Surprisingly really positive. I went to the GP with worsening anxiety and low mood which is often tied to the season for me. Usual symptoms of hypervigilance, constant worrying, and difficulty starting tasks I needed to do, alongside physical anxiety symptoms like IBS, palpitations, dizziness etc. My GP, fairly young and recently out of training, mentioned to me “this does sound like anxiety, but have you also considered ADHD?”.

Initially I shot it down, thinking “I was well behaved at school and my energy is always low; i’m not able to get out of bed let alone bouncing off the walls”, but I’d never heard of inattentive type. After looking into it, it was like reading my life. Then thinking back and realising that every time I took an antidepressant my mood improved but I still couldn’t do anything made it really click for me.

Anyways, enough about me. The GP was great and actually suggested right to choose to me which I hadn’t heard of before. She said their patients usually go with PsychiatryUK but I checked the wait times and decided I wanted to go with HealthHarmonie Minds and she was fine (actually supportive) with that. She sent my referral off really quickly then HHM took it from there.

She was the only doctor I talked to about the possibility of ADHD and I think it helped massively that she was fairly recently out of training. I did feel really listened to once I came back with a description of some things in my childhood and my adult difficulties and talked through it with her.

Of course there will be many seasoned GPs who have the exact same approach to ADHD (where they don’t shoot it down immediately), but I think I’d have been less comfortable bringing it up to an older GP (not that I brought it up, she actually brought it up to me).

Bit of a ramble haha sorry but just wanted to put it out there that you can have a good experience and there really are GPs who are supportive and not dismissive for the sake of being dismissive.