About Sarah Wood

ADHD Next Step is not written by a faceless brand or a content farm. It is written by one person who has been through the confusion it describes, from the inside, for most of a lifetime.

My story, briefly

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 40s. By then I had spent decades assuming it was just how I was built: a brain that never switches off, the restlessness, the need to have several things on the go at once, and the flip side of it, hyperfocus, where I could vanish into a piece of work for hours and the rest of the day would disappear with it. I did not miss deadlines. If anything I ran hot to hit them. But I run my whole life on alarms and reminders now, because left to itself my head simply will not sit still long enough to keep track. A diagnosis did not switch any of that off, but it reframed my whole life. For years I had carried the feeling that I was "too much" for people. What the diagnosis really told me was the opposite: I was not too much, I was wired differently, and there was finally a name for it.

Getting there was its own ordeal. The UK assessment pathway is confusing, slow, and badly explained, and almost nobody hands you a map. I learned how it actually works the hard way, by living it, and later by helping my son through his own ADHD as a parent who finally understood what he was feeling.

Why I am qualified to write this

I want to be clear about what I am and what I am not. I am not a doctor, a psychiatrist, or a clinician, and nothing on this site is medical advice. What I bring is different, and for the questions this site answers, it matters: lived experience of adult ADHD across nearly five decades, the experience of going through UK assessment and diagnosis as an adult, and the experience of supporting my own child through the system.

Alongside that, I have spent more than 15 years building for the web through my company, Creative Sauce London. That is what lets me take a process that is genuinely baffling and lay it out clearly, step by step, without the jargon that makes so much ADHD information hard to use for the very people who need it.

How these guides are made

Lived experience explains the process. It does not replace the facts, so every guide is built on both.

• Anything about the UK pathway, your rights, waiting times, or Right to Choose is checked against primary sources: the NHS, NICE, and established ADHD charities, which are linked directly in each guide so you can read them yourself.
• The lived-experience parts are labelled as mine, so you always know what is fact and what is one person's account.
• Guides carry a date and are updated when the pathway or the guidance changes, because this area moves.
• Where a question is medical, I say so and point you to a professional rather than guessing.

Part of a wider network

ADHD Next Step sits alongside the other sites I run for people navigating ADHD and the systems around it. If this site answers the "what is happening to me" question, these help with what comes next:

Questions, corrections, or just want to say hello? hello@myadhdpath.co.uk.