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There are at least as many professionals in the field of mental health care who don't know what undiagnosed ADHD* looks like in adults as there are, and that's putting it delicately. Where can you start if you suspect that you are talking to someone from group 1? (1/?) https://twitter.com/shiraisinspired/status/1337491169069199364
A lot of the general information professionals *should* have is available to you too, in libraries and on the internet. Older books/journals and resources from the web should be treated with the same mistrust as an uninformed therapist, though. Self help groups can help you out:
They can be a helpful place to find material and support navigating that material, not just for officialy diagnosed people! When I couldn't even find a GP to help me find *any* person with any credentials to even do a general screening with me, a regional self help group gave me
a list of professionals their members have had good experiences with. In Germany, there is a registered organization with lots of branches/sub-clubs dedicated to making education, exchange of experiences, and mutual support accessible (ADHS Deutschland e. V.).
Check out if there's something similar in your country! If there is, reach out - apart from the resources they might have already collected there, the contact with members itself might be very insightful to you, whether you find that you have things in common with them or not.
Initially, I was just going to quote @shiraisinspired and quip "I did that". But i think it's important for me to add some notes on *how* "I did that".
The crucial thing that kind of puts you ahead of any professional, well-educated on ADHD or not, is your expertise on *you*. No one else might ever suspect that 'ADHD' is a fitting label for the way you experience some things, because you just might not show it obviously.
You might have learned exhausting coping mechanisms to suppress all your symptoms and only show the exhaustion that's a result of that. You might be so gifted in other things that you compensate what impairments you have.
Or you might be in a surrounding in which you profit from your being different, or in which you have already inadvertently adapted your behavior to accommodate your limitations. I could go on, but I think I made my point:
If you suspect that you have ADHD, what you can and should research is the many different ways ADHD shows up. And what you might already know, but maybe should deliberately put into words in some form is why *your* situation looks the way it looks.
You can learn on your own on what basis #ADHD is #diagnosed almost as well a you can be told by a professional who knows what they are doing. What you have ahead and can probably articulate better than anyone is why you have not been diagnosed *yet*.
Because once you are diagnosed (or ADHD is ruled out), that's what has to determine how you go forward either way, and that's data that you have been collecting your whole life up to now, and no one else did. And the information to read data can be acquired in a number of ways.
