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.
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.
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.”
But also, you have to realise this misdiagnosing does exist.
I had excellent school success as a kid. I taught myself how to read before school. I was always the top of the class, made friends easily, had no issues. My mom is a social worker. There was never any behavioural trouble from me, nor any learning problem.
But now some 30 years later, when I’ve looked for help and been anxious at the doctors, 9/10 of them would be “perhaps you have ADHD?”, despite they core characteristic of ADHD being it’s neurodevelopmental, and I had literally zero issues in that. No matter how much I kept reassuring them and pointing out as a kid I would not have met any of the diagnostic criteria, they wanted to “test” me. The test was essentially just someone asking every clear questions about the same things I just talked about. Had I had even tje slightest inclination to answer a single question “yes”, I would’ve got a permanent prescription for pharmaceutical stimulants. Without needing one.
But as I actually wanted to figure out my issues, I didn’t take that chance, becsuse I don’t want to be misdiagnosed.
However, this is in Finland, and I can not exaggerate how common pushing this idea was, but only AFTER like 2010 or something. Before that no-one ever even considered it, despite me having gone to the doctors with the exact same symptoms.
So yeah it’s a complex issue, but I’m of the mind that doctors are clearly being affected enough to influence their objectivity on the matter.
I understand that feeling, and the annoyance of having something insistent upon with treatment attached you’re not interested in. Hopefully the norm is dispassionate advocacy and dropping it when patients say no.
Acquired/adult ADHD is not as well studied and is usually secondary to other conditions, or correlated with long-term use of certain drugs like antihistamines for sleep, structural changes in the brain, etc etc. We don’t know enough. But if a patient have their own mechanisms that they say works, or thinks it’s temporary/habit-extinction/burnout, that’s the final word. Pushing rx management after that is unethical.