It's refreshing to see more information identifying ADHD beyond the behaviors and traits shown on the surface. I've always felt my brain is incapable of doing things a NT can do effortlessly and it's hard to live in a world that thinks "everyone has a little ADHD. You just need to try to focus more."
The "everyone is a little ADHD" is particularly annoying because it's basically true but misses the problem. Everyone does get distracted at times. But people with ADHD have it to a much worse degree.
It's like height. Everyone has a height, but if you're 180cm tall you'll find the world caters to you well, but at 250cm you struggle to fit and basic tasks are difficult.
Its the same as people saying "I'm a bit OCD". They aren't.
Having both OCD and ADHD I can tell you that people who say they are "a bit OCD" or "a bit ADHD" have never wished they were dead because their executive function is shot and their emotional regulation is so compromised, and that they're fed up of washing their hands until they bleed.
Everyone has some traits of most disorders from time to time. What marks a disorder is that it is constant, unrelenting, pathological and happiness destroying.
It's not "basically true" though. The whole point of the "disorder" designation is that it interferes with life activities. Everyone has attention deficits at times - that does not a disorder make. Otherwise I agree with the analogy.
Like all English statements, it depends on how you read it.
I read it as, "everyone experiences the symptoms of ADHD to some extent, including those who don't experience symptoms beyond the threshold of a disorder."
The big question is, do you see that fact as a tool for the average person to trivialize or to empathize with the ADHD experience?
> and it's hard to live in a world that thinks "everyone has a little ADHD
Ironically, headlines like this contribute to the idea that “everyone has ADHD”. Once you identify 27 different variants as being linked to ADHD, a lot of people are going to have at least one of those variants. That doesn’t mean they have ADHD, because the correlation to any singular variant is insignificant. But a lot of people are going to find one or two or three of these variants and assume, wrongly, that it means they have ADHD.
The more variants that are “linked to” a condition, the more people will have at least one of those variants and get confused. When you have as many as 27 variants linked, it could be the case that virtually everyone has at least one of those variants, depending on how common they are.
These aren’t diagnostic for ADHD in any way. They’re more of loose correlational hints for further research.
For reference, these are the established "12 steps" of overcoming alcoholism:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
This, under some atheist/agnostic worldviews, is roughly equivalent to "you just need to control yourself".
For the record, the 12 steps were established by a group of long-term, hard-core alcoholics who were literally dying from their decades of excessive consumption and still could not stop. "Giving it up to God" helped that specific group.
And now we call every guy who goes on a bender an alcoholic and send them to AA though most people drink less as they get older without any intervention of any kind.
I have friends who work in the recovery field: The “12 steps” are from one program, but they’re not any sort of established treatment protocol.
That program works for some people, doesn’t work for others. It’s not any sort of standard that gets handed out universally by treatment programs, though.
First time I took medication for ADHD. It was absolutely shocking to experience focus on something I didn’t find highly interesting. I normally associate boring to being worse than almost all physical pain.
Maybe just below when I had a kidney stone.
Having that “pain” taken away was amazing. I can focus better without meds now that I know what it’s like. No where near as with meds. But still a big improvement.
These "12 steps" are established by definition of throwing out anyone that they don't work for. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of a process, all told.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid and as an adult it makes me feel angry because we slap a label on kids, and now even adults so we can have something to point the finger at rather than acknowledge that people are stimulated by different things.
Hard no. We have decades of research establishing there are distinct differences in the brains of people with ADHD and real kinds of tasks in which they drastically underperform regardless of effort.
It might be nice to think it's really just part of a rainbowy spectrum of everyone is different and koombaya, but it's simply not true.
Similar to another commenter here, I told myself this story until my early thirties and suffered the whole time thinking I was using the ADHD "label" as a crutch.
ADHD and other mental illnesses get this "just a label" treatment because we don't walk around with missing limbs or eyeballs. Most people with ADHD mask their symptoms enough to feign normality. That normality is enough to make them functional while enough to fool others the stray from normal is akin to the occasional distractability of neurotypical brains.
I was of this mind at one point. I didn’t take ADHD medication through my teens or early 20s. It wasn’t until I got married and had a kid that I found myself struggling to provide for my family in a very real way that I saw a psychiatrist and started Adderall.
I’ve tried a few times over the years to stop, and each time my career has taken a tail spin. I go from being a top performer when taking a small amount of Adderall to having difficulties doing the most basic work tasks because they’re boring.
I can acknowledge all I want that I’m stimulated by different things, but without a diagnosis to give a professional an idea of the symptoms I face, I wouldn’t be a successful or happy member of society.
Before my diagnosis and treatment I was EXTREMELY depressed and anxious all the time. The diagnosis has been literally life changing in the best way possible.
Same here. I got okay grades in school, and I even managed a few semesters in college with excellent grades (comp sci major), but that was with the help of self medicating with stimulants (illicitly obtained.)
Now that I'm an adult with a diagnosis and proper, legal medication, it has helped immensely. It makes me wonder where I would/could be if I got on the right path earlier in life.
> so we can have something to point the finger at rather than acknowledge that people are stimulated by different things.
So what do you do for people like me who without medication can't even do things we want to do or have an interest in, no matter how hard we try? It's not always as simple as being stimulated by different things.
Call it ADHD or not, in extreme cases it can be absolutely debilitating for people and it's not simply because they're lazy, or not trying.
I'm not saying ADHD doesn't exist or that there are not people who need medication to assist them.
I just believe that its so overly diagnosed these days. It's similar to depression. It's very common to just throw drugs at the problem when some people don't need drugs, they need a lifestyle change, sometimes that means using drugs to begin with as a bridge to a lifestyle change.
But we are in this weird state where people go to a doctor and its like "oh you sneezed? here take these 15 drugs" "how do you feel, on can't focus, must be ADHD, take this" "oh you feel down, must be depression, take these 6 drugs"
Sometimes I feel like we treat a problem before we diagnose the problem.
It's not that simple to get diagnosed and the drugs are not the first thing that will be tried. I'm sure there are some overprescribing doctors out there, but on the other hand it took me months to get a diagnosis+prescription and required changing who I'm seeing. And that's even before you go on the "let's figure out the correct dosage" ride that takes time, effort, and bad days. It's not your average vitamins.
On the other hand comments like that are among things that contributed to me not getting diagnosed for years, so consider what are the confirmed facts when talking about medical treatments, ok?
> But we are in this weird state where people go to a doctor and its like "oh you sneezed? here take these 15 drugs"
Many people say this, but where's the evidence? Probably the best quality article to date in support of overdiagnosis and overtreatment is [1], and that paper is incredibly weak. It does not give any concrete numbers as to the rate of overdiagnosis, only really claims that there are populations of less severe ADHD that have inferior reward/risk outcomes of pharmacotreatment, while also admitting ADHD is underdiagnosed and undertreated in subpopulations, especially girls and minorities.
In other words, it's likely all just misdiagnosis, due to limited sensitivity and specificity.
My hypothesis is that ADHD detection, like any medical test, has limits to its accuracy, and considering even quantitative tests with 90% accuracy have quite large false positive populations, we are seeing a similar situation with the far more qualitative ADHD test system.
Since you were diagnosed as a child you may not be aware, but getting a diagnosis for ADHD is not nearly as simple as you describe and doctors are not just throwing meds at you. If anything, you'll first be labeled a drug-seeker.
It could be more frequently diagnosed, but also under-diagnosed at the same time. More diagnosis are due to more awareness, but there isn't data to prove it's been overly diagnosed in people who don't have it.
ADHD isn't just "stimulated by different things" though. It's lacking the executive function to maintain that stimulation. Someone with ADHD might be stimulated by a thing and then get bored very soon and move on to another new stimulus.
