All of this applies to Autism, as well.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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According to the administration at a school I’m familiar with, at least 50% of the 5th grade class has ADHD.
So, not having ADHD is the disorder.
50%?
The national stats are ~1:10 people have it. 50% is a huge anomaly. Something isn’t right.
At what point does it just become a personality trait, like introversion vs extroversion?
When it stops having negative outcomes on peoples' lives.
My cousin was diagnosed by a brain scan. She signed up to be part of a clinical trial for something else, got kicked out of the trial because her fMRI showed she had ADHD.
So if we can literally scan someone's brain and diagnose them from a picture instead of all these vague "describe your symptom" guessing... why don't we?
Money
It's quite costly to run an fMRI. Not needed if you can get the same results more or less from a questionnaire.
In my professional experience, it can be hard to tell between ADHD symptoms and CPTSD symptoms. The checklist is not a great way to diagnose people. We usually do a lot more assessments, I also use a computerized test to measure reaction time and error commission.
I wish we (therapists) at least had the option to order an MRI or recommend a doctor orders one in difficult cases (I can do the latter but they will just laugh at me).
Wait, is there an actual chance to "see" ADHD in an MRI image? I was under the impression that we can't do that (yet) and the only way to diagnose was through questionnaires, attention testing and such. That's what I was told by the doctor who ultimately diagnosed me two years ago
Ya, it could be better. Maybe a compromise would be to go with EEG machines which are less costly and can probably still differentiate fairly well (maybe).
I would be down with that as long as it’s a viable way to diagnose (I don’t know enough off the top of my head about it).
Basically anything other than self-report and the clinician’s opinion would be nice.
I was diagnosed in my late 50's. It was a complicated process because there is another mental health co-morbidity that shares some traits.
After going through the more than a year long process, we are working on dialing in the meds.
One of the challenges for diagnosis is that the attention economy is shortening a lot of people's attention span, causing many people to feel that they have ADHD, and diverting resources from diagnosing people who actually have ADHD. Not saying that the issue shouldn't be addressed. The combination of these factors, and the rather long and complicated process of a proper diagnosis is a challenge.
Serious question: how would we be able to detect if we’ve over diagnosed a mental disorder such as ADHD? What would evidence for that look like?
From the linked research article:
‘Over-diagnosis’ is observed when the prevalence of diagnoses made in clinical services, referred to as administrative prevalence (based on healthcare databases or insurance claims) exceeds prevalence estimates based on accurate assessments in representative population-based samples. Over-diagnosis may occur when diagnostic criteria are not applied with sufficient rigour, leading to false-positive cases. Over-diagnosis may also happen when people inappropriately self-diagnose. Notably, for individuals with milder or subclinical symptoms, a diagnosis can sometimes do more harm than good, creating stigma or leading to low-benefit treatments with significant side-effects.
So is Admin Prevalence > Prevalence Estimates where the estimates are made based on representative population-based samples?
Isn't it strange how we discovered a lot more stars after inventing telescopes?
Obviously there was an unrelated increase in stars born at that exact time.
This is actually the most apt analogy for the whole "sudden increase in diagnosis" bullshit line that anti-vaxxers and anti-science people continually vomit out.
I'm in no way an anti-vaxxer or anti-science (I'm a researcher myself). I still think it can be justified to look closely at the large increase in, and volume of, various mental disorders. First of all: There's no doubt that a lot more people are being diagnosed due to better diagnosis tools.
However, a major difference between psychological and somatic illness is that the divide between sick and healthy is (typically) a lot sharper in the latter case. Either you have an injury or infection, or you don't, and we can measure that. In the case of e.g. depression or ADHD, there's a much wider gray zone from e.g. "healthy person having a bad day" to "clinically depressed".
The point I'm getting at is this: When a certain percentage of the population is diagnosed with a disorder, you have to ask whether we've started diagnosing ordinary human existence as a disease. Alternatively, you have to start looking at a systematic level for why an enormous portion of the population has a certain disorder. Where that limit should be is an open question, but I would argue that when something like 10-20 % of the population has a specific disorder, we're no longer just looking at individual cases of disease but rather at (a) the possibility that the criteria for diagnosis are two wide, so we're catching "healthy" people with it, or (b) we have a society-level problem (e.g. an epidemic).
I know of areas with ADHD-rates around 20 %. For a somatic illness, we would never let that kind of infection rate pass without taking a closer look at what's going on at the societal level.
To try to explain the increase of stars in the universe without it's correlation with vaccine rates is just disingenuous. \s
Everyone knows that if the nebula takes paracetamol during pregnancy it increases the chance of K-type star creation.
The nebula: "Cut me sing some slack, i had an astronomical headache"
It’s almost as if we’ve gotten better at understanding the condition overall and in nuance.
Most data suggests it is under diagnosed.
Especially in women, like by a lot.
This is a recurring issue. Too many trans people? Liberal agenda spreading!
It’s like they don’t understand causations.
I believe that we are diagnosing at an appropriate rate (maybe even still under). I do think that we are getting better at recognizing the signs, having resources, and finding support. But I also think there is an increase not only attributed to better diagnosing. I think that the amount of unstructured screen time before kids are able to develop an independent thought is also creating a myriad of neurological disorders. Not saying that kids with ADHD or anything else aren’t more susceptible, because they definitely are, but I think we’ll start to find that it’s also part of the cause and not just a symptom.
it is still undoubtedly the case, however, that there are plenty that self-diagnose because people on social media make it seem "cool" or to be special in some way, without any basis on actual symptoms. Same happens for a lot of other mental health conditions too.