Asklemmy

Self diagnosed? Definitely

Actually, properly diagnosed? Probably underdiagnosed actually. Friend of mine had to go through a lot of pricey hoops just to get tested in a reputable place.

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.

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.

The scientific, peer-reviewed answer is that it is significantly under-diagnosed in adults as well as in those AFAB of all ages. Most sources say up to 80% of adults with ADHD are undiagnosed and/or untreated.

Don't know. I'm on a 2-5 year waiting list to find out 😵‍💫

For adults, it's under-diagnosed. Because some of the most common prescriptions for it are stimulants like Adderall, there is a fear that adults are trying to scam the doctor. Additionally, and imo even more infuriatingly, doctors are apprehensive about diagnosing an adult because "you made it this far in life without needing help. You can't be ADHD/autistic/neurodivergent." Fuck that mentality. I'm ADHD and autistic and I don't need a doctor to validate me when they can't even agree amongst themselves half the time.

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.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to be diagnosed with ADHD?

I was diagnosed when I was 32. In order to be diagnosed, I had to go through a series of screening tests that measured intelligence, executive function, behavioral assessments, interviews with family that knew me when I was a kid, "testimony" from my therapist and other tests meant to rule out alternative explanations. eg. sleep deprivation, health issues, depression, anxiety etc. And it was expensive. Thousands of dollars and many hours. Its essentially designed to mentally tax you until the ADHD is detectable through any masking that you do.

Definitely not in women - the opposite is true.

Yes, and no. This is an unanswerable question.

Negligence, ineptitude, and mistakes happen in every field and medicine, education, and parenting are no different.

There is pain in being diagnosed correctly just as much as there is incorrectly. The question we should be asking instead for both sides of the aisle is how do we best deliver knowledge, support, and care in the correct format to those who need it?

Probably under diagnosed with people who actually have it.

It can be both overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed! Both these things can be true at once:

• Some people who would benefit from ADHD treatment do not receive it.
• Some people receive ADHD treatment who would be better off without it.

One contributing factor is that people are treated differently in the contexts where ADHD is likely to come up (e.g. in schools) due to things like race, gender, and family income.

A black boy and a white girl having the same "brain stuff" going on are likely to be treated differently by teachers and parents — not only due to overt sexism and racism, not only hormonal and developmental differences, but also different cultural experiences with medicine (and medical mistreatment), different parental fears, etc.

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.