ONLINE VIA TELEHEALTH
ADHD and autism assessment for adults
Most people who come to me for assessment have been wondering for a while. Often years. Something surfaced, a child was assessed, a friend was diagnosed, an article described a life that looked uncomfortably like their own, and the question has been sitting there since.
By the time they get in touch, most have read a great deal. Many have taken online screeners. Some have raised it with a GP and been told they seem to be managing fine. What they want is not reassurance, and not a label. They want to know whether this explains it, and if it does, what to do with that.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Adults who compensated well enough that nobody looked closely
This assessment is designed for adults, 18 and over, who communicate fluently in speech and are living independently. In practice most of my assessment clients are women who were never identified as children.
There is a reason for that. The diagnostic criteria for ADHD and autism were developed by observing young boys whose difficulties were visible enough to disrupt a classroom. The criteria measure how much trouble a person causes, not how much they are struggling. A girl who is quiet, anxious, exhausting herself to keep up, and getting reasonable marks generates no referral. She simply grows up.
Or perhaps people did look, and what came back never quite fitted. Anxiety. Depression. Burnout. Labels that described something real about how you were feeling, but left the question of why it kept happening unanswered.
WHO THIS IS NOT FOR
I want to be clear about the limits of what I offer, because it saves people time and money.
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Not an NDIS functional capacity assessment. I provide a diagnostic report. NDIS access also requires a functional capacity assessment, which I do not offer.
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Adults only. I do not assess children or adolescents.
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Designed for verbally fluent adults. If you have an intellectual disability or communicate primarily in ways other than speech, a different assessment format will serve you better.
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If substantial support needs emerge, I will tell you plainly and refer you on to someone who can complete the further assessment you would need. That is a possible outcome of this process rather than a reason not to begin it.
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Medication. I am a Psychologist and cannot prescribe. If you are seeking ADHD medication you will need a GP or Psychiatrist, explained further down this page.
HOW IT WORKS
Every assessment starts the same way
ADHD and autism co-occur far more often than they were once thought to, and in people who have masked heavily the picture is rarely obvious from the outside. So rather than asking you to choose a pathway before we have met, we decide together at the end of the first session, with your history and your questionnaire results in front of us.
01
Intake and questionnaires
An intake form and a short set of questionnaires, around thirty minutes of work. You are not expected to answer every question perfectly.
02
Initial session, 90 minutes
We go through your history properly: childhood, school, work, relationships, health, and what has brought you here now. At the end we decide together which assessment fits.
03
Diagnostic session (or sessions)
A second, longer set of questionnaires tailored to what we discussed, then the structured diagnostic interview. A combined assessment is split across two 90 minute appointments by default.
04
Feedback, then reports
An hour talking through what I found and how I got there, before anything arrives in writing. Reports follow within two weeks.
Initial session, $400
90 minutes by telehealth, booked directly. A 50 per cent deposit of $200 confirms your booking, with the remaining $200 payable on the day. This session stands on its own: if you decide not to continue afterwards, that is a reasonable outcome, and you will have had a full clinical session and my considered view at the end of it.
THE THREE PATHWAYS
Chosen with you after the initial session, not before
ADHD assessment
3 appointments, 4 hours in total
$1,400
Questionnaires covering current and childhood symptoms, executive function, camouflaging, autistic traits, trauma, mood and daily functioning
Diagnostic session, 90 minutes, using the DIVA-5 structured diagnostic interview
Feedback session, 60 minutes
Diagnostic report, plus a separate report written for you
Autism assessment
3 appointments, 4.5 hours in total
$2,000
For people who already have an ADHD diagnosis, or where autism is the question and ADHD is not
Questionnaires covering autistic traits, camouflaging, repetitive behaviours, sensory and interoceptive experience, alexithymia, trauma and daily functioning
Diagnostic session, two hours, using the MIGDAS-2
Feedback session, 60 minutes
Diagnostic report, plus a separate report written for you
ADHD and autism
4 appointments, 5.5 hours in total
$2,500
The full questionnaire battery, including camouflaging, autistic traits, sensory and interoceptive measures, repetitive behaviours, alexithymia, trauma and functional impact
Diagnostic sessions, two appointments of 90 minutes, using the MIGDAS-2 and the DIVA-5. Available as a single three hour session if you prefer
Feedback session, 60 minutes
Diagnostic report, plus a separate report written for you
WHAT YOU ACTUALLY BOOK
Three or four appointments, and you know the length of each before you start
The diagnostic part of a combined assessment takes three hours. I split this across two appointments by default, because three hours of sustained conversation is a lot to ask of anyone and most people find two shorter sittings easier. If you would rather do it in one, that is available.
Only the initial session is booked online. The rest are scheduled with you once we have agreed a pathway.
Questionnaires, in two batches
Questionnaires are sent to you by email to complete at home, in your own time. The first batch takes around thirty minutes and comes before your initial session. The second is longer and is tailored to what we discussed, and it comes after the initial session and before the diagnostic session.
The gaps are deliberate
There is usually a week or so between your initial session and your diagnostic session, and around two weeks between your diagnostic session and your feedback session, so that I have time to score everything and think properly about what it shows. From your first appointment to receiving your reports is generally six to eight weeks.
SOMEONE WHO KNOWS YOU
Another perspective, if there is someone to ask
If you have old school reports, previous assessments, or letters from other clinicians, those are useful too. Not essential.
Part of the assessment involves gathering another perspective. There are two kinds of information this can provide: what you were like as a child, and what you are like now. A parent or older sibling can often speak to the first, and a partner or close friend to the second.
There are standardised questionnaires for both, which take around fifteen to twenty minutes to complete, and I will send them to whoever you nominate. Some people ask two or three people. Some ask one. Some ask nobody.
This is optional, and it will not determine the outcome. I want to be clear about that, because the question of who can speak to your childhood is not straightforward for everyone. Parents die, relationships end, families are estranged. And for many of the people I assess the whole point is that nobody noticed, so a parent's account may be that everything seemed fine.
That absence is information in itself, and the assessment is built to account for it.
Where collateral information is limited, I say so in the report and explain how I reached my conclusions without it.
WHAT IT COSTS IN TOTAL
Everything listed is included. There are no additional charges for the reports or the feedback session.
A note on rebates: Assessment is not covered by a Mental Health Treatment Plan. Medicare rebates apply to therapy, not to diagnostic assessment for adults. Some private health funds offer a partial rebate, please check directly with your fund.
How payment works
Initial session, $400. A $200 deposit confirms your booking online. The remaining $200 is payable on the day.
Assessment fee. Once we have agreed on a pathway, the fee is paid in two parts: half before the diagnostic session, and half after it, before your feedback session and report writing. That is two payments of $700 for ADHD, $1,000 for autism, or $1,250 for a combined assessment.
Payment via: Credit card or direct deposit.
Please ask if a more spread out payment plan would be helpful for you.
THE TRAUMA QUESTION
Working out which of these is doing what is the actual clinical work
This is the part of the assessment I take most seriously, and it is why the process is structured the way it is.
Inattention, overwhelm, emotional dysregulation, exhaustion and difficulty with organisation are not exclusive to ADHD. They are also what happens to a nervous system that has spent years managing danger, and they are what happens to someone who has been masking since primary school. The three can look almost identical from the outside, and they very frequently occur together.
A high score on an ADHD screening questionnaire tells you much less than people assume. Australia's national ADHD guideline says as much. Screening tools perform well when people with ADHD are compared to the general population, and poorly when compared against other clinical groups, because the symptoms overlap so heavily.
It is why the assessment includes trauma measures alongside the neurodevelopmental ones. This is not a side consideration in my assessments. It is the centre of them.
WHAT YOU RECEIVE
Two reports, a resource pack, and a conversation before any of it arrives
A diagnostic report
A full clinical report, written to professional standards, with a summary at the front so a GP or Psychiatrist can read the essentials quickly and then look further if they want to. This is the document you hand over: to a prescriber, to a workplace, to a university. It contains the diagnosis, the criteria, the evidence, the standardised results and my reasoning.
A resource pack
What the outcome means, what to do next, where to find community, and what tends to help.
A report written for you
A separate document, addressed to you rather than about you. It covers the same ground in language that makes sense, and it goes further than the clinical report can: what this means in practice, where your strengths sit, what tends to cost you, what helps, and what I would suggest you do next. It is written to be the one you come back to and the one you share with the people in your everyday life who know and care about you.
A conversation first
We meet for an hour and I talk you through what I found and how I got there, before you receive anything in writing. Nobody should learn something significant about themselves from a document that turns up in their inbox.
ON LABELS
The label tells you which box you are in. It does not tell you much about you.
This is not a test. You cannot fail it, and not meeting criteria is not a poor result.
A diagnosis is shorthand. It names a cluster of experiences that tend to occur together, and it is useful for exactly that: it is what prescribers require before they will consider medication, what some workplaces and universities ask for before they will formally consider an adjustment, and a category other people already recognise. But it describes a category, not a person. Two people with the same diagnosis can have almost nothing in common in how they actually live.
What tends to be worth the hours is the detail underneath it. How your attention actually behaves, and under what conditions. What you are genuinely good at, including things you have never counted as a strength because they came easily. What reliably depletes you, and what you have been doing to compensate without noticing. Where the risk sits, whether that is burnout, or a particular kind of work, or a pattern in relationships that keeps repeating. What conditions let you function well, which most people have never been asked to articulate.
That picture does not depend on a diagnosis to be worth having.
What people do with that picture varies. Some use it to ask for something specific at work rather than disclosing a label and hoping. Not "I have ADHD" but "I need written follow-up after verbal briefings, and two hours of uninterrupted time in the morning." Some use it to recognise the early signs of depletion in themselves, rather than only noticing once burnout has arrived.
Some find it changes how they explain themselves to the people closest to them. For some, a lifelong pattern stops reading as a character flaw. A great deal of what people bring to assessment has been carried for decades as evidence of laziness, or coldness, or not trying hard enough. And where therapy follows, it can begin from a clearer picture rather than spending months building one.
If you are still weighing up whether this is worth doing, I have written about that here.
MEDICATION, GPS AND PSYCHIATRISTS
What a Psychologist's report can and cannot do
Many people who receive an ADHD diagnosis will want to discuss medication, so it is worth explaining how this works.
I cannot prescribe. Psychologists are not prescribers. What I provide is a diagnostic report with a summary at the front, written so that a GP or Psychiatrist can take in the diagnosis, the criteria met, the evidence of childhood onset and the impact on your functioning within a short appointment, with the full detail behind it if they want to look further.
Prescribing arrangements are changing, and they differ by state. In New South Wales, GPs with additional training can now continue existing ADHD prescriptions, and a further group is being endorsed to diagnose and start stimulant medication without a Psychiatrist's involvement. NSW Health maintains a map of approved prescribers, searchable by suburb or postcode. If you are outside NSW, your GP is the best person to tell you what applies where you live.
I want to be honest about one thing. A Psychologist's diagnosis does not guarantee that a prescriber will accept it or prescribe. Prescribers typically conduct their own assessment before starting a controlled medication. I write my reports to stand up to that scrutiny, but I cannot promise an outcome that is not mine to give.
Medication is one option, not the only one. Many people find it helpful. Some cannot take it, or choose not to, for reasons ranging from cardiac history to pregnancy to previous difficult experiences with psychiatric medication.
Why not just see a Psychiatrist?
If what you want is a diagnosis and a prescription and nothing more, then a Psychiatrist or an endorsed GP prescriber is the faster and likely cheaper route. You should do that.
What that route does not include is several hours spent working out whether what you are experiencing is ADHD, or autism, or the accumulated cost of thirty years of masking, or a trauma history that nobody has connected to your attention, or some combination of all of them.
My service is built for depth, for people who want to understand what has actually been happening.
If you already have a diagnosis
Some people come to me having already been diagnosed, by a GP or a Psychiatrist. They have the label. They do not understand much of what it means for them.
For those people I offer something different. Not another assessment, but a proper exploration: the same questionnaires, three or four sessions working through what they show against your actual history, and a written formulation at the end of it. What your attention actually does. What masking has cost. How your emotional regulation, your interoception, your relationships and your history fit together.
Because this is therapeutic work rather than diagnostic assessment, it may be claimable under a Mental Health Treatment Plan, and is delivered within standard 50 minute sessions. If autism is the open question rather than the meaning of an existing ADHD diagnosis, the autism assessment above is what you are looking for.
AFTERWARDS
You do not have to tell the whole story twice
Most people take their assessment report somewhere else and start again from the beginning with someone new for ongoing therapy. Some people prefer this as a fresh start, and that works best for them.
Another option is that by the time we finish, you will have told me your whole story. Childhood, school, work, relationships, the parts that were hard to say. If you would rather not do all of that again with someone else, you do not have to. I already know it, I have seen how you respond over several hours of sustained demand, and if trauma turns out to be part of the picture, that is work I can do with you.
So if you feel we have been a good match and want to continue with ongoing therapy sessions, we can do that.
Common questions
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Do I need a GP referral? No. You can book directly.
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Can I claim Medicare? Not for the assessment. Medicare rebates under a Mental Health Treatment Plan apply to therapy, not to diagnostic assessment. Ongoing therapy after your assessment may be rebatable.
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Is this all done online? Yes. Assessments are conducted by telehealth across Australia. The diagnostic interviews I use work well remotely, and being in your own space, with your own things, your own lighting and your own comfort items, is an advantage rather than a compromise.
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How long does the whole thing take? Usually six to eight weeks from your first session to receiving your report.
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Can I bring someone with me? Yes. For the autism assessment in particular, having a partner, sibling or parent join part of the session can be genuinely useful. It is entirely optional.
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What if I do not meet criteria? Then I tell you, and I explain what I think does account for what you are experiencing. That is a real result, not a failed assessment, and for many people it is more useful than a diagnosis would have been.
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Do you assess children? No. Adults only, 18 and over.
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I cannot sit still for three hours. You do not have to. The combined assessment is split into two 90 minute appointments by default. Breaks are expected within those, movement and stimming are welcome, and you should have water and snacks nearby. It is a conversation, not a test.
Assessments begin with a 90 minute initial session
You can book that directly, and decide about the rest afterwards. If you would like to ask something first, use the contact form and I will get back to you during business hours.
DR REBECCA HANNAN
Registered psychologist (AHPRA), PhD. EMDR practitioner registered with the EMDR Association of Australia, and trauma-informed process work psychotherapist registered with PACFA.
This page is general information and not a clinical opinion about you. This is not a crisis service; if you are in danger or need urgent help, call 000 or Lifeline 13 11 14.