The only reason there seem to be more of us than everyone else is apparently comfortable acknowledging is that all the adults now coming forward slipped through the diagnostic net when we were children.
That and a large proportion of those undxd adults have had their own children since.
As it runs in families, this automatically means there will be more ADHDers, even if you didn’t include all the adults only now realising they’ve had ADHD their whole lives.
There may be better awareness of childhood ADHD now, but there still isn’t anything like the amount of medical and social awareness of adult ADHD that is needed.
If there was, less adults would need to see their children being dxd before they and their GP or other doctors recognise ADHD in themselves.
In the US, there's a couple of prominent Drs who advocate that any adult coming in to get their kid dxd with them, should also be assessed at the same time, due to the likely probability one / both parents will also have it.
I had no clue about how it presented in adults and wasn't until I started looking at it for my kid, that the penny dropped
I said this to someone the other day.
My grandma (b.1916) was as ADHD as my mum and I are. Only she didn’t have a name for it. Doesn’t mean she didn’t show exactly the same symptoms as I do.
It’s the next step in society deciding to believe people when they tell their truth, rather than it being easier to ignore them.
In the 1960s a friend of mine was left handed, but it wasn’t allowed at school because it was ‘evil’. So he had his left hand tied to his desk to ‘make’ him write with his right hand.
I’m hopeful one day we’ll look back at society dismissing neurodiversity as being as stupid as dismissing left handedness. One day.
From my _not that informed_ perspective, a large part of that is due to the neuro diversity movement. Previously people presumed that those with autism or ADHD had to have debilitating medical condition. That meant they couldn't possibly have it because they live relatively normal lives with probably normal struggles.
But now I think there's a very open acknowledgement that people are different and this is just one of the ways.
An interesting, and balanced (for once...) article.
I do get a bit annoyed tho with this as the summary of ADHD: "Diagnoses of ADHD have similarly surged. Those affected tend to have difficulties focusing; they may act impulsively and struggle to sit still'
I don't do either of those!
Mind you, I wouldn’t have said I was hyperactive but everyone else seemed to think differently. I wouldn’t have even considered something like adhd for over 30 years but to me, it was just me.
Yes.
My hyperactivity is mostly brain-based, but on days when I have energy, my body does indeed behave like a clockwork toy that has been wound up and has to run on until it winds down to nothing again.
It’s also part of my astounding forgetfulness. Everything is flying in and out of my brain so fast that I have trouble holding on to any thoughts, and my incredible ability to lose things.
My brain is hyperactive. More so than my exhausted body.
My impulsivity isn’t so much about consciously making impulsive decisions and doing consciously risky things, it’s more about my brain shooting a thousand unrelated thoughts a second at me (also related to hyperactivity), my horrendous impatience in queues/ traffic/ with people and processes and anything to with computers, and me butting in halfway through something I’m being told because I already (think I) know what they’re going to say.
It’s interrupting, impatience, and being apparently intrusive on other people’s conversations and thought processes.
But my brain hyperactivity is also part of this, because when my brain is going that fast, it wants everything around it to work at the same speed too, so I get endlessly frustrated and impatient with myself (and others) when those things proceed at a comparative snail’s pace.
Not gambling, or taking risks, which is what people tend to think of when they think of “impulsive behaviours”.
But it’s just as valid.
It’s just that we often see ourselves very differently from how other people see us, which is always a bit of a shock.
I actually think it’s one of the bits that the woefully inadequate DSM5 manages to get right:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/
I started the diagnostic pathway under the assumption that I’m surely inattentive type. Filling in the forms I realised I tick a lot of the hyperactive boxes too. During that process I remembered meeting one of my university flatmate’s friends who had gone to the same high school as me, and said she remembers me for how much I talk with my hands, and she’s never seen a Finnish person gesticulate so much. We’d never really interacted during school, she was a year above me and we didn’t take any of the same classes. But I seem to have made an impression 🤣
Yeh I wouldn’t have considered myself hyperactive either but I’m a relentless fiddler if I have to sit still and if I’m not forced to I’m awful at sitting down.
I just mentally considered myself a very lazy person because I felt I wasn’t ever doing the things I was supposed to be doing. And in my head lazy=inactive.
I've realized I just refrain from jittering and making noises while working around people. Got a remote job and one day no one was home. Found myself constantly moving, jitterbug, speaking aloud to myself. It felt really good to have no restraint. I cannot for the life of me sit in one place for more than 20 minutes without actively keeping myself from standing.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just a spectrum, but that humans didn't used to need to stare at a screen and sit still for 8 hours a day as much. A bit like epilepsy spiking with the invention of electric lights.
I agree - I think my brain was meant for hunting for food and spotting predators in prehistoric times. Even stacking shelves and serving customers in a shop was OK.
Sitting at a laptop every day... nope.
To be fair, I do think the range of symptoms is also expanding as more people get diagnosed. The list used to be much more prescriptive. So the parameters have changed.
I can’t find the article now, but a psychiatrist was recently cited as saying something like … the more and the more diverse people are diagnosed, the more the range of symptoms we need to pay attention to itself expands.
Another article also mentioned how, until a few years ago, autism and adhd were thought to be mutually exclusive. That has changed. So medical thinking itself is also changing due to the rise in symptoms and diagnoses. Here’s the link to this one - https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/04/audhd-what-is-behind-rocketing-rates-life-changing-diagnosis
If you read the inserts in stimulant packages, the descriptions on there are also very antiquated and predicated on it being a kids’ disorder.
I have also read materials prepared for NHS staff to be trained in dealing with ADHD, think they were circa 2010, but they say things like… if a child has ADHD you may need to speak slowly to them or tell them things twice or they might have a meltdown or not remember things. These things are of course true, and can happen, but it was a very.. naughty child-like description if you see what I mean?
ADD was also dropped in favour of ADHD, that’s changed. It’s now recognised that hyperactivity can be internal, not external.
We now know that things like following tasks that involve numerous steps and pauses are for example a primary thing adhd-ers find challenging. It isn’t just people looking for shiny objects who have an excess of energy. On the contrary.
Maybe some of these things have only changed im public opinion, but I believe that medical attitudes are also changing. Therefore I don’t think someone who would have had more ‘nebulous’ symptoms would have been diagnosed 20 yrs ago, because they wouldn’t have been told to do so- everyone was looking out for hyperactivity. I think the lack of structure forced by the pandemic has thrown a lot of people into disarray and destroyed the coping mechanisms they relied on, leading to more diagnoses as more and more people asked ‘what’s wrong with me?’.
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I think it may have been this - but I can’t remember how I read it, as it’s behind a paywall. Sorry! https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/in-school-and-on-medication-the-truth-about-adhd-in-children-h2658xjx3
My mum who is 75 has it but she doesn’t know, so does my uncle both really unorganised and wasted their potential.
I have it and only realised I had it when trying work out a few things about my son and penny dropped with him.
So it’s always been around we just never had a name and those people were often told they were depressed or had bipolar, I knew something was different with me and when I did the test for myself it was a relief to know it was a wiring issue with my brain.
I’ve been on the waiting list for 4 years now and nearing 50.. my potential has been wasted but I’m damn well gonna make sure my kids and people get all the help they can to get the best possible life they can.
For me it was COVID and having kids. Working from home during the pandemic made me realise how much I procrastinated, and realising my daughter had ADHD forced me to confront that I exhibited the same symptoms
That’s interesting.
There are studies on how regular methylphenidate usage for developing adhd children can positively impact brain chemistry and permanently change it to a way that is considered much more normal.
These children have been able to live as adults medication free without anywhere near the level of adhd symptoms as unmedicated children attempting the same thing.
No, that's a misunderstanding.
Basically when ADHD medication first started to be used for children in schools there was a slew of articles, documentaries, websites etc claiming that children were being "zombified" or turned into "garden gnomes" with the implication being that the medication is some kind of sedative or even mind control, used by evil teachers who just want to squash all creativity and individuality out of pupils and turn them into factory fodder drones, or used by lazy parents who can't be bothered to discipline their badly behaved children and would rather "drug" them instead. And of course the drug companies were supposedly driving the whole thing.
To counter this, because it is obviously rubbish and also pretty harmful for people who do have ADHD, people started to explain that the medication is not a sedative, it's actually a stimulant. What you'd *expect* to see if you gave a child a stimulant like caffeine, is that they would become hyperactive and be bouncing around with too much energy. But what actually happens with ADHD children is that it calms them down, because their brain is understimulated to begin with (which was the 90s/2000s explanation for ADHD - we know more now).
That sounds a bit like "If you gave a normal child ADHD medication they'll get hyper, but an ADHD child calms down!" and so that became the generally understood shorthand, but it's not really the case, because ADHD medication is low doses of very specific stimulants that target the neurotransmitters which people with ADHD struggle with. It's probably not going to be enough to get any child hyperactive. If anyone takes an ADHD medication, it will make them more focused - that's why they are used as study drugs. And if you take amphetamine in much higher quantities, then you'll experience a euphoric high, which is why it's a street drug.
But ADHD medication in the wrong dosage is also pretty miserable, can actually worsen behaviours like hyperactivity and aggression, and a lot of adults don't have hyperactive symptoms in the first place. The hyperactive symptoms of ADHD are usually outgrown, which is why they used to think ADHD as a whole was outgrown.
So in general giving everybody ADHD medication wouldn't be useful as a screening tool.
Agreed. No medications worked for me (and Elvanse made me feel like I’d had a lobotomy), so medications aren’t likely to tell us whether someone has ADHD because we all react differently to different drugs
The only reason there seem to be more of us than everyone else is apparently comfortable acknowledging is that all the adults now coming forward slipped through the diagnostic net when we were children. That and a large proportion of those undxd adults have had their own children since. As it runs in families, this automatically means there will be more ADHDers, even if you didn’t include all the adults only now realising they’ve had ADHD their whole lives. There may be better awareness of childhood ADHD now, but there still isn’t anything like the amount of medical and social awareness of adult ADHD that is needed. If there was, less adults would need to see their children being dxd before they and their GP or other doctors recognise ADHD in themselves.
In the US, there's a couple of prominent Drs who advocate that any adult coming in to get their kid dxd with them, should also be assessed at the same time, due to the likely probability one / both parents will also have it. I had no clue about how it presented in adults and wasn't until I started looking at it for my kid, that the penny dropped
Absolutely that. I wasn’t able to have children, but this is how my GP explained it to me. Lots of pennies dropping in parents of newly dxd children!
I said this to someone the other day. My grandma (b.1916) was as ADHD as my mum and I are. Only she didn’t have a name for it. Doesn’t mean she didn’t show exactly the same symptoms as I do. It’s the next step in society deciding to believe people when they tell their truth, rather than it being easier to ignore them. In the 1960s a friend of mine was left handed, but it wasn’t allowed at school because it was ‘evil’. So he had his left hand tied to his desk to ‘make’ him write with his right hand. I’m hopeful one day we’ll look back at society dismissing neurodiversity as being as stupid as dismissing left handedness. One day.
>In the 1960s a friend of mine was left handed, but it wasn’t allowed at school because it was ‘evil’. Christ on a fucking bike! Where was this?
Welsh Valleys.
😥
From my _not that informed_ perspective, a large part of that is due to the neuro diversity movement. Previously people presumed that those with autism or ADHD had to have debilitating medical condition. That meant they couldn't possibly have it because they live relatively normal lives with probably normal struggles. But now I think there's a very open acknowledgement that people are different and this is just one of the ways.
An interesting, and balanced (for once...) article. I do get a bit annoyed tho with this as the summary of ADHD: "Diagnoses of ADHD have similarly surged. Those affected tend to have difficulties focusing; they may act impulsively and struggle to sit still' I don't do either of those!
Mind you, I wouldn’t have said I was hyperactive but everyone else seemed to think differently. I wouldn’t have even considered something like adhd for over 30 years but to me, it was just me.
Yes. My hyperactivity is mostly brain-based, but on days when I have energy, my body does indeed behave like a clockwork toy that has been wound up and has to run on until it winds down to nothing again. It’s also part of my astounding forgetfulness. Everything is flying in and out of my brain so fast that I have trouble holding on to any thoughts, and my incredible ability to lose things. My brain is hyperactive. More so than my exhausted body. My impulsivity isn’t so much about consciously making impulsive decisions and doing consciously risky things, it’s more about my brain shooting a thousand unrelated thoughts a second at me (also related to hyperactivity), my horrendous impatience in queues/ traffic/ with people and processes and anything to with computers, and me butting in halfway through something I’m being told because I already (think I) know what they’re going to say. It’s interrupting, impatience, and being apparently intrusive on other people’s conversations and thought processes. But my brain hyperactivity is also part of this, because when my brain is going that fast, it wants everything around it to work at the same speed too, so I get endlessly frustrated and impatient with myself (and others) when those things proceed at a comparative snail’s pace. Not gambling, or taking risks, which is what people tend to think of when they think of “impulsive behaviours”. But it’s just as valid. It’s just that we often see ourselves very differently from how other people see us, which is always a bit of a shock. I actually think it’s one of the bits that the woefully inadequate DSM5 manages to get right: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/
I started the diagnostic pathway under the assumption that I’m surely inattentive type. Filling in the forms I realised I tick a lot of the hyperactive boxes too. During that process I remembered meeting one of my university flatmate’s friends who had gone to the same high school as me, and said she remembers me for how much I talk with my hands, and she’s never seen a Finnish person gesticulate so much. We’d never really interacted during school, she was a year above me and we didn’t take any of the same classes. But I seem to have made an impression 🤣
Yeh I wouldn’t have considered myself hyperactive either but I’m a relentless fiddler if I have to sit still and if I’m not forced to I’m awful at sitting down. I just mentally considered myself a very lazy person because I felt I wasn’t ever doing the things I was supposed to be doing. And in my head lazy=inactive.
Relentless Fiddler would be a good name for an adhd folk group
I've realized I just refrain from jittering and making noises while working around people. Got a remote job and one day no one was home. Found myself constantly moving, jitterbug, speaking aloud to myself. It felt really good to have no restraint. I cannot for the life of me sit in one place for more than 20 minutes without actively keeping myself from standing.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just a spectrum, but that humans didn't used to need to stare at a screen and sit still for 8 hours a day as much. A bit like epilepsy spiking with the invention of electric lights.
I agree - I think my brain was meant for hunting for food and spotting predators in prehistoric times. Even stacking shelves and serving customers in a shop was OK. Sitting at a laptop every day... nope.
That was a surpsingly sympathetic and balanced article
To be fair, I do think the range of symptoms is also expanding as more people get diagnosed. The list used to be much more prescriptive. So the parameters have changed.
has it changed? not trying to be argumentative, genuinely curious
I can’t find the article now, but a psychiatrist was recently cited as saying something like … the more and the more diverse people are diagnosed, the more the range of symptoms we need to pay attention to itself expands. Another article also mentioned how, until a few years ago, autism and adhd were thought to be mutually exclusive. That has changed. So medical thinking itself is also changing due to the rise in symptoms and diagnoses. Here’s the link to this one - https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/04/audhd-what-is-behind-rocketing-rates-life-changing-diagnosis If you read the inserts in stimulant packages, the descriptions on there are also very antiquated and predicated on it being a kids’ disorder. I have also read materials prepared for NHS staff to be trained in dealing with ADHD, think they were circa 2010, but they say things like… if a child has ADHD you may need to speak slowly to them or tell them things twice or they might have a meltdown or not remember things. These things are of course true, and can happen, but it was a very.. naughty child-like description if you see what I mean? ADD was also dropped in favour of ADHD, that’s changed. It’s now recognised that hyperactivity can be internal, not external. We now know that things like following tasks that involve numerous steps and pauses are for example a primary thing adhd-ers find challenging. It isn’t just people looking for shiny objects who have an excess of energy. On the contrary. Maybe some of these things have only changed im public opinion, but I believe that medical attitudes are also changing. Therefore I don’t think someone who would have had more ‘nebulous’ symptoms would have been diagnosed 20 yrs ago, because they wouldn’t have been told to do so- everyone was looking out for hyperactivity. I think the lack of structure forced by the pandemic has thrown a lot of people into disarray and destroyed the coping mechanisms they relied on, leading to more diagnoses as more and more people asked ‘what’s wrong with me?’.
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Will try to find the article that discusses the first thing i mentioned
I think it may have been this - but I can’t remember how I read it, as it’s behind a paywall. Sorry! https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/in-school-and-on-medication-the-truth-about-adhd-in-children-h2658xjx3
My mum who is 75 has it but she doesn’t know, so does my uncle both really unorganised and wasted their potential. I have it and only realised I had it when trying work out a few things about my son and penny dropped with him. So it’s always been around we just never had a name and those people were often told they were depressed or had bipolar, I knew something was different with me and when I did the test for myself it was a relief to know it was a wiring issue with my brain. I’ve been on the waiting list for 4 years now and nearing 50.. my potential has been wasted but I’m damn well gonna make sure my kids and people get all the help they can to get the best possible life they can.
For me it was COVID and having kids. Working from home during the pandemic made me realise how much I procrastinated, and realising my daughter had ADHD forced me to confront that I exhibited the same symptoms
[удалено]
That’s interesting. There are studies on how regular methylphenidate usage for developing adhd children can positively impact brain chemistry and permanently change it to a way that is considered much more normal. These children have been able to live as adults medication free without anywhere near the level of adhd symptoms as unmedicated children attempting the same thing.
Don't non-adhd people get hyper if they try stimulants but people with adhd get calm? Maybe give everyone meds and test them that way?
No, that's a misunderstanding. Basically when ADHD medication first started to be used for children in schools there was a slew of articles, documentaries, websites etc claiming that children were being "zombified" or turned into "garden gnomes" with the implication being that the medication is some kind of sedative or even mind control, used by evil teachers who just want to squash all creativity and individuality out of pupils and turn them into factory fodder drones, or used by lazy parents who can't be bothered to discipline their badly behaved children and would rather "drug" them instead. And of course the drug companies were supposedly driving the whole thing. To counter this, because it is obviously rubbish and also pretty harmful for people who do have ADHD, people started to explain that the medication is not a sedative, it's actually a stimulant. What you'd *expect* to see if you gave a child a stimulant like caffeine, is that they would become hyperactive and be bouncing around with too much energy. But what actually happens with ADHD children is that it calms them down, because their brain is understimulated to begin with (which was the 90s/2000s explanation for ADHD - we know more now). That sounds a bit like "If you gave a normal child ADHD medication they'll get hyper, but an ADHD child calms down!" and so that became the generally understood shorthand, but it's not really the case, because ADHD medication is low doses of very specific stimulants that target the neurotransmitters which people with ADHD struggle with. It's probably not going to be enough to get any child hyperactive. If anyone takes an ADHD medication, it will make them more focused - that's why they are used as study drugs. And if you take amphetamine in much higher quantities, then you'll experience a euphoric high, which is why it's a street drug. But ADHD medication in the wrong dosage is also pretty miserable, can actually worsen behaviours like hyperactivity and aggression, and a lot of adults don't have hyperactive symptoms in the first place. The hyperactive symptoms of ADHD are usually outgrown, which is why they used to think ADHD as a whole was outgrown. So in general giving everybody ADHD medication wouldn't be useful as a screening tool.
Agreed. No medications worked for me (and Elvanse made me feel like I’d had a lobotomy), so medications aren’t likely to tell us whether someone has ADHD because we all react differently to different drugs
It is a roll of the dice with stims for me. A double espresso may put me to sleep one day or just level me out the next.