Self diagnosed? Definitely
Actually, properly diagnosed? Probably underdiagnosed actually. Friend of mine had to go through a lot of pricey hoops just to get tested in a reputable place.
It’s definitely under diagnosed. 5% of the world population is thought to have ADHD. I know plenty of people around me that show serious signs of it and they have no idea. Granted I’m not a psychiatrist, but I live with an ADHD person and the similarities are striking.
Absolutely not, the tricky thing about ADHD is that it’s mostly lots of small things that everyone has or does. (Bad short term memory, executive dysfunction, rejection sensitivity, inattention, difficulty to focus, etc). People with ADHD have a lot of them all at once and that’s the problem. It’s a spectrum with a threshold of issues to have at once to be considered ADHD. That’s why it’s not easy to diagnose, it can vary wildly from person to person.
This feels like the correct answer.
The amount of people I go on a date with and tell them I’m ADHD and they follow with, “me too” when they are obviously not, is crushing. I’m glad my learning disability is fun to cosplay for you. The juxtaposition of people I meet in wild and tell them I’m ADHD and they are like, “Oh what’s that like?” as they’re looking for the lost keys in their left hand or leg stemming, feels… curious.
If I could snap my fingers and not have ADHD I’d do it. People think ADHD is just being scatterbrained and hyperactive and think its at best quirky and at worst annoying but a lot of the hallmarks of ADHD cause a lot of suffering just existing in society. eg. executive dysfunction/impulsivity, emotion dysregulation (seemingly feels like your emotions are harder to control which is part of the rejection sensitivity), difficulty building and maintaining relationships, difficulty holding jobs, being unable to quiet your thoughts late at night (80% of us have insomnia/delayed sleep patterns to one extent or another) and being very prone to boredom that can often feel almost physically painful. And of course, society treats you as if your personality is shit because what people see is someone forgetting things, making bad snap decisions and generally being annoying. So a lot of us dont think highly of ourselves because thats often how we are conditioned. To think we are lazy, uncaring, annoying and thoughtless/impulsive.
I’ve also got ADHD, so I understand the struggle. But personally I think ADHD has a lot of upsides as well. People with ADHD are often really fun to be around, they have often really different perspectives on the world and see things that other people don’t, and tend to take everything in their stride. ADHD people in my experience are better at out-of-the-box thinking, handling stressful and chaotic situations, and extremely capable when they’re interested in something.
The reason that ADHD feels debilitating is because capitalist society forces us to conform with neurotypical behaviour, because conformity is more important than outcomes. If ADHD people were allowed to work their to own schedules, and allowed to focus mainly on tasks which interest them and offload things that they find boring/tedious, it would go a long way towards getting the best out of people with ADHD. If it’s handled well, they can easily outperform neurotypical coworkers, it’s just very much about harnessing the chaotic energy that we have.
god that sucks to hear.
I’m alarmed at the amount of people I met, mostly women, who are like upset when I tell them I’m not autistic. It’s like they want me to be or something. They insisted I needed to get tested to be sure.
Like what is with these people wanting this to be common and wanting to get people join in like its a club? It’s a genetic trait. You either have it or you don’t I thought.
If multiple people seem surprised that you’re not autistic and encourage you to seek diagnosis, I dunno, maybe there’s something there? Are you a woman yourself?
Other people see you differently than you see yourself. And you wouldn’t necessarily realize you were part of the autism tribe because as far as you were concerned, everyone is in the same tribe as you. You wouldn’t really know what it was like to experience things with a different tribe’s mental wiring. Just like I didn’t really figure out that my brain literally worked differently than 95+% of the population (ADHD) until I was very thoroughly an adult.
Probably over diagnosed by people self-diagnosing. Probably significantly under diagnosed officially/clinically.
And the above is true for a LOT of conditions, not just ADHD.
My daughter has a learning disability. Dyslexia and some weird kind of error with certain fine motor skills. The diagnosis from everyone? ADHD-put her on drugs. What drugs would you like? If one drugs doesn’t fix her, we’ll try two drugs.
Thank god my wife and I resisted. Nobody could explain what was going on and how drugs would fix it. I ain’t gonna lie, her elementary school days were rough. But now, straight A college student in her junior year.
I’m sure there are people looking for it, but my experience was default diagnosis by doctors and schools pushing adhd onto kids where it wasn’t appropriate.
There’s a very vague term called NLD or Neurological Learning Disorder with which I was diagnosed at the time. Iirc a big part of it is issues with fine motor skills because of bad communication between the two brain halves. Also gets misdiagnosed as ADHD quite often.
I was diagnosed with Dyspraxia as a kid which was a wildly vague fine motor skills disorder that made me near unintelligible prior to speech therapy. I still have issues slurring words from time to time, but it’s not significant.
I don’t think anyone knew what was going on with me tbh. But I def have ADHD, and there’s suspicion I’m autistic as well. I’m working on getting a neuropsych eval done now to try and understand better.
Doctors are idiots when it comes to this stuff. ADHD should be diagnosed by a psychologist, just like any other neurodivergence.
Psychologists can only really diagnose mood disorders, not psychiatric conditions. Because ADHD is a psychiatric disorder, psychologists absolutely should NOT be diagnosing it. If they suspect ADHD in a client, their job is to refer the client to a psychiatrist who is able to make such a diagnosis and prescribe medicine to manage it.
Source: bachelor’s degree in psychology
ADHD isn’t particularly hard to diagnose most of the time. If we’re going to wait for psychologists in every bog standard case, good luck with the upcoming twelve year waiting list to get your kid some help.
People just need to know when to identify confounders and refer out. Takes a few good training seminars.
I’ve noticed this too. Even people telling me i have OCD because i sort certain things in certain ways. (i do NOT have OCD. I just can’t stand some things if they are not in my order.) But people are very quick to diagnose other’s. wich is okay imo as long as there is reason to believe so, so that you can go to the doctor and check wether that’s true. Problem is people don’t know that they don’t understand the illness/disability/etc. à la dunning krüger effect.
I don’t have numbers but my personal experiences tends to show me what it’s over diagnosed, at least in California. Got many people around me that are diagnosed, with meds, and they take it as part of their identity, bringing it up all the time.
My kid talked to a therapist a few times for some minor anger issues, and he’s already talking about getting him diagnosed for ADHD. He’s the top student in his class, can focus for hours building anything he wants, is outgoing, and gets along with all his friends. He just has a few emotional outbursts at home, which don’t affect his functionality or happiness. I don’t understand the point of a diagnosis. It feels like a label would just follow him around and box him in, so we decided not to pursue.
My kid talked to a therapist a few times for some minor anger issues, and he’s already talking about getting him diagnosed for ADHD. He’s the top student in his class, can focus for hours building anything he wants, is outgoing, and gets along with all his friends. He just has a few emotional outbursts at home, which don’t affect his functionality or happiness.
So…your child is exhibiting symptoms of being high-functioning ADHD, according to their therapist?..
I don’t understand the point of a diagnosis. It feels like a label would just follow him around and box him in, so we decided not to pursue.
The point of a diagnosis is to allow them to get help with things that are challenging for people with ADHD. It’s not something that is going to do them any harm or cause them to be discriminated against, contrary, if it is a correct diagnosis, it can be of great help. I did but get an official diagnosis until I was in my 30s and had a very similar experience in childhood, with my parents but moving forward with diagnosis. Not having access to resources when I was younger caused measurable harm and issues that I could have otherwise avoided.
Would you mind elaborating? Understanding what your issues where that were addressed by help could help see what I’m misunderstansing. I obviously want to do what’s best for my child.
“He’s the top student in his class”
With studying, or without?
In my experience, being top of the class without working for it is a great way to wind up crashing and burning as soon as one gets to college and suddenly isn’t the smartest in the room
He’s the top student in his class oh no. He’s gifted? Get ready for potential burn out in teen years or college years. These problems can change over time, and its impossible to predict how these conditions will play out, but I’d like to warn a parent your kid might need special attention / support considerations apart from a neurotypical child.
As medicine advances, most diseases or conditions will be diagnosed more often. With the extreme increase in technology in the past 50+ years I wouldn’t say that cancer is being over diagnosed just because we can find it better. While mental health science is arguably far behind traditional medicine, I wouldn’t say that ADHD as a whole is over diagnosed. Is it probable that there are some bad doctors that will simply hand wave kids away with an ADHD diagnosis? Sure but those cases are far less common than you might think. As someone with ADHD I have seen the sentiment that it is over diagnosed arise in my life as people claiming that what I suffer from isn’t real and I need to pay attention better, or that I’m just “abusing the Adderall to get ahead in life.” So no I don’t think it is over diagnosed and people around the world need to have a better understanding of how mental illness truly affects the people that suffer.
I’ve always been fascinated how ADHD is the disorder that gets singled out for over diagnosis but not ASD.
AFAIK there’s not much in the way of pharma treatments for ASD so public policy couldn’t care less about it.
There’s money to be made in demonizing ADHD.
Forgive my naivety, how do you get rich off demonising adhd? It would stand to reason that bucks are made by over diagnosing and selling superfluous treatment, what would I sell you after adhd is demonised?
You gotta think diabolically.
My psychiatrist here in Australia cautioned me when doing online research into different ADHD medications to check the country of origin and avoid American sources where possible, as there is a huge anti-drug bias in US public and medical literature, and to stick to European/Australasian/other resources for more accurate information on mechanism of action and potential side-effects.
Boy, he was not wrong. If you go on many American websites that talk about the pros and cons of one stimulant or another, it’ll overemphasise its propensity towards abuse and extensively list the side effects without bothering to explain how the drug actually works in the body.
You’ll think it’s an unbiased source, at first, because the website itself only seem to contain basic drug information (at a cursory glance) only to scroll to the bottom and find that the website is owned/sponsored by a rehab facility, of all places.
It’d seem like there’s money to be made off of dx and prescribing ADHD meds, but we all know how fucking hard it is to dx’d in the first place, let alone prescribed something that works. It’s not wildly profitable to prescribe drugs with heavy federal restrictions on it.
What is profitable, however, is to give someone 6 other psychiatric medications to treat ongoing mental health issues from undiagnosed ADHD, and the half dozen other co-morbid issues like substance abuse disorders, PTSD, anxiety/depression, bipolar disorders, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and so on- none of which you’ll get much traction in treating without also addressing ADHD, and some of which may be misdiagnosed or more effectively treated when identifying the core disorder.
Why treat 1 condition when you can treat 7 ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Better yet, you can do that in an inpatient facility that their insurance can pay for, where you can convince them that their substance abuse issues are due to moral failing rather than an attempt at self-medicating a (widely speaking) treatable disorder, yet hypocritically prescribe them a cocktail of other psychiatric medications for their “moral failing”.
That being said, I’m not saying all rehab facilities are bad or operate in this manner, but it is just one of many ways that the medical and pharmaceutical industry inadvertently or directly discourages appropriate ADHD treatment, additionally fuelled by the government’s bigotry-fuelled war on drugs.
The scientific, peer-reviewed answer is that it is significantly under-diagnosed in adults as well as in those AFAB of all ages. Most sources say up to 80% of adults with ADHD are undiagnosed and/or untreated.
May I have this source? Being genuine here, I don’t doubt this but I may use it to show people and maybe put a bug in their ear to get diagnosed.
I found these citations in a paper on the first page of Google. I apologize but I have not verified them.
Fayyad J, De Graaf R, Kessler R, et al. Cross-national prevalence and correlates of adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Br J Psychiatry. 2007;190(5):402–409.
Retz W, Retz-Junginger P, Thome J, et al. Pharmacological treatment of adult ADHD in Europe. World J Biol Psychiatry. 2011;12(suppl 1):89–94.
Newcorn JH, Weiss M, Stein MA. The complexity of ADHD: diagnosis and treatment of the adult patient with comorbidities. CNS Spectr. 2007;12(suppl 12):1–14. quiz 15–16.
I agree with you.
I think argueing if adhd might be over or under diagnosed makes adulds feel even more ashamed.
I also don’t like blaming self diagnosis. Women having a hard time finding professionell help, cause they never fit into stereotypical adhd behaivor. They seen as overreacting and emotional.
I think the reason so many people are diagnosed with ADHD is related to how our society looks like.
I wouldn’t even consider it an illness or defect. Our brains are just wired differently.
In the past, this would have been beneficial for the survival of your tribe. But if you live in a modern city and work in an office, it makes you unable to deal with the challenges you normally face.
Even just 30 years ago, the pressure to work efficiently and the hustle culture were much less pronounced than today.
Whenever I am out in nature hiking, hunting or kayaking, I don’t have any issues motivating myself and don’t feel like anything is wrong with me.
But in daily life, I barely function without meds.
I see this rhetoric a lot and I really dislike it and find it actively harmful to people with ADHD.
ADHD, at least mine, would absolutely still be a mental illness outside of modern society. My doesn’t care if I’m remembering where I put down my phone or where I put down my sandwich, I still misplace them either way. At work being without my medication makes it difficult to keep track of my responsibilities. At home it makes it difficult to keep track of doing laundry, washing dishes, cleaning the house. You don’t suddenly lose all responsibilities and idle tasks without a modern society, your responsibilities and tasks just become different. And my ADHD couldn’t give two shits what those responsibilities and idle tasks are, I’m going to struggle with them either way without medication.
Dismissing ADHD as not a mental illness but a symptom of modern society is not only incorrect at it’s most basic level, it also implies that people like me could be “normal” IF “x, y, or z” conditions were met. That idea is just blatantly untrue and just perpetuates the dismissive and uncompromising stance that many people take towards individuals with ADHD.
