I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid and as an adult it makes me feel angry because we slap a label on kids, and now even adults so we can have something to point the finger at rather than acknowledge that people are stimulated by different things.
It might be nice to think it's really just part of a rainbowy spectrum of everyone is different and koombaya, but it's simply not true.
Similar to another commenter here, I told myself this story until my early thirties and suffered the whole time thinking I was using the ADHD "label" as a crutch.
ADHD and other mental illnesses get this "just a label" treatment because we don't walk around with missing limbs or eyeballs. Most people with ADHD mask their symptoms enough to feign normality. That normality is enough to make them functional while enough to fool others the stray from normal is akin to the occasional distractability of neurotypical brains.
I’ve tried a few times over the years to stop, and each time my career has taken a tail spin. I go from being a top performer when taking a small amount of Adderall to having difficulties doing the most basic work tasks because they’re boring.
I can acknowledge all I want that I’m stimulated by different things, but without a diagnosis to give a professional an idea of the symptoms I face, I wouldn’t be a successful or happy member of society.
Before my diagnosis and treatment I was EXTREMELY depressed and anxious all the time. The diagnosis has been literally life changing in the best way possible.
Now that I'm an adult with a diagnosis and proper, legal medication, it has helped immensely. It makes me wonder where I would/could be if I got on the right path earlier in life.
So what do you do for people like me who without medication can't even do things we want to do or have an interest in, no matter how hard we try? It's not always as simple as being stimulated by different things.
Call it ADHD or not, in extreme cases it can be absolutely debilitating for people and it's not simply because they're lazy, or not trying.
I just believe that its so overly diagnosed these days. It's similar to depression. It's very common to just throw drugs at the problem when some people don't need drugs, they need a lifestyle change, sometimes that means using drugs to begin with as a bridge to a lifestyle change.
But we are in this weird state where people go to a doctor and its like "oh you sneezed? here take these 15 drugs" "how do you feel, on can't focus, must be ADHD, take this" "oh you feel down, must be depression, take these 6 drugs"
Sometimes I feel like we treat a problem before we diagnose the problem.
Many people say this, but where's the evidence? Probably the best quality article to date in support of overdiagnosis and overtreatment is [1], and that paper is incredibly weak. It does not give any concrete numbers as to the rate of overdiagnosis, only really claims that there are populations of less severe ADHD that have inferior reward/risk outcomes of pharmacotreatment, while also admitting ADHD is underdiagnosed and undertreated in subpopulations, especially girls and minorities.
In other words, it's likely all just misdiagnosis, due to limited sensitivity and specificity.
My hypothesis is that ADHD detection, like any medical test, has limits to its accuracy, and considering even quantitative tests with 90% accuracy have quite large false positive populations, we are seeing a similar situation with the far more qualitative ADHD test system.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042533/#!po=9....
On the other hand comments like that are among things that contributed to me not getting diagnosed for years, so consider what are the confirmed facts when talking about medical treatments, ok?