for disorganization, the underlying trait is still there. Answer for what happens when the systems fail.
Don't compare yourself to the worst case you can imagine. “I'm not that bad” is not the threshold. The threshold is your actual daily experience relative to how neurotypical people describe theirs.
Your first instinct is usually more accurate than your revised answer. Overthinking a question often means applying social desirability pressure to override an honest response. Go with your gut.

None of this means catastrophizing your experience or treating every difficulty as diagnostic. It means taking your experience seriously enough to report it accurately.

The skip option, and why it matters

Every question in the assessment has a skip option. The specific wording varies by life stage — “I can't remember” for childhood and adolescence questions, “not sure” or “not applicable” for adulthood questions. These are not the same as “no.”

Skipped questions are excluded from both the numerator and denominator of your score. This means skipping does not hurt your result — it simply removes that question from consideration. A score based on 80 answered questions out of 100 in a domain is just as valid as one based on all 100. What matters is the quality of what you answer, not forcing an answer where one isn't accurate.

Use skip when:

You genuinely cannot remember a childhood experience
A question does not apply to your life circumstances
You are uncertain enough that any answer would be a guess, not a reflection

Do not use skip as an escape from questions that feel uncomfortable to answer. Discomfort often signals that a question is touching something real. Sit with it briefly before deciding it doesn't apply.

What happens if too many questions are skipped?

If fewer than 60% of questions in an axis are answered, the scoring engine reports “insufficient data” rather than a score. This is intentional — a score based on sparse data is more misleading than no score. If you see “insufficient data” in your results, consider going back through that life stage and revisiting skipped questions. More on what “insufficient data” means →

What your results will show

The free results give you your three axis scores — ADHD, Autism (ASD), and AuDHD — along with a confidence level for each based on how many questions you answered. This is the same scoring engine used for the full report.

The paid full report adds the 14 subscale breakdown, a pattern analysis that highlights significant findings across your results (including mutual masking flags), and a PDF export formatted for sharing with a clinician.

Your results are not a diagnosis. They are a structured picture of your trait patterns — which traits are present, how strongly they show up, and how the ADHD and autism patterns relate to each other. That picture is useful regardless of whether a formal diagnosis follows.

Scores are shown with color indicators: sage for low, amber for moderate, and terracotta for elevated. “Elevated” does not mean “broken” — it means the pattern is consistent with the traits being screened for.

How to read your results in detail →

What to do after you get your results

A screening result — even an elevated one — is not a clinical diagnosis. If your results suggest significant ADHD, autism, or AuDHD traits, the appropriate next step is a conversation with a qualified clinician who can conduct a formal evaluation.

Depending on your location and circumstances, this might be a psychiatrist, psychologist, neuropsychologist, or specialist adult ADHD or autism service. Waiting times and access vary considerably. If you are in a public healthcare system, asking your GP or primary care doctor for a referral is typically the starting point. If you are self-funding, searching for clinicians who specialize in adult AuDHD or late-presenting ADHD and autism will narrow the field.

Your iamaudhd PDF report is designed to be a clinical communication tool. It presents your results in a structured format that a clinician can read quickly, with subscale data and the pattern analysis highlighted. When you book an appointment, send the PDF in advance if the practice allows it, and bring a printed copy to the appointment itself.

Be prepared for the possibility that a clinician unfamiliar with AuDHD may focus on one condition rather than both. If your results show a strong AuDHD pattern, it is reasonable to specifically raise the question of co-occurrence and ask whether the evaluation will assess for both.

What to say when you bring your results

You don't need to lead with “I think I have AuDHD.” A more productive framing: “I completed a structured screening for ADHD and autism co-occurrence. Here are my results. I'd like to discuss whether a formal evaluation makes sense.” This positions the screening as a starting point for dialogue rather than a claim that requires defending.

Common questions before starting

Do I need to do all three stages in one sitting?

Your session is stored in your browser. As long as you use the same browser and device and don't clear your session data, you can return to where you left off. That said, completing a life stage in one sitting produces more consistent results than splitting it across days.

What if I was diagnosed with ADHD or autism already?

The assessment is still valuable. Many people with an existing single-axis diagnosis want to understand whether co-occurrence explains aspects of their experience that their diagnosis doesn't. The three-axis scoring will show you how the two trait profiles relate — including whether mutual masking may have affected your original assessment.

I'm not sure if I'm answering “correctly.”

There is no correct answer. Read each question at face value and answer from your lived experience. If a question is ambiguous, interpret it in whatever way feels most directly relevant to your experience and answer from there.

Will my answers be used for research or shared?

No. iamaudhd does not sell data, does not use third-party analytics during the assessment, and does not share your responses. See our privacy policy for full detail.