I've seen recently that a good chunk of the people I interact with on a daily basis (internet and IRL) say they have ADHD. Why is this? Is ADHD super common now? It doesn't seem normal for this many people to have ADHD.
Posted Aug 31, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC
It doesn't seem normal for this many people to have ADHD.
There's a difference between "more people have ADHD" and "more people are being treated for ADHD". It was widely undiagnosed in the past -- I am pretty sure I was one of the undiagnosed ones.
And yes, when the diagnoses get more accurate, it can seem like more people have it than before, because more people are talking about it.
This makes sense. Similar things have happened to other mental conditions like autism, where it seems like rates are going higher because we are better at diagnosing people. My question arises from the fact that I feel like I see more people who say they have ADHD than those who say they have autism or some other mental condition. ADHD seems special in this way because more people seem willing to say they have it.
Well, sure. There's less social stigma attached to it.
Besides the social stigma aspect the pandemic actually added to the increase in adhd diagnoses. A lot of the people who were undiagnosed didn’t need any treatment or diagnosis because they had learned to cope in their normal routines. But then they got stuck either not working or working from home or going to work with insanely different routines. They weren’t able to cope as easily because of their adhd and that’s how they realized they had it in the first place. It helped that so many people had that same experience at the same time while having nothing better to do than stay home in social media so it got talked about a lot to help them realize.
The medical community in the USA has over-diagnosed children with that medical condition for the last 20+ years. That is because the "science" behind mental health is at best poor and at worst completely arbitrary.
It used to be that basically the only people who were diagnosed were kids who ran around and were disruptive in school, especially boys. But in the past few years, people have realized that there are a lot of other ways for ADHD to manifest.
Personally, I didn't think of myself as having ADHD. I just knew that since I was a kid, I never really managed to finish anything I started, and I kept fucking up important things by not doing them before a deadline, and I had lost multiple important friendships by not managing to keep up long distance communication even when I really wanted to, and I felt really bad about all those things.
And then it turns out that if I take ADHD medication, all of those are dramatically better and life is pretty good. But I didn't think of that until I was in my late 20s because I was a girl who liked school so I didn't fit the stereotype.
Apparently it's highly prevalent and extremely under-diagnosed. The last figure I heard was 5-6% of the population. I guess there's just been a shift in understanding of what ADHD is and how to diagnose it.