The Invisible ADHD Profile
A Guide for Clinicians and the Women They Serve

Description

ADHD in adult women and AFAB individuals is rarely missed because it is subtle. It is missed because it is managed.

Many arrive in adulthood having learned to compensate through vigilance, relational over-functioning, exhaustive self-monitoring, and chronic self-correction. By the time they present for assessment, what is visible is not impulsivity or disruption, but exhaustion, collapse, and a profound erosion of trust in their own functioning.

The Invisible ADHD Profile begins with a familiar but often unspoken experience: functioning that appears intact from the outside while requiring relentless internal effort to sustain. Many adults live for years compensating through vigilance, self-monitoring, emotional restraint, and constant cognitive recalibration, long after the cost of doing so has become unsustainable. What eventually brings them to assessment is rarely disruption or impulsivity, but exhaustion, collapse, and a growing sense that maintaining everyday life requires more effort than it should.

From this starting point, the book introduces a structured, neuroaffirming framework for understanding ADHD as it presents internally across adulthood, through masking rather than misconduct, hyper-regulation rather than hyperactivity, and sustained cognitive strain rather than overt behavioural disruption. Rather than reducing ADHD to a checklist of symptoms, the text conceptualises it as a patterned neurodevelopmental profile shaped by cognitive variability, emotional over-control, hormonal modulation, and context-dependent functioning over time.

Grounded in contemporary assessment practice and informed by qualitative clinical interviews, pattern-based analysis, and synthesis of neurodivergent adult narratives, the book supports rigorous interpretive reasoning while centring developmental context, ethical formulation, and the long-term consequences of invisibility. It is intended to sit alongside formal assessment processes, offering clinicians and informed readers alike a language for internal experiences that standard diagnostic models frequently fail to capture.

This volume forms part of a connected three-book series published by NPI Press examining neurodevelopmental strain, identity formation, and post-burnout reconstruction in neurodivergent adults.

Intended Audience

• Psychologists, neuropsychologists, and prescribing clinicians
• Therapists and advanced practitioners working with adult neurodevelopmental profiles
• Graduate-level trainees in assessment and applied neurodevelopmental practice
• Neurodivergent adults, particularly women and AFAB individuals, seeking language and validation for internally managed ADHD presentations
• Readers interested in the intersection of assessment, identity, masking, and adult development

Series Information

The Invisible ADHD Profile is the first volume in a three-part clinical and conceptual series:

• The Invisible ADHD Profile
• The Myth of the Strong One
  Neurodivergent Women, The Shadow Mother, and the Path from Martyrdom to Sovereignty (Spring 2026)
• After Functioning
  Reclaiming Agency After Neurodevelopmental Burnout] (Summer 2026)
  

Each volume may be read independently, while together forming a coherent framework for understanding masked neurodevelopmental profiles across adulthood.