Young Adults at Lightfull (18–25)
You’re somewhere between leaving home and figuring out who you are without the people who used to do the figuring for you. School worked, mostly, until it didn’t. Or it stopped working a while ago and you’ve been holding it together with caffeine, late nights, and the suspicion that everyone else got an instruction manual you never received.
Maybe you’re here because something tipped over recently, a deadline you couldn’t recover from, a relationship that ended in a way that surprised you, a panic attack in the library, the third week in a row you’ve stayed in bed past noon. Or maybe nothing tipped over. Maybe you’re just done pretending the way you live is the way it has to be.
I work with neurodivergent young adults across the lifespan. I’m ADHD myself. The work I do best at this age is helping you make sense of what’s been hard, what’s been quietly working, and what comes next.
What I commonly see at this age.
The 18–25 cohort often arrives self-referring, no one made the appointment for you, no parent is in the room, you’ve been wondering for years and finally did the thing. Some patterns I see often:
| Late-noticed ADHD. | You compensated through school by being smart, by working twice as hard as classmates, or by hyperfocusing on what you loved and ignoring everything else. University or your first job removed the scaffolding and the strategies stopped working. You’re now wondering if this has been going on the whole time. |
|---|---|
| Anxiety that’s been there since childhood. | You learned to manage it before you knew it had a name. It cost you things, sleep, friendships, willingness to try certain things. You want to know what to call it, and what would actually help. |
| OCD that no one ever recognised. | Mental compulsions, scrupulosity, relationship doubt, harm intrusions you’ve been too ashamed to mention. Not the handwashing version Hollywood taught everyone to expect. |
| Depression after a transition. | Starting university, finishing university, moving out, moving back. The structure that held the hard feelings in place is gone, and you’re not sure what’s underneath. |
| Decision paralysis. | You can analyse anything except your own next step. The number of options feels like a feature of being young, but it doesn’t feel like one when you’re in it. |
| Identity questions you can’t quite name. | Who you are if you stop performing the role you’ve been performing. What you actually want, separate from what got you praise. Whether the way your mind works is a problem or a profile. |
Sometimes one of these is dominant; often two or three are tangled together. A careful assessment is how we find out which is which.
If you’ve been wondering whether you have ADHD.
The most common version of this story I hear: you were a “good kid” who did well enough in school that no one looked closer. The diagnosis criteria as they were applied when you were a child weren’t designed to catch you, you weren’t disruptive, your grades were fine, you mostly turned in the work eventually. Now the demands have changed, and the strategies that hid the difficulty have stopped scaling.
I do adult ADHD assessment without requiring parental collateral, because by 18–25, your own developmental memory and current functioning are the most informative sources, and many young adults don’t have access to a parent who can speak to early childhood the way the older diagnostic literature assumed. The page on adult ADHD assessment walks through what that looks like.
If anxiety or OCD is the louder thing.
Anxiety in young adults often shows up as decision paralysis, perfectionism, social anxiety that’s been quietly steering choices since secondary school, sleep disruption, and physical symptoms that feel new but trace back further than you’d think.
OCD at this age often shows up not as visible rituals but as mental compulsions, checking, replaying, mentally undoing, asking for reassurance, ruminating on whether you’re a good person or a bad person or whether you really love your partner. A careful clinical interview is what catches these, because brief screeners often miss them.
Both anxiety and OCD assessment and CBT and ERP-based therapy are available. If you want to look at the screeners I commonly use before deciding anything, the screening tools page has them.
| What you’re calling a quarter-life crisis | What it might also be |
|---|---|
| Can’t pick a major, can’t pick a job, can’t pick a city | Decision paralysis layered with ADHD’s working-memory load |
| Sleep schedule that’s drifted, mood that’s drifted | Delayed sleep phase common with ADHD; mood often the second thing |
| Friend group thinning out, replaced by the phone | Dopamine-seeking + social anxiety + life transition combined |
| The first job/grad school where masking stopped working | Exactly when undiagnosed ADHD tends to surface, when scaffolding falls away |
What working together looks like.
The first session is up to two hours. We spend it understanding what you’re carrying, what you’ve already tried, what’s working that you might not be giving yourself credit for, and what the next useful step is. For some people that next step is an assessment. For some it’s starting therapy. For some it’s a referral to a psychiatrist for a medication conversation, which I can coordinate.
Follow-up sessions are 60 to 90 minutes, depending on what the work needs that day. I keep a small caseload by design and a thirty-minute stagger between clients, so I can write notes and you never run into whoever came before you.
If we agree on a treatment plan, the work I do is evidence-based, exposure-based CBT for anxiety and OCD, structured behavioural and cognitive work for ADHD-related executive function challenges, and skills work where the literature supports it. None of these are pre-packaged programmes. They get adapted to what you actually need.
Who I’m not the right person for.
If your primary concern is an active eating disorder, I’ll route you to someone better placed for that work. If you’re in acute crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the Samaritans of Singapore (1767, 24-hour) or IMH’s emergency service (6389 2222), and we can talk after you’re safe. If what you’re carrying is more about adjustment, life-stage uncertainty, or relational difficulty without a neurodivergent or anxiety/OCD/mood layer, a generalist therapist who doesn’t specialise in ND will likely serve you well.
I’m specific about who I work with, because I’d rather you find the right person than spend money on a fit that isn’t quite there. The clinical fit page has more on who I do and don’t take on.
| What | How long | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 15-minute meet & greet | 15 min | Free |
| First consultation | Usually up to two hours | SGD 700 |
| Full ADHD assessment | 2–3 sessions + collateral input where helpful | Package pricing, see /fees/ |
| Feedback session | ~90 min, written report walked through together | Included in assessment package |
| Ongoing therapy | 60–90 min per session | SGD 350/hr, pro-rated |
What this costs.
| First consultation: | typically SGD 700 (usually up to two hours). This is where the conversation starts. Payment is due before each session. |
|---|---|
| Follow-ups: | SGD 350 per hour, pro-rated. Sixty minutes is SGD 350. Ninety minutes is SGD 525. |
| Assessments: | Adult anxiety or OCD assessment from SGD 3,500. Comprehensive ADHD or psychometric assessment from SGD 3,500. Full fee details are on the Fees page. |
| Not sure yet? | Book a free 15-minute Meet & Greet to ask questions before committing. Book here. |
If you’re a young adult man reading this.
Some of what I notice in this cohort is specific to being a man at this age, the assumption that needing help is a personal failure, the difficulty naming feelings without immediately filing them under “weakness,” the way “I’m fine” stops being convincing even to yourself. I’ve written more on that on the page for the men reading this. None of it changes the work; it just changes the frame I sometimes need to use to get the work started.
If you’re new to Singapore, or moved back recently.
A meaningful share of the young adults I see are between countries, international students, third-culture kids who returned for university or work, expats whose parents brought them here at fifteen and now they’re twenty-three and figuring out what they want. The disorientation of that transition is real, and it’s often tangled with whatever else is going on. The page for international clients has more on the practical side. The clinical work doesn’t change.
If you’re a parent who landed on this page.
You probably found this looking for ways to help an adult child who’s struggling. The most useful thing I can tell you is that at this age, the work has to be theirs. I won’t take a referral from a parent for an adult; the appointment has to come from the young adult. What you can do is share this page, or the screening tools page, and let them decide whether to reach out. The parent page has more on supporting a young adult without taking the work over for them.
If you’ve read this far and something landed, the next step is small: book a Meet & Greet. Fifteen minutes, free, no pressure to continue. Book here.
If you’re not sure whether what you’re carrying is ADHD, anxiety, mood, or just life-being-a-lot right now, start here. I’ll meet you wherever you are.
A few free screeners
Self-completed, instantly scored, no email required. They are a starting point for a conversation, not a diagnosis.
- ASRS-v1.1 (full 18-item), self-screen for ADHD.
- AQ-10, first-pass adult autism screen.
- PHQ-9 + GAD-7, mood and anxiety check-in.