They make it so easy. NHS waiting lists can be years long. I was on a "9 month" waiting list for nearly a year. Since following the instructions here it has been 2 and a half weeks and my first appointment is about to be booked.
As long as your GP isn't an ass and accepts that your self-assessment form and any evidence you have is enough to justify an assessment, you will be able to get an appointment. You just give forms/letters to your GP and Psychiatry UK do the rest - even chasing payments from your CCG.
In my experience, GPs often aren't familiar with how Right to Choose works or confuse it with funding requests, which the CCG will likely decline. There is a letter you can print on the page I linked that outlines Right to Choose for the GP. I also edited mine to clear up that it wasn't a funding request and didn't require the same protocols.
Once your GP has sent your referral to P-UK, they will contact you. You then sign up to their portal where they will send you forms to be filled in. 3 are for you and one is an "informant form" for someone who knows you well. This is the only real difficult part because you might not have someone who knows you well enough/believes that you have it/ you could be like me and know your parents would just dismiss whatever you have to say about it.
Fortunately for me my gf is supportive and was willing to do it, I also asked P-UK if that was appropriate, they said "The Informant Report is ideally completed by someone who knows you well and has for some time." It's probably fine for say, a close friend who has known you for at least a few years and at least somewhat understands ADHD and knows you want to get diagnosed. (Also it's very funny comparing what they notice about your symptoms to what you notice)
Can somebody explain to me how pharmaceutical grade uppers are supposed to treat hyperactivity? I never grasped that one
Not a clue, but I notice that stimulants in general affect me totally differently than other people. I feel calmer and more focused - even sleepy sometimes - on every stimulant I've tried. I can legit sleep after a fat line of coke or mdma
Stimulants give ADHD people a big boost in executive function because the ADHD brain requires a lot of stimulation to regulate attention. The "hyperactivity" in question is actually an inability to stick to one task.
To start with, I'm not a neuroscientist, so if I've gotten something wrong please correct me, but afaik:
ADHD is caused by a deficiency in neurotransmitters and/or neuroreceptors in the brain, specifically in relation to the neurotransmitter dopamine. This means that ADHD brains aren't able to process as much dopamine per any given interaction that would release it as a normal brain, which lead to a couple problems. First is that not being able to process as much dopamine as is needed causes a lot of signals within the brain to become lost, obviously leading to problems with focus, memory etc. The other problems comes from the fact that dopamine functions as a reward/pleasure signal. Obviously the brain needs a delicate chemical balance to maintain it's ability to function correctly, so not being able to take in a much dopamine is going to throw off that balance. Since the brain is taking in less than the required amount of dopamine each time it's released, it tries to compensate by doing more things that release dopamine, so that the total dopamine intake is still within the correct limits overall, which is what produces things like hyperactive behaviors and/or excessive daydreaming. It's essential the brain "manually" stimulating itself into the correct chemical balance.
Where the stimulants come in is that they supercharge dopamine production. This solves the first problem because now there's so much dopamine being produced that even if a lot of it is still getting lost, the brain is still getting the correct signals through sheer numbers. It also solves the second problem by passively producing the kind of necessary stimulation that the brain could only produce manually before through actions like daydreaming or fidgeting.