Hey y’all,
There’s a research finding from a journal called European Psychiatry that I want to put in front of you because I think it changes the conversation a lot of women in their thirties and forties are having with themselves alone.
A team of researchers trained a machine-learning model on routine medical records. The model learned to identify adults who were likely to be diagnosed with ADHD — months before the formal diagnosis happened. The model didn’t read a personal essay or interview the patient; it looked at the pattern of what showed up across a series of 15-minute visits over a period of years.
I want to be careful about what this means and what it doesn’t mean. The AI is a predictive tool, not a diagnostic tool. It flags people whose records match the pattern of those who eventually got diagnosed. Whether the diagnosis is correct still requires a real assessment by a real clinician. But I think the flag itself is the biggest news.
Here’s why I think this matters to you.
Adult ADHD in women is one of the most under-diagnosed things in medicine (70-80% of women diagnosed with ADHD didn’t receive a diagnosis until adulthood). And the symptoms in adult women just happen to look like the things women are told they should feel anyway: exhausted, never quite caught up, managing a million things… and even the stereotype of a flighty/ditzy or agitated woman.
Those symptoms (fatigued, brain fog, scattered, agitated, forgetful, overwhelmed, etc.) are dismissed in a 15-minute primary care appointment as “it’s anxiety,” “have you tried meditation,” “let’s talk about your sleep,” or “have you tried losing weight.” They rarely get the response, “Let me refer you to someone who can assess this.”
This is the gap the model is finding. The model doesn’t know you’re a woman in your forties whose mother told her that everyone feels this way. The model doesn’t know that you are good at your job and so you have learned to compensate and mask. The model doesn’t have the bias of a 15-minute appointment in which you only mention the most acceptable version of what’s going on. The model is looking at a longer record than any single appointment can hold, and it is matching patterns the clinician’s schedule didn’t leave time to see.
What I want you to do with this — if you’ve been wondering for a while whether the way you’ve been struggling has a name — is not to chase the model. The model lives in a research paper, not at your doctor’s office. You can’t ask for the score, unfortunately.
What you can do is take the finding as permission. Permission to ask the question out loud. Permission to call a clinician who does adult ADHD assessments — not your primary, the kind of clinician this is the actual job of — and to describe what your life has actually been like, not the version of it you’ve been able to function inside.
I’m not making a diagnosis from a newsletter. The thing I’m pointing at is that the system has been missing this in women like me and you for decades, yet apparently even a relatively simple pattern-matching tool can see it. If a model trained on routine records can flag the pattern, your own description of your life — given to the right clinician — is a stronger signal than anything the model has.
The permission is no longer just from a stranger on the internet. It’s from a research model that sees the pattern faster than the average doctor’s appointment is built to detect it.
A question for you:
When did you first wonder if the way you’ve been struggling has a name?
— Rachel
P.S. — PsyPost has the lay summary; the paper itself is in European Psychiatry. Search the journal for “predictive model adult ADHD electronic health records 2026” if you want the primary source.
