ADHD Evaluation: Diagnostic Reasoning, Differential, and Defensible Findings

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A three-hour live virtual intensive for licensed clinicians who evaluate ADHD, or who are asked about it often enough that they need to reason about it well.

ADHD referrals have risen sharply, and a substantial portion of what arrives for evaluation is not ADHD. Sleep disruption, trauma-related attentional dysregulation, anxiety, mood disorders, specific learning disorder, and autism all generate attention complaints that elevate the same rating scales. The diagnostic question is rarely whether attentional difficulty exists. It is what is producing it, whether the onset and cross-setting criteria are genuinely met, and whether the evidence supports the conclusion you are about to put in writing and sign.

This intensive works through the reasoning rather than the checklist.

What we cover

Criteria applied with real threshold language. DSM-5-TR criteria in practice, including the childhood onset requirement and the cross-setting impairment standard that retrospective adult evaluations routinely fail to establish.

The differential as clinical work, not a list. Distinguishing ADHD from anxiety, trauma-related attentional disruption, mood disorders, sleep disorders, specific learning disorder, and autism, including the common presentations where more than one condition is genuinely present and the diagnosis is additive rather than exclusive.

What rating scales can and cannot support. Informant discrepancy, base rate problems, and the particular limits of self-report in adult evaluation.

Continuous performance tests. What the literature actually supports regarding sensitivity and specificity, and why a normal CPT does not rule ADHD out and an abnormal one does not rule it in.

Validity considerations. Symptom and performance validity in adult ADHD evaluation, including how to conduct and document evaluations undertaken for stimulant access or academic accommodation.

Integration and report writing. Bringing developmental history, collateral report, records, and test data into findings that hold together, with rule-out reasoning made explicit and accommodation recommendations that survive review by a school, a university disability office, or another clinician.

Who this is for

Licensed psychologists, licensed mental health clinicians, and school psychologists who conduct or contribute to ADHD evaluations. Also appropriate for therapists who do not test but are regularly asked about ADHD and want to refer with sharper questions.

Led by Niki Serravalle, Psy.D., LPCMH, NCC, a licensed psychologist whose practice centers on psychological and psychoeducational evaluation.

Date, continuing education credits, and pricing will be announced to the waitlist first.