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Comment by tuxie_ | Hacker News Reader

Don't take it personal. Both things can be true, you can have adhd and adhd can be overdiagnosed, doesn't mean that none of those diagnostics are valid.

I'm sure you must be tired of people telling you about how overdiagnosed adhd is, I'm sorry about that, but don't take it personal, it's just a person on the internet.

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GP also claimed the treatment is extremely suspect yet provided nothing to back up the claim. Does GP think the treatment does not work? AFAIK it is among the most treatable psychiatric illnesses.

doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.5335

> Findings

> In this systematic scoping review of 334 published studies in children and adolescents, convincing evidence was found that ADHD is overdiagnosed in children and adolescents. For individuals with milder symptoms in particular, the harms associated with an ADHD diagnosis may often outweigh the benefits.

What I mean is that we feed children Ritalin without a second thought. It's absolute nuts. There are many many ways to work with ADHD which doesn't require giving a children meds. We should be way more cautious about doing that.

This study comes nowhere close to supporting the claim you made upthread, that "The diagnosis and treatment of ADHD in adults but most especially in children is extremely suspect". The claims it makes are much narrower than your claim (in particular, it focuses on mild ADHD cases, and the "harms" it discusses from medication are subjective, like the diagnosis providing "an excuse for problems".

> Don't take it personal

Oh I take it personally. I’m alive today because I sought diagnosis and treatment. I very nearly wasn’t alive from the consequences of being undiagnosed and untreated. I very probably would be dead today if I had taken this “just person on the internet” more seriously than I already had. I’m more than tired of people offering their ignorant opinions about stuff they don’t understand.

On the other hand, the state threw a ADD diagnosis on me because I was bored in school, pumped me full of a methamphetamine analog and put me into classes with profoundly disabled people ruining my social life from a early age. I'd stare at the wall in my bedroom for hours due to the drugs, eventually my parents stopped giving them to me when I was at home, but that lead my dad to try them, and eventually get addicted to meth proper himself.

I dropped out at 15 and taught myself computer science, so it was all provably horseshit but it sure made my life harder as a child.

In all seriousness, I’m sorry you went through this. I also grew up with a parent and family with addiction. I’m in no place to assess anything about your life, but what you describe is consistent with the diagnosis. And unfortunately your dad taking your meds and becoming an addict is consistent too.

ADHD is frequently hereditary, and substance abuse and addiction are common for people with undiagnosed ADHD.

Your own story of dropping out and teaching yourself isn’t just familiar to me, it’s similar to both my brothers’ stories as well.

I’m sorry you experienced this the way you did. I wish you had better medical care, and better parental guidance. I hope the life that you’ve made for yourself is joyful and prosperous, and I hope if it’s ever not you’ll find your way to that however it makes sense.

As somebody who was diagnosed with ADHD in my youth and who has tried various medications, I've reached the point of suspecting that the disease model is just a poor fit here.

Does my brain work differently than other people? Yes. Would this have been a problem for me in any pre-industrial society? (Which, to be clear, is most of human history?) I don't think so. Is it a problem for me when I have a fair bit of control over the work I do? Not really! I only experience it as a problem when I am expected to function in contexts with industrial-age labor models, where there's a hierarchy that expects me to labor like a robot in line with how my betters have decided how the work should be done.

So I can entirely believe that authority figures over-use ADHD as a diagnosis so that their lives are easy. Reading through the DSM, it seems to me there are quite a number of diagnoses that could be used as Authority Inconvenience Syndrome. And I don't think I've ever seen one where people might need treatment for being too obedient.

I find the idea that we are born defective to be inherently suspect.

It is quite illogical but very popular because well adapted people can just talk about superior genes and how everyone else has inferior genes and they can never change anything about that except with extensive medical treatment.

For sure. I've read some really interesting stuff under the "medicalization of deviance" label. A classic example being how homosexuality was treated as a psychological illness because the dominant group saw it as a societal offense.

I see people downvoting this and I think that's a mistake. There's a fair bit of stigma for all sorts of mental health treatment, and I think that's a reasonable thing to be angry about. It's possible that some people are over-treated and also that some people are under-treated. People who have suffered from either end of that are allowed to be angry about their suffering.

I want to support you, also toward HN, that I do take it personally and am pretty exhausted by people all the way back to both of my parents denying I have a condition.

People of the internet: there are better things you can be doing than playing armchair psychiatrist, especially by invoking notions that can ultimately be harmful to a class of people who have forever been told they just need to put in more effort. You don't know what it's like to live with this so please stop with the conjectures. Thank you.

We're glad you're alive. Please don't take HN threads into flamewar.

People have different experiences/backgrounds. It's both inevitable and natural that there are different points of view on this or any other complex topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I hear you. The ignorance around ADHD is appalling. My medication (Elvanse) works wonders - being able to focus like normal people has entirely changed my life.

I remember the first time I took one of those pills, I was astounded my how clear my mind became. It was like the noise switched off, and I could just get on with what I needed to.

Like you, I was diagnosed as an adult. I have considerable regret for all those years prior wasted without diagnosis and medication. I'm trying to undo all the maladaptive behaviours I've developed likely because of this, and shed myself of the many, many guilts I feel. But it's a long hard slog.

I wish my parents were still alive so I could talk to them about it all, and show them the person I've become since.

When I see confident expressions of ignorance about ADHD, or even worse, scammers and liars trying to take advantage of people with ADHD, it also makes me see red. You're not alone in this. I think you were right to speak out here, whatever anyone else says.

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