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.
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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.
“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
Please, diagnose your kid even if you think he doesn’t have ADHD
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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.
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?
They’re selling another product.
Conmen like Tate and their ilk would love to sell you on the idea that Adderall is evil.
You’re just abusing adderal to get on par with NTs
Thinking about disgnosis reminds me of some of my experiences on LSD.
Several times I had these relevatory moments where the ephemeral nature of the universe and its gradual slipping into entropy over time became intimately tangible. When this would happen, I’d usually find it terrifying. I’d feel like the world was falling apart around me, because it literally always is.
But in these moments, I was so focused on seeing that entropy in a way that felt new that it would take some time to realize it had always been this way. It seemed like the end of the world, but the reality was that it was just a normal day and I was examining aspects of my world that I didn’t normally and making connections. That’s all.
Some of those connections were silly psychedelic-fueled nonsense, with whatever meaning that might lie beneath lost in some cryptic and half-undestood internal symbolism, while others were perhaps a bit more useful, but none of them were new.
To me, though, these revelations felt apocalyptic in the moment, and of dire urgency. It felt as though the realization itself presented a dire threat, as if it itself was entropy, but in reality the only thing that had changed was my awareness.
Diagnosis, to me, is a similar beast. We’re attempting to peel back the falsely self-protective veil of ignorance about our own internal workings, and we see these things as though they were new and should somehow define us. The reality is, though, that we’re just learning how to classify and examine what was already there. We’re not describing something different from what we might have assumed otherwise, we’re looking at the guts of what’s made us who we are.
For some people making those connections may lead to things that can help improve their lives. For others it can be a way to divorce a person from themselves. We’re taking the huge variety of human experience and trying to pigeonhole it just based on people that share various sets of common characteristics that some of them have found difficult to cope with or to make work with the expectations of their social context. If we’re focused on mental health only in terms of disfunction, that’s all we’re going to see when we start classifying it.
Definitely not in women - the opposite is true.
I mentioned my adhd diagnosis in a post earlier today so you may be the same inquirer. Regardless here’s a little bit more of my story.
I was born in 1986 and not diagnosed with ADHD until 2021 (I was 35). I didn’t do anything about about my diagnosis until 2023 when my career started going off the rails. I sometimes fantasize about what my career would have been like if I’d been diagnosed (and acted on the diagnosis) 15 years ago when I started to suspect something was up.
For me it mostly manifests as struggles to initiate tasks unless they’re interesting or urgent.
Is it over diagnosed? Maybe. Our brains evolved to hunt, collect berries, and work collaboratively with our clan. If we struggle do so TPS reports so that shareholders know how their incomprehensible riches are being used, is it fair to call that a mental disorder?
Is paying money to the pharma-man so we can be a better money machine for your bosses shareholders kinda fucked up? Yes.
But will it also help me better support the things I value? My family? My community? My interests? Yes.
I think if you want to know if ADHD is over diagnosed you need a scholarly resource, not an internet forum.
The other thing that makes it tough is that we don’t really have a good grasp of what it is. At least, last i checked.
Like, are we just pathologizing people on this or the other side of a fuzzy threshold of executive function? Or is there a population that really is physiologically/genetically different? Either way, is there something wrong with society where people within a previously normal range of executive function are now unable to keep up?
Probably under diagnosed with people who actually have it.
