Comment by ruthmarx
Comment by ruthmarx 5 days ago
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
Comment by ruthmarx 5 days ago
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
Totally on board with your comments on disparagement, but there's been a rash of autism diagnoses in my daughter's school to the point where in some classes 20% of students have been diagnosed as autistic. I feel at that point people are diagnosing personality, and it's using the (UK) special educational needs system to force schools to pay attention to different learning styles. (My daughter's school is actually pretty good on that front if you point it out to the staff, so I'm not sure what's triggering it particularly in her school, but it may be to do with releasing government funding for extra classroom assistants).
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
You and GP make great points, and these are situations that are becoming more common. Luckily, there is some light at the end of the tunnel (at least for ADHD). There's been a lot of study in recent years and medical science is starting to identify physiological markers commonly correlated with ADHD [1][2][3]. The sad thing is that the science hasn't advanced far enough to include these in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. It's my hope we'll see an updated DSM and medical training within the next decade, but it'll be a long and painful wait.
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/...
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7461955
3. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
> As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
Not my intention, but I was diagnosed as a kid when over-diagnosing did seem to be a trend, and I've become skeptical in these times of self IDing.
When I mentioned over-diagnosing it was more referring to the 90s, but I think a lot of adults who were diagnosed then may have been misdiagnosed and never checked.
My heart goes out to you. Misdiagnosis is just as bad (and sometimes worse) than not being diagnosed. I've known people who were diagnosed with ADHD with very bad outcomes because it later turned out that they had bipolar disorder; the wrong medical treatment literally ruined their life. At the same time, I've had periods in my life where I couldn't focus on important conversations with my partner because of a noisy bird nearby.
If you suspect you have a condition or someone is advocating for you to seek treatment, please seek a qualified psychiatrist who's specifically trained in diagnosis. Better yet, make sure they're in touch with your primary care provider [1]. Psychiatric assessment and diagnosis its own psychiatric specialty for a reason, but doctors with these qualifications are criminally difficult to get time with for a variety of reasons.
Both me and my little brother were diagnosed as kids also. Neither of us have it--we were just little shits.
There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.
Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.
Thank you for answering.
I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.
I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.
> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.
Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.
> If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes—there's too much similarity and too many people with both to be a coincidence. But in the case of my family, most of us do just fine in reading social cues... when we're paying attention. Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
> Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
Yes, this is something I deal with as well.
It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
I've wondered if I am on the spectrum also but I don't match a lot of the base/core traits, although I feel ADHD or ADD alone doesn't explain some of my, ahem, quirks either.
I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
> There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes
Autism and adhd definitely appear to share traits, and I suspect there's a shared cluster of genes affecting certain aspects of neural linking between regions of the brain. Even without shared genes it makes sense that a "networked system" of core brain functions would share similar behaviors if the parameters were tweaked in similar ways.
Why are you so confident that they shouldn't be confident?
As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty.
0. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
1. https://chadd.org/about-adhd/general-prevalence-adults/