Granted, I'm also an armchair doctor, but... The criteria for being diagnosed with ADD seems like it can be applied to every single human being on this planet. Am I wrong?
For a person with ADD, if there was a gun held to their head to stay on a task, they will soon forget that there's a gun and become distracted. They can't help it. Their mind is racing. The only way to stay on task is to be constantly tapped on the head with the gun. At this point, it's the periodic reminder that's doing the trick. This is why people with ADD often require external structure to keep them focused.
There's a lot of positives for people with ADD, such as increased creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Problem is that a lot of societal institutions, such as school, are not adapted to it.
The average person, given various antidepressants (or at least certain ones; I've not kept up on all the research) would not get any benefit. Desipramine, for example, is not some all-around, casual-use pick-me-up.
I think this is true for at least some ADD drugs; how does a person respond to stimulants? Do they calm down, or do they get wired? Ritalin and Adderall used to calm me down; so did black beauties when I was self-medicating. Eventually they stopped doing anything for me.
Unfortunately there is, to my knowledge, no objective marker for various mental conditions. You have to try things and consider the context and see what works or doesn't, and you may never really know exactly why, or what the underlying problem is.
ADD? Occasional distraction? Depression? Bad time in your life? Bi-polar?
The lines are blurry.
It's not so much about keeping focus it's the executive function part of it: keeping focused on the right thing. People with ADD can definitely focus, they just can't control it. That's why parents can easily dismiss it as lack of motivation. "he focuses just fine playing soccer" (a sport with adrenaline that gives results like stimulants)
The ability to concentrate is like a muscle. If it's weak, the way to strengthen it is exercise. If you went to a gym and found you could only bench-press 20 pounds, would we say you have Muscular Weakness Syndrome and suggest medical treatment? While it's possible your weakness might be caused by some disease, and that should perhaps be looked into, it's also possible that the sole cause is that you don't get much exercise.
The way to exercise the concentration muscle is, of course, meditation.
This is just my opinion and I could be wrong, but I think it's a possibility that should be kept in mind.
qEEG has been very good at matching up people who have been diagnosed with ADD versus normal people. It's the first real test that provides some indication without going off behavior.
I thought this was one of the better comments regarding the diagnosis of A.D.D.
Why? I was diagnosed late, so I was missed – and yet, I cannot ignore the obvious over-diagnosis of A.D.D. It seems if you're hyper, you have attention deficits. For me, I was never hyper so I completely missed the radar. That's also why I feel that there is an over-diagnosis – and why people feel that it isn't a legitimate diagnosis.
I was diagnosed with a less-noticed blend of A.D.D., more commonly known as ADHD-PI or "predominately inattentive". I actually could sit still, I didn't move around all the time. But the slight movement of a foot in a classroom would completely take me away from any focus. Most people can say that they have those experiences, but these people can also get into extreme focus later on for other things they actually love to do. That's the marker, for me, as a diagnosis.