Getting Help for ADHD in Moscow as an English Speaker

If you’re an English-speaking adult living in Moscow and you’ve started wondering whether attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might explain some of the difficulties you’ve been having — with focus, organisation, restlessness, or impulsivity — this article is meant to help you understand what an ADHD assessment actually involves, and what a reasonable next step looks like. It’s written to inform, not to diagnose. Nothing here is a substitute for talking to a qualified professional.

What can adult ADHD look like day to day?

ADHD is often associated with childhood, but it can look quite different in adults. Rather than obvious hyperactivity, many adults notice ongoing difficulty sustaining attention and concentration, or a pattern of “hyperfocus” — becoming so absorbed in one activity that it’s hard to switch away from it, sometimes at the expense of other things that need attention. Hyperactivity can show up more as inner restlessness than visible fidgeting. Impulsivity can cause friction at work or in relationships, and many adults describe a particular difficulty with longer-term planning — it’s not that the future doesn’t matter to them, but that it can be genuinely hard to weigh it against what feels urgent right now.

None of this is a checklist, and recognising one or two of these patterns in yourself doesn’t mean you have ADHD. These are simply common examples of what the experience can involve — a starting point for thinking about it, not a way to conclude anything on your own.

Can ADHD be diagnosed for the first time in adulthood?

Yes. ADHD can be diagnosed in adulthood, including in people who were not diagnosed as children. This doesn’t mean ADHD typically starts fresh in adult life, out of nowhere. Assessment usually looks at whether relevant difficulties were also present earlier in life — often stretching back to childhood or adolescence — even if nobody identified them as ADHD at the time. It’s common for adults to only make this connection later, sometimes after years of feeling like ordinary tasks required much more effort than they seemed to for other people.

Why an online checklist isn’t a diagnosis

ADHD symptom checklists and online quizzes are easy to find, and they can be a reasonable prompt to think more seriously about your own experience. But answering a checklist is not the same thing as being assessed. A proper assessment needs to look at your history in real depth, consider other explanations for what you’re experiencing, and understand how any difficulties actually affect different parts of your life — not simply whether you match a certain number of items on a list.

What a proper ADHD assessment generally involves

An ADHD diagnosis should be made by a healthcare professional with specific training and expertise in diagnosing and assessing ADHD — not assumed to be within the everyday scope of any psychiatrist or psychologist, and not reached from a short screening conversation alone. A thorough assessment typically looks at:

• Your personal history, including whether relevant difficulties were already present earlier in life
• How things affect you across different areas of your life — for example work, study, relationships and daily routines
• Other conditions that can look similar to ADHD, or occur alongside it — such as anxiety or mood difficulties — so these are properly considered rather than overlooked

This is why an ADHD assessment is a process carried out by someone with the right specific training, rather than a single test or a quick judgement.

What if I was never assessed as a child?

Many adults living with undiagnosed ADHD were never assessed when they were young — sometimes because the difficulty wasn’t recognised at the time, sometimes because they found ways to manage that only became harder to sustain later in life, such as after starting a new job, moving to a new country, or taking on more responsibility. Not having a childhood diagnosis doesn’t rule anything out. What matters for an adult assessment is whether, looking back, there’s evidence that relevant difficulties were already present earlier in life — even if nobody named them at the time.

What a reasonable next step looks like

If some of this feels familiar, a reasonable next step is usually a conversation with a healthcare professional about arranging a proper assessment — rather than trying to reach a conclusion by yourself, or basing a decision purely on an online test. Having that conversation doesn’t commit you to anything beyond finding out more, and it’s the way to get an accurate picture of what’s actually going on, instead of guessing. If you’re considering an assessment, you can read more about what to expect from a psychiatric consultation.