Hacker News Reader

On the other side of the coin, pathologizing everything can harm people as well. There are many children labeled “hyperactive” and put on drugs for a disorder they likely didn’t have at an extremely early stage in their development.

> We've just...not addressed it and seen rising depression, anxiety, suicide rates.

People are not developing major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders from not being on ADHD medications, at least not on the scale you’re referring to. “Increasing” rates of those disorders has largely been due to increased awareness and discussion of them, as well as some of the very patterns happening to ADHD right now: pathologizing normal feelings, romanticization of mental disorders, and self-diagnosis fueled by online communities.

> if people want to get these stimulants, why not?

Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is if you _didnt_ have ADHD as a child it's unlikely you have it as an adult.

So your assertion that it's a "disorder they likely didn’t have at an extremely early stage in their development" seems to be totally off the mark. Speaking as someone who really wishes their parents had medicated them for their childhood ADHD diagnosis. It likely would have saved me a lot of pain, heartache and C's in middle and high school. Not to mention college.

There's a big difference between "didn't have ADHD as a child" and "was never diagnosed with ADHD as a child", and it's one that a lot of people actually conflate. "They over-diagnose ADHD nowadays, I never had it" when they mean that there were no diagnoses in a period of time when ADHD was not widely known (if at all, depending on how far they go back).

It's easier for medical professionals to accept you have ADHD as an adult if you were diagnosed as a child, but that doesn't mean that all people with no childhood diagnosis cannot have ADHD.

The point I was contesting in the parent was "disorder they likely didn't have at an extremely early stage in their development".

He's claiming that childhood diagnosis is bunk. He's insisting that kids are unlikely to have ADHD.

I'm asserting that the behaviors for ADHD show up in children first and foremost.

I'm not saying that receiving clinical diagnosis as a child is the only way to have an adult diagnosis: In fact I'm not talking about diagnostics at all. It's that you _had_ ADHD as a kid, undiagnosed or otherwise, means you likely _have_ ADHD as an adult. I never once posited that someone with no diagnosis as a child is precluded from being diagnosed as an adult; however they should have had childhood symptoms based on the DSM as I understand it.

I'm arguing with someone who denies the existence of childhood ADHD in a naive "kids are just hyper don't drug them" argument.

> People are not developing major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders from not being on ADHD medications, at least not on the scale you’re referring to.

Evidence for this? ADHD meds have completely made my depression/anxiety go away because I'm no longer fighting with my brain. This has been the experience for dozens of other people that I know.

> Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.

Yeah. It's a schedule 2 drug. Which means you *need* to discuss it with a doctor anyway.

I still disagree with it being a scheduled drug. I wonder how many people are in prison because of self medication?

Current estimation by specialists is that at least 20% of the carceral population has it.

Compared to 3 to 5% of the adult population in same estimation.

“Increasing” rates of those disorders has largely been due to increased awareness and discussion of them

I think we need to start verbalizing the root cause of that statement and go all the way to ‘increasing rates has largely been due to increased pressure to succeed academically and professionally in knowledge based professions’.

You ain’t gonna just grind Leetcode all day without a little something.

This person isn't saying ADHD isn't widespread, they're just defining "widespread" realistically.

If we followed the logic of the current social media version of ADHD diagnosis, everyone would have it.

People post things like:

> Short sentence. > Very very very long sentence dragging on for 20 lines in small font. > Haha you have ADHD if you didn't read the second part.

It's ridiculous, and it doesn't even touch the tip of the iceberg of what living like ADHD is actually like.

Which is why a license physician is required to dispense this medication. There aren't candy stores with bins, giving these out by the pound. They are controlled substances and the fact that there are online pill mills to facilitate this? Well, it sounds like you have a problem with healthcare under capitalism, which to be clear, so do I, but absent a different system, that's the end result.

This is complete non-sequitur to what I've said.

ADHD is an awful mental illness that attaching this warped definition to helps absolutely no one with. And I say that as someone who struggled for years to understand what my diagnosis actually meant because of this kind of vapid bullshit I seen pedaled on social media.

It's not just about misdiagnosing themselves, it's about people who have ADHD ending up with deep seated fundamental misunderstandings of their disorder is due to the constant bombardment of misinformation.

-

Also a pill mill has nothing to do with capitalism. If you're going to use words learn what they mean first.

The idea of a pill mill is physicians will jump to giving you the pills with minimal establishment of history.

It's trying to undermine the controls around the medication in such a way that it practically becomes a (pay-us-to-access-it) candy jar

You're using a service that is literally selling itself as a way to get pills for a specific disorder with the absolute least amount of friction, that's barely a step removed from pill mill.

They're even putting mini-quizes up for people to know if there's a good chance they'll get their diagnosis. Since you don't see a psychiatrist before "passing", you're literally being implicitly "coached" on how to get diagnosed.

Most (good) psychiatrists will take multiple visits with someone who has never been diagnosed before diagnosing let alone giving you pills for it, meanwhile these people are advertising how in 20 minutes you can be getting access to pills...

There's even stories of them turning away people who might have more issues than just ADHD, that's how laser focused their "treatment" is. If you were being given the same level of psychiatric treatment as a normal psychiatrist it'd be absurd to be told "I won't treat you because you have depression", for example.

Screen time and Tik Tok cause ADHD https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2019/07/18/preschooler-...

Your link does not claim that. In fact, their study specifically states: "We only had repeated screen-time and behavior data available for a sub-sample of our cohort (n = 367) which limited our ability to determine directionality. As such, it is possible parents may respond to children who exhibit externalizing behavior difficulties by offering more screen-time or using increased opportunity for screen-time as a self-soothing strategy. "

It's a fair point. Not a perfect study and they do not claim a causal relationship. However, also from the results:

Researchers found by age 5, children who spent two hours or more per day, looking at screens, were 7.7 times more likely to meet criteria for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, than children who watched screens for 30 minutes or less each day.

It's a substantial result. They talk about practical and ethical reasons they can't establish the causal relationship, too.

I'm guilty of being a little tongue in cheek, but I'd try to limit a kid's exposure to early screen time and ease them into things like TikTok.

And you can't "get" ADHD. You either have ADHD or you don't. At least thats what the scientific consensus is right now.

You can have conditions exacerbate the symptoms associated with ADHD.

I think as society becomes more technical it becomes more debilitating for sure.

For whatever reason our society has a huge and totally inconsistent bias against medication/drugs to change brain chemistry.

To me, there is little doubt that people "self medicating" with coffee in the morning would never fly if coffee was just introduced to society yesterday.

We don't even bother to think about the unimaginable amount of good that has been done to society with people self medicating with coffee.

In the same sense , I can't imagine the amount of harm all this untreated ADHD that we don't take seriously will do to society in 2022.