Loading ADHD Self-Report Screener (ASRS v1.1)…
This is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a medical service of any kind, and nothing here is reviewed by a clinician. It is a questionnaire published by the World Health Organization, reproduced so you can fill it in for your own interest or study. ADHD is diagnosed by a qualified professional through a clinical interview, a history reaching back to childhood and ruling out the many other things that produce these same answers — anxiety, depression, thyroid problems and poor sleep among them. A questionnaire cannot do any of that, and this one does not try to.
Check the box that best describes how you have felt and conducted yourself over the past 6 months.
This Adult Self-Report Scale-V1.1 (ASRS-V1.1) Screener is intended for people aged 18 years or older.
Answered 0 of 6. The count appears once all six are filled in.
Whatever your count, if attention, focus or restlessness is causing you difficulty, that is worth raising with a doctor — and it is worth raising whether your count was nought or six. Please give the completed questionnaire to your healthcare professional during your next appointment to discuss the results.
The 6-question Adult Self-Report Scale-Version 1.1 (ASRS-V1.1) Screener is a subset of the 18-question Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale-Version 1.1 (Adult ASRS-V1.1) Symptom Checklist. © New York University and the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Reproduced under the terms published by NYU’s licensing office, which states the six-question Screener is freely available for clinical and non-clinical use, including commercial use, with attribution, and that no modification other than making an electronic version is permitted. Nothing here is reworded: all six questions, both scoring rules and the threshold sentence are exactly as published.
Kessler RC, Adler L, Ames M, 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.
The Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale was developed by the World Health Organization with a research team led by Ronald Kessler at Harvard Medical School, for the WHO World Mental Health Survey Initiative. The version here is the six-question Screener — a subset of the full eighteen-question checklist, chosen because those six carried most of the discriminating power on their own.
It was built for one job: helping somebody decide whether a longer conversation is worth having. It was never meant to end that conversation, and its own printed footer asks you to hand the completed sheet to a professional rather than act on it yourself.
This page is not medical advice and not a medical service, and nothing on it is reviewed by a clinician. Fill it in out of curiosity, to see how the instrument works, or to take the answers to an appointment.
For the first three questions, an answer of “Sometimes” falls in the shaded area and counts. For the last three it does not — only “Often” and “Very Often” do. Same questionnaire, different bar.
That asymmetry is the cleverest thing about the instrument. The first three ask about inattention — unfinished details, disorganisation, forgotten appointments — which discriminate at a lower frequency. The last three ask about restlessness, where “sometimes” describes almost everybody and only the higher frequencies carry signal. Each item’s cut sits where it best separated the groups in the calibration sample, rather than one tidy rule across all six. A version that shaded every column identically would look neater and measure worse.
These are not symmetric, and most write-ups get it wrong. A 2023 systematic review pooled every adult ADHD instrument with published accuracy figures and found negative predictive values above 96%, while positive predictive values “at best reached 61%, but most fell below 20%”.
So if little falls in the shaded area, that is genuinely informative — decent evidence that ADHD is not what is going on. If a lot does, it is much weaker. At the rate ADHD actually occurs, most people who cross the threshold on a screener do not have it. Anxiety and depression are the commonest reasons, producing nearly identical answers about concentration, unfinished tasks and restlessness. So does poor sleep, a thyroid problem, or simply having too much to do.
There is a second trap. Accuracy is usually measured against healthy comparison groups, where these instruments look excellent. Measured against people with other psychiatric conditions — precisely the people who fill in a screener — specificity collapses. One adult ADHD scale drops from 96% to 58%.
An assessment is a structured clinical interview, usually an hour or more. It establishes that symptoms were present in childhood, typically before age twelve — which is why clinicians ask for school reports or a parent’s recollection, and why a questionnaire about the last six months cannot reach that far. It establishes impairment in more than one setting, because difficulty only at work is a fact about the job. And it works the differential: the assessor is actively trying to find the other explanation first.
None of that is available to six questions answered alone by somebody who already suspects the answer — and that last part matters, because expectation shapes self-report.
Every question is word for word as published, in the published order, with the published response options and scoring rule. Nothing has been reworded to read better or shortened for the screen.
That is partly a licence condition — the terms permit an electronic version and no other modification — but it is also the only way it works. The validation figures belong to these exact sentences. A reworded item is a different item with no evidence behind it.
No. The instrument’s own wording is that four or more marks indicate symptoms “may be consistent with” adult ADHD and that it may be worth talking to a healthcare provider — a statement about whether to ask a question, not an answer to it. Most people who cross that line do not have ADHD.
It is the more informative direction — negative predictive value runs above 96% — but it is not proof. Someone with strong coping strategies, or inattention without restlessness, can answer below the threshold and still have ADHD. If it is causing you difficulty, a low count is not a reason to drop it.
No. Everything is worked out in your browser and nothing is transmitted, stored or logged. Closing the tab discards it. The print button produces a copy for you, not for us.
That is the use it was built for, and the instrument’s footer asks you to. A clinician gets more from seeing which questions you answered which way than from a total.