About
What this is, and what stands behind it
ADHD Compass is an independent project. It is not affiliated with the World Health Organization, with Harvard, or with any clinical body, and none of those organisations has reviewed or endorsed it.
No individual is named here
Most health sites lead with a clinician's photograph and credentials. This one does not. A photograph is a claim you cannot check; a scoring rule published in full is one you can. We would rather be judged on the second.
So the case for trusting anything here has to rest on things you can check: where the questionnaire came from, which studies the numbers are drawn from, the exact rule applied to your answers, and what this project refuses to do. All of that is below or on the methodology page.
What it is built on
The questionnaire is not ours. It is a published screening instrument, and the scoring follows the research that validated it rather than anything we devised.
Instrument: Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) v1.1 Symptom Checklist. Developed by World Health Organization, with the Workgroup on Adult ADHD. 18 items.
- 1.Kessler RC, Adler L, Ames M, Demler O, Faraone S, Hiripi E, et al. The World Health Organization adult ADHD self-report scale (ASRS): a short screening scale for use in the general population. Psychological Medicine 2005;35(2):245–256.Where the six-item screen and its threshold come from, validated against a clinical interview.
- 2.Kessler RC, Adler LA, Gruber MJ, Sarawate CA, Spencer T, Van Brunt DL. Validity of the World Health Organization Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) Screener in a representative sample of health plan members. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 2007.A four-level classification of Part A frequency sums, reported at an AUC of approximately 0.90.
- 3.Brevik EJ, Lundervold AJ, Haavik J, Posserud MB. Validity and accuracy of the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) and the Wender Utah Rating Scale (WURS) symptom checklists in discriminating between adults with and without ADHD. Brain and Behavior 2020;10(6):e01605.An independent replication by a different group, in a clinical sample of 646 adults with ADHD against 908 controls.
The reasoning the scoring rests on
The items map to recognised criteria
The questionnaire's items were written against the diagnostic criteria clinicians use for ADHD, which is why a result is worth bringing to an appointment. It covers the symptom-frequency part of those criteria and none of the rest.
Two symptom groups, not one
ADHD symptoms have long been described in two clusters — inattentive, and hyperactive-impulsive. The subscale profile reflects that structure. It is descriptive: neither cluster has a threshold, because the instrument defines none.
Why a positive screen still is not a conclusion
This is the part most screening tools skip. Even a very specific test produces false positives when the thing it looks for is uncommon, because the people without the condition vastly outnumber those with it. That arithmetic is why a screen points toward a conversation rather than settling anything — and it does not change however good the test is.
The standard every number has to meet
Before a figure appears anywhere on this site it needs four things: a primary citation, a calculation you could reproduce, a stated reference population, and stated limitations. If any of the four is missing, the number does not ship.
That rule exists because it was broken. It is not an aspiration written in advance.
Something we got wrong, and what we did about it
An earlier draft of this project carried score bands for a 0–72 total, and population averages to compare your result against. Both came from an AI-generated research summary that was accepted without checking the underlying sources.
An external review found no primary source for any of it. The bands do not appear in the literature, and the official checklist states that no total score is derived from it at all. Everything in that group was removed.
One detail from that episode is worth keeping, because it shows how easily this goes wrong: there are published US figures for this questionnaire, and the reported average is around 2. That number counts how many items crossed their threshold — it is not a score out of 72. Comparing one against the other would produce a percentile that looks authoritative and means nothing.
We publish this because a project that has never corrected anything either has not been checked or is not saying so.
Why there are no trackers on the questionnaire
No advertising or analytics script runs on the questionnaire or on your results. Not a reduced set — none.
This is not caution for its own sake. The US Federal Trade Commission has taken action against several health companies for exactly this pattern, where answers given to a health quiz reached advertising networks through scripts running in the page.
| Company | Penalty |
|---|---|
| GoodRx | $1.5M |
| BetterHelp | $7.8M |
| Cerebral | $7.1M |
Privacy-respecting analytics tools are excluded from those pages too. The rule is about what executes on the page, not about a vendor's intentions, and a rule with exceptions for the well-behaved is not a rule.
What this project cannot claim
It is not a clinical opinion about you
The scoring comes from published research and the thresholds were set by the researchers who built and validated the questionnaire, not by us. What no published rule can do is look at your particular life. That is what an assessment is for, and this is not one.
No one is named as its author
This project is operated anonymously at present. That is a fair reason to weigh what you read here more carefully, and we would rather state it than imply an authority that does not exist.
It is not a diagnosis, and cannot become one
No questionnaire can settle this, online or on paper. The result is educational, and its only useful destination is a conversation with someone qualified to assess you.
The questions are placeholders right now
The item wording currently used on the site is placeholder text rather than the real questionnaire, while permission to reproduce it is confirmed in writing. The scoring rules are real; the questions are not yet.