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Comment by chownie | Hacker News Reader

> One should question the rate of which it is diagnosed, and who is getting diagnosed.

The medical consensus after multiple enquiries in the UK has come to:

1. The rate of diagnosis is far too low (the evidence of this being we're catching people as adults who should've been caught as children).

2. Our diagnostic criteria aren't inclusive enough (we have historically missed inattentive presenting ADHD, we have historically missed ADHD presenting in women)

These results are politically unpalatable so the enquiry is I think currently being run for the third time, but signs point to ADHD overdiagnosis being a hoax/fake news/whatever you call it.

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I say this as someone with ADHD:

The issue is that ADHD is not real in the organic sense. Well, at least the evidence is scant. It's more of a description than a disorder. It's not something one "has."

I like to compare ADHD to racial categorization of people. Race is not real in a biological sense, but it's definitely real in a social sense.

I am probably butchering what I am trying to say so, just read this if you want to understand someone(s) that can communicate eloquently.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9189308/

The set of symptoms is roughly recognizable and treatment protocols are established. There's some data and bad theories, and informed consent based on all this. (Imagine how informed the patient can be downstream of this!)

So yes, just as with depression, where we have only very crude understanding of how SSRIs work. We have the RCTs, cohort studies, and we know that it's better than placebo.

Some people fight with depression through their whole life. Just as with ADHD.

As with Alzheimer's we are painfully in the dark with regards to etiology, prevention and treatment, but that doesn't mean it's not real.

There's multiple Alzheimer's (there's the early onset familial version, and it has something to do with APOE4 / amyloid, but there's the rest which is a big question mark), it's also not real yet, because the biomarkers we have are almost useless. Still we try what makes sense, and try to help people who are suffering from it. Same as with ADHD.

And just as the heritability of any complex behavior (intelligence and susceptibility to depression) is not a simple thing it doesn't mean it's not real.

> Some people fight with depression through their whole life. Just as with ADHD.

See I just don't think they're even similar. How is being sometimes (and sometimes is the operative word in ADHD) unable to follow instructions, forgetting things, having social anxiety, putting things off etc anything like the depression from being abused as a child?

I think a lot of the symptoms of ADHD are just underperforming "neurotypicals". Struggling is not an illness. Finding things hard doesn't mean you have an innate inability to do them, in sorry to tell you

> See I just don't think they're even similar. How is being sometimes (and sometimes is the operative word in ADHD) unable to follow instructions, forgetting things, having social anxiety, putting things off etc anything like the depression from being abused as a child?

Untreated ADHD is associated with a literal doubling in your suicide risk compared to your peers.

> and sometimes is the operative word in ADHD

No it isn't? I think you need to go and research what ADHD actually is, you appear to have formed an opinion without good foundations.

> These results are politically unpalatable so the enquiry is I think currently being run for the third time, but signs point to ADHD overdiagnosis being a hoax/fake news/whatever you call it.

And here's one for you: hundreds of thousands of scroungers and workshy young adults are saying they have ADHD to get pip and other perks... Because this is even less of a charade than back pain used to be, you can legit go on holiday with ADHD, they even give people mobility passes in the UK for ADHD, screwing over people in actual wheelchairs who really do suffer in society

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