When people start asking about testing for dyslexia, ADHD, or autism, it’s usually because they want clarity, a name for what they’ve been living with, maybe even a roadmap for what to do next.
But here’s something important to remember:
Testing isn’t the whole picture. It’s just one piece of the puzzle.
Why We Test in the First Place
When you go through medical or psychological testing, especially through a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, those tests are meant to answer just two questions:
- Would this person benefit from medication?
- Would this person benefit from additional support in school or at work?
That’s it.
Anything else you learn like patterns, traits, or new self-understanding is a bonus.
Testing isn’t a personality test or a strengths finder. It’s a classification tool, built to see if your behaviors fit within a specific diagnostic box.
A Little Context: These Tests Are Still Young
Did you know…
- ADHD testing officially began in 1980 (last major revision: 2022)
- Dyslexia testing began in the 1970s
- Autism testing began in the 1980s
That means our “official” understanding of these neurotypes is only a few decades old and still evolving fast. Each revision can take two to five years to finalize, meaning what’s “new” might already be five years out of date.
So, no this isn’t cutting-edge neuroscience. It’s the best system we have right now, and thankfully, it keeps improving.
Let’s Talk About Those Boxes
For ADHD and autism, testing often helps determine what types of medications might be helpful.
For dyslexia, there’s no medication that teaches reading or spelling faster but testing can open doors to accommodations and assistive technology that make a world of difference.
If you’ve never explored what’s available, from text-to-speech tools to executive function coaching, I can’t encourage you enough to do some exploring. The right support system changes everything.
What Testing Is Not
Testing does not tell you who you are.
If you want to understand your personality, values, or strengths, that’s a different type of work, and just as important.
There are wonderful personality and strengths tests out there (and a few that aren’t so great). For instance, I recently tried one that gave me a mountain of data but no roadmap for growth, not helpful. The good ones help you see where to start improving and how to keep going.
Here’s one surprisingly fun option: try Lumosity for a week. It’s action-based, not self-reported, so you learn about your memory, focus, and cognitive patterns through play, not perception.
So… Should You Get Tested?
That’s the question I get all the time.
And my answer is: It depends on your goal.
If you’re an adult, you’re probably not seeking school accommodations you’re trying to understand why you work, think, or focus the way you do. Sometimes testing helps with that. Sometimes, a personality or strengths assessment gives you more practical insight.
When my clients ask about testing, we talk it through. Together, we decide if it’s the right time, the right purpose, and which kind of testing will actually bring useful clarity not just labels.
Your Turn
I’d love to hear from you:
- Have you been tested and did it help you?
- Which personality or strengths tests have given you the most valuable insights?
Let’s keep learning about ourselves in ways that bring out our best, not box us in.
Warmly,
JoyGenea
Transcription:
Okay, my neurodiverse, spicy little friends, this week the question about testing has come up. I just don’t even know, so many times. So let’s just go there and have that conversation.
Is testing the right thing to do? I don’t know. You have to ask yourself a bunch of questions. Why do you want to get tested? What is the outcome you’re hoping to receive from that testing?
And then, if you know you have, um, some memory glitches, I highly recommend you start writing that information down as you look into testing and so forth. I highly recommend you have a note on your phone or something that you can start to collect the information you want to make sure you talk about in that testing.
One of the key things I want people to remember, and what I write about in my article this week, is about the fact that there are two really big reasons that you would go to a psychiatrist to get further testing, because that is set up to do one of two things.
First, it is meant to figure out if you would qualify and benefit from—if your neurology would benefit from—medication. Okay, so we’ve got a medication bucket. And the other is if you would qualify and receive value and benefit from assistive services, or if you—or an IEP—if you are in school.
More than likely, if I’m talking to you, you might still be in college. And so yes, we will possibly look at that for that IEP. If you are out of school, that IEP comes off workplace accommodations.
Um, I’m just gonna tell you very—and right now, very heavily—a lot, and whether workplaces want to hear about doing accommodations right now is definitely a spicy little conversation we’re not gonna have here today.
So you need to figure out a few of those things. Those are just top-level kinds of questions. If you want to see about medication, then yes, you’re going to need to go down that path. If, um, you want to pursue workplace accommodations, or your workplace is looking to work with you and wants to learn more, absolutely pursue that and learn some more.
What that type of testing is not is a personality assessment. It is not a strengths finder. It is going to identify some things, and that’s a bonus out of this whole deal, but that’s not its primary goal and objective. It’s only looking for weaknesses in particular areas that would benefit from things from an IEP. And it is only looking for weaknesses where medication would bring benefit.
If during that testing you don’t fall into those kinds of categories, then really you’re just gonna kind of get some light information, but it isn’t gonna—if you don’t fall into the buckets, you don’t fall into those buckets. So it may not be exactly what you’re looking for.
So I wanted to kind of cover that, because so often—and I even caught myself in this recently—when I was doing some testing, I caught myself in the bucket of like, “Oh, this will have all this information.” You know what? It didn’t. And I was reminded of that. And I remind my clients of that, but somehow I had hoped that testing had advanced.
It’s another thing I talk about in the article. We have to remember, this type of testing was only started—ADHD was in the 80s, um, dyslexia was in the mid-70s, and then autism was only—they only started testing for that in some manner in the 80s. And those tests continuously evolve. They evolve slowly, and we need to understand that.
In a time when we’re so used to information and systems evolving quickly around us, this lives in a medical system, and it does not, because it has standards—which is great—it moves slowly. So typically, um, shifts like that are a two- to five-year process before anything moves and becomes something different. And you just need to keep that in mind.
So they’re not, um—I can share with you something that came out of my test results, something I’ve read off of other people’s results recently—is that when it talks about adaptive tools, it in no way considers AI. AI wasn’t around when these tests were last updated. Um, it doesn’t even encourage web searching and those types of things. Like, it blows my mind what is not recommended in there.
So definitely consider it a place you’re going and some information that you can use to start further conversations. You can pursue further information and do some of your own research. Again, it’s a great tool. When people come to me with that, it helps us know a bunch of things, and then we can apply that, do some more research, and move it forward from there.
So that’s what I’m saying about professional, um, psychological testing. It has its place. Understand its place. Pursue it when you want things within that place, but recognize, like most things, it has limitations. And I want to keep your expectations in check for some of that.
I am so glad we’ve had this conversation. I look forward to hearing your comments. I wanna hear about testing you’ve had and success that you’ve had with it, or impressions that did not feel as successful. I would also love to hear about personality tests that you like and recommend.
One of the hidden bonuses that I have found when clients are like, “Well, is my memory declining? I’m not sure where—it’s not that great.” I’m like, “You know what? Pay for a year subscription of Lumosity.” The game—there’s a hint on my memory—the brain game app that they have. You can also play it on your computer.
It actually, in playing those games, it is continuously testing you, and it is play testing, so it’s real-time and in the moment. One of the things I’ve done with it is I test out my memory. There are certain games that are very memory-based, and I test out my memory at different parts of the day. I did that for a month, and I actually—that was part of how I recognized when my memory was at its best, when it retained information better.
And so now I actually do my workday around some of the information that I pulled from that, which was simple and easy and affordable. So, there’s a variety of ways to gain the information you’re looking for, but find it possibly from a different resource or service.
I am JoyGenea. I am here to help unconventional thinkers and people with neurodiversity—dyslexia, ADHD, autism—find incredible results in their life by shifting some small things that may be getting in their way. Bye now.