A new survey reveals that 25% of adults in the U.S. suspect they may have undiagnosed ADHD, though only 13% have consulted a doctor.
I imagine this is because everyone has traits similar to ADHD. Not wanting to do your homework isn’t a unique feeling, but if you can literally never force yourself to do it even with serious personal consequences, you might need medication.
Diagnosis is based on severity, and in reaction to the hideous over diagnosis of ADHD in particularly very young boys at the start of the 2000s, its become very difficult for even those people with bad, medication-indicated ADHD to get diagnosed. Everyone loses and it just sucks.
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ADHD is greatly underdiagnosed for PoC and women especially. If you try and get any sort of help for this kind of thing and you’re not a white man, you’re seen as drug seeking or lying.
Remember when the Sacklers convinced everyone for years that Oxy isn’t addictive or over prescribed and definitely not causing a public health crisis?
edit I write with a phone that’s somewhat broken and autocorrect keeps fucking up so there’s bound to be lots of mistakes, don’t mind them
Yeah this seems a bit like that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4500182/
Although there are also large differences. First off, the severity of the substance. You can get super addicted to stimulants, but the dependence isn’t anywhere close as bad as with opiates. It’s not that different from chugging a few strong energy drinks. (Different effects though, affect different neurotransmitters.)
I personally believe AHDH is being overdiagnosed, but I also think there’s a condition for which those help which isn’t ADHD or ADD. I think there’s just so much stimuli nowadays to compared say 100 years or even just 30 years ago, that humanity is just struggling to keep up, biologically.
So instead of being ADHD or ADD, which are *neurodevelopmental disorders, this might be a neurocognitive fatigue of some sort that most people are experiencing, because of our environments and modern society.
Just as an off example, watching TV as a kid. You sat there and watched, at a certain time (which you already knew by heart for your shows but would find on TV-guide if you needed to check), until the commercials came on. Then you went to get a drink or a snack, or even dared to venture to other channels for a hot minute. Then go back to watch the rest of the show. It ends, and with it, programming for the day. What do? No doomscrolling or anything possible. Maybe some N64? No online games, no internet really, and rude to call people at night anyway.
You had a different sort of peaceful than now. There’s more freedom now, but… well, it’s mostly just nostalgia, but there were advantages. I’ve noticed I quite often hop on Lemmy when something boring comes up in a thing I’m watching.
Attention divided. Neurocognitive capacity exceeded. Stimulants required.
Agree mostly, but will recommend one consideration that was not obvious to me at first.
I agree that some cultures in some societies are today routinely testing human biological limits as you describe, down to the availability of neurotransmitters, what is required to sustain them at sufficient levels where they’re needed, and that it’s difficult to tell the difference between this and “actual” ADHD.
Consider however that the clinical guidelines for diagnosis depend largely on questions about how many and/or how often certain symptoms occur and, more importantly, whether they’ve become a problem for the patient (in school, at work, etc), and answers to these questions are greatly affected by whether the patient belongs to the cultures described above.
That is, the clinical boundaries are not so globally absolute, even though it’s a spectra we now recognize and can help with. Often a more flexible program or job would be the preferable prescription, but it’s an option available to few.
So these days the common complaint is that ADHD is overdiagnossd. While abuse exists, such as the online script mill in the news recently, the criticism is usually less helpful — since it implies misjudgment on the part of clinicians and parents attempting to help a child keep up, stigmatizes the ones who succeed, delays diagnosis for many others — but also is not precisely the intent. Instead they mean to question (rightly, as you did) society’s increasingly narrow definition of when someone’s best efforts are considered “enough.”
I am fully expecting that the vast majority of people are neurodivergent in some way, meaning ‘neurotypical’ is actually not typical and most people are coping. Or maybe our expectations for ‘normal’ are a bit too high.
I fully expect that the vast majority of people are neurotypical and what we call neurodivergent is just what coping looks like under the batshit insane societal structures we’ve inherited.
I think you’re both right (except maybe the vast majority part).
we can’t afford to consult a doctor …
I really must remember to book that appointm - ooh squirrel!
Honestly, I do wonder sometimes. Especially since a relative was diagnosed recently and it turned out another relative was diagnosed as a kid. Ah, well.
