science

I'm just sick of being unmedicated because there's always a shortage of medicine or my insurance wants to be a fuck nugget. I can't even function properly without mine and have severe anxiety over losing my job because of this shit. Fuck American healthcare, fuck insurance companies.

I have ADHD along with many other learning disorders and trust me, ADHD is really being over diagnosed. Children nowadays spend 12 to 15 hours a day nonstop doomscrolling short form content on TikTok and of course that is gonna impact their ability to concentrate and focus. 

Many doctors who diagnose those things are old (in my country, for example, it takes DECADES to be allowed to work in the field) and are so old they're just not prepared for ts so they just flag everyone as ADHD 

I think that it is a combination of better diagnostic practices, diagnostic ambiguities, and ever popular exploitation. I know individuals with ADHD who fit the bill to me, and I know individuals who acknowledge they don’t have it and yet have a prescription. So, there is some unfortunate noise in the statistics, because of abusers.

The experts whose jobs are dependent on over-diagnosis.

This thread somehow brought out some of the most misinformed, boomer-brain takes imaginable and comes dangerously close to anti-intellectualism. We can all agree that labels can be reductive and unhelpful, but as someone with a neurological disability, seeing people debate whether a disorder that makes it incredibly hard to enjoy my life is even real or not is fucking horrible.

Why is there never any nuance in these discussions? We can both believe that under-diagnosis occurs, and that over-diagnosis occurs. 20% of all pupils in the UK are now classified as so disabled that they require specialised assistance. "SEND" assistance for this can range from free taxi services to and from school (which recently reached £1.2 billion), to support payments, to special assistants in school. The number of ECHP students (those with the highest needs) increasing by 71%, from 253,679 in 2018 to 434,354 in 2024. SEND spending is out of control.

So what happened, exactly? The average child disability rate in Europe is 4.6%. How did the UK end up with 20%? Did the UK suffer a catastrophic nuclear event? A war? Famine? None of the above. It is clear that categorisation has become EXTREMELY loose over time on average. This does not mean that there are not children who are struggling to get diagnosed with ADHD. However ADHD and autism are a spectrum disorder. It is not binary. The UK has drawn the line far closer to the normal side of the spectrum than any other nation on Earth. If costs continue to rise at this rate, it risks destabilising the entire health system. Public sentiment will shift, and we risk undermining children getting any diagnosis at all.

IMHO, this requires at least two tactics at the same time. 1) Invest sufficiently into diagnosis resources. Stringing parents and children along for years while they wait in the system can make the issue much worse than it needs to be. 2) Draw the diagnostic line closer to where the rest of Europe does it. This will mean far fewer children are diagnosed with disabilities, but those who genuinely have a disability are treated much faster and actually receive the resources they need.

The moral panic of overdiagnosis comes from conservatism's obsession with hypernormalcy. Basically unless your really-really failed to be normal, you're not allowed to stray from it, and even then, it would be good if you were normal, because they like the virtue of normalcy, and also thinking is hard, and also also change is bad.

Yes this explains modern transphobia a lot. Some admitted, that it has to be "all undone", because people stopped trying to be normal first and foremost. This also partly explains gatekeeping in fandoms.

If ADHD is common enough to be prelevant in 5% of population... Then to me it seems like its not something we should be drugging people for, but instead adjust the lives to it? I mean we don't give "righ-handeness" drugs to left-handed people.