Adult ADHD diagnoses

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you take ADHD medicine and you don’t have ADHD, it doesn’t really do much for you. That’s how you know it’s not over diagnosed.

What about those college kids taking Ritalin? Seems like some of these drugs do help everyone, to some extent.

What gives you the idea Ritalin or other drugs are helping "everyone, to some extent"?

First, not "everyone" takes the drugs.

Second, the drugs don't really "help" people who don't have ADHD. But, some chase the high and take them anyway.

Third, not all of the drugs used are stimulants.

Hope you read up on the topic before spreading incorrect info.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok, I'll take the other view.

I think it is BS. I'm sorry, but if you did well in school, did well socially, got through grad school, and got through the first 10 years of a career in a tough field like law or medicine, all without an ADHD diagnosis or any medication, you don't have ADHD.

I actually think what is happening here is that people who have always achieved and been successful hit their 30s or 40s and struggle with something. Anything. Maybe they have a job where they aren't the top worker. Or they just get burned out. Maybe they have a hard time with dating. Maybe it's infertility or postpartum depression. And as people who have always succeeded at everything they do, in part because they are smart and capable and also often in part because they've had a lot of support from family and good financial situations, they cast about looking for an external reason why they aren't nailing it. And ADHD is an extremely convenient scapegoat.

I also think the medical community collaborates in this by constantly suggesting ADHD as a possible cause to any mental health problem they can't fix. I know several woman for whom ADHD was suggested to them as a diagnosis by doctors and others who don't specialize in it (GPs, therapists) when these women came to them complaining of symptoms that could be a lot of things -- anxiety, trouble sleeping, difficulty in relationships, etc.

I think it's total BS. I think they are just struggling with what a lot of us struggle with. Juggling kids and work, midlife malaise, social anxiety that sometimes gets worse as you age, etc.

And yes, ADHD meds will help you focus even if you don't have ADHD. This is why there is a black market for ADHD meds on college campuses that spikes during exam periods or when papers are due and then goes away. But as with people who actually have ADHD, the benefits also decline over time.

Looking forward to getting yelled at here. Just want to say in advance that the reason my post made you so mad is that you are worried it's true.

Not mad here. I actually understand why people think it could all be bs. It does seem like diagnoses are increasing in women. But it's hard to understand unless you are actually in it. Be grateful you're not experiencing it, PP. If you were, you would be able to see it's not bs. It's really, truly, much worse than just struggling with the day-to-day and midlife issues.

You still have not explained how a person who has clearly been extremely high functioning for their entire life with absolutely no academic, career, or social issues would suddenly have a diagnosis that is supposed to present in childhood and where the diagnostic criteria include difficulties in those areas.

How can someone who has clearly demonstrated a high level of executive functioning for several decades suddenly have a disorder that is defined by a lack of executive functioning? Explain it.

How about you give us an example of the person who had "absolutely no academic, career, or social issues"? You go first.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you take ADHD medicine and you don’t have ADHD, it doesn’t really do much for you. That’s how you know it’s not over diagnosed.

Not true. ADHD stimulant medications are literally speed - so anyone who takes them will feel the psychological effects, which to some are pleasurable and give the sensation of having more energy. That is why they are called “uppers.”

You are showcasing your ignorance. Not all ADHD medications are stimulants.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you take ADHD medicine and you don’t have ADHD, it doesn’t really do much for you. That’s how you know it’s not over diagnosed.

Yes it does. It’s speed.

No. Not all ADHD meds are stimulants. You are spouting incorrect info, you troll.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

If you have actual ADHD then everyone knows.

Nope.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My question is this. Why does it matter?

Why does it matter if people are being incorrectly diagnosed for a disorder and prescribed stimulant medication which, oh by the way, is tightly controlled and often in short supply? Why does it matter that a group of high functioning adults are suddenly using ADHD as an excuse for thing like "being rude" or "not wanting to do things no one wants to do"? Why does it matter that people who don't have ADHD are trying to make themselves the poster children for a real disorder that can be debilitating for the kids and adults who actually have it and have struggled with it their entire lives?

Hmmm, I can think of reasons it matters.

Hey troll!

Congrats! You win the cookie. You can go away now.

You persist in saying stimulants are the only drugs for ADHD. They are not the only drugs used for ADHD.

You are wildly incorrect here, and I hope you will do some research and reading to gain the correct information about this issue.

You probably won't, though, because you love to troll away, you sad thing you!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

You should be mad at the people claiming to have ADHD who don’t.

This. Not one person on this thread has claimed ADHD isn't real. The question is why/how people who have a demonstrated history with high achievement that can only be accomplished via sustained executive function are suddenly getting ADHD diagnoses.

And it is sudden. Even 10 years ago, this wasn't a thing. Now I know a dozen people diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s and 40s, all with impressive resumes and graduate level educations. Of course people are going to ask questions about that trend. It doesn't make sense.

One issue is how you define “high achievement.” Someone can look like they are high achievers from the outside, but you have no idea what’s really going on.

What does that even mean?

If some successfully graduates from high school, college, and law school with good grades, passes the bar, and works successfully as a lawyer for a number of years, they have achieved difficult academic and professional accomplishments that require a fairly high level of executive functioning.

ADHD is a chronic, debilitating disorder that disrupts executive functioning via some combination of the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD exists on a spectrum with some people struggling more than others, but in order to qualify as ADHD, these symptoms must combine to actually impact the individuals ability to function normally. While all humans may experience these symptoms in some level and combination at some point in their lives, a person with ADHD has them persistently in a way that inhibits normal academic, professional, and social functioning.

Thus, if you are able to function not only normally but at a high degree of difficulty in your academic, professional, and social life for decades, you do not have ADHD. You may have other issues. You may be burned out at work, dealing with depression, anxiety or other mental health concerns, having a midlife crisis, or simply in the wrong career or relationships. But unless you have struggled to function at school, work, and socially due to ADHD symptoms for your entire life, you don't have ADHD.

On paper, my mom is a high-achieving professional (world-class) with family and friends. But in real life, she is such a freaking mess and has always been. She is extremely cognitively gifted and hyperfocused at work. My sibling and I, are less smart, and our ADHD is much more obvious, but we've been always "googd kids", and you'd never guess that mom is a all over the place at home. When younger, there were days when she just did not come from work because she was so hyperfocused on some interesting task. I won't list all the impulsive crap she did over the years, but I was much more tame as a teenager than she was at 40. Again, none of that would be obvious, and I'd never tell a soul. My dad is also a good partner for her, he forgives her impulsivity and goes along with her ideas. That is to say, my mom struggles everywhere, but you won't know based on the achievements.

This sounds like bipolar manía and/or personality issues. That’s the problem with calling everything “ADHD.”

The problem is in giving diagnosis on the internet. She is was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety by a professional at 60. And, given that my sibling and I were both independently diagnosed with ADHD, I’d rely on the professional opinion, not yours.

DP but as we've discussed, it can be exceedingly easy to be diagnosed with ADHD "by a professional" these days.

If your mom was diagnosed 15 years ago, I buy it. If it was within the last 5 years... it's a super trendy diagnosis and the idea of someone being diagnosed with a disorder that definitionally presents in early childhood makes me skeptical.

Who am I to pass judgment on your mom's diagnosis? No one. But don't go discussing it on the internet if you don't want people to weigh in.

By all means, keep trying to tear down and delegitimize ADHDers’ experience with your weird jealousy or whatever it is that’s making you judge other people instead of looking inward. Want me to diagnose you with NPD or low IQ?

They are definitely low IQ.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

You should be mad at the people claiming to have ADHD who don’t.

This. Not one person on this thread has claimed ADHD isn't real. The question is why/how people who have a demonstrated history with high achievement that can only be accomplished via sustained executive function are suddenly getting ADHD diagnoses.

And it is sudden. Even 10 years ago, this wasn't a thing. Now I know a dozen people diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s and 40s, all with impressive resumes and graduate level educations. Of course people are going to ask questions about that trend. It doesn't make sense.

One issue is how you define “high achievement.” Someone can look like they are high achievers from the outside, but you have no idea what’s really going on.

What does that even mean?

If some successfully graduates from high school, college, and law school with good grades, passes the bar, and works successfully as a lawyer for a number of years, they have achieved difficult academic and professional accomplishments that require a fairly high level of executive functioning.

ADHD is a chronic, debilitating disorder that disrupts executive functioning via some combination of the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD exists on a spectrum with some people struggling more than others, but in order to qualify as ADHD, these symptoms must combine to actually impact the individuals ability to function normally. While all humans may experience these symptoms in some level and combination at some point in their lives, a person with ADHD has them persistently in a way that inhibits normal academic, professional, and social functioning.

Thus, if you are able to function not only normally but at a high degree of difficulty in your academic, professional, and social life for decades, you do not have ADHD. You may have other issues. You may be burned out at work, dealing with depression, anxiety or other mental health concerns, having a midlife crisis, or simply in the wrong career or relationships. But unless you have struggled to function at school, work, and socially due to ADHD symptoms for your entire life, you don't have ADHD.

On paper, my mom is a high-achieving professional (world-class) with family and friends. But in real life, she is such a freaking mess and has always been. She is extremely cognitively gifted and hyperfocused at work. My sibling and I, are less smart, and our ADHD is much more obvious, but we've been always "googd kids", and you'd never guess that mom is a all over the place at home. When younger, there were days when she just did not come from work because she was so hyperfocused on some interesting task. I won't list all the impulsive crap she did over the years, but I was much more tame as a teenager than she was at 40. Again, none of that would be obvious, and I'd never tell a soul. My dad is also a good partner for her, he forgives her impulsivity and goes along with her ideas. That is to say, my mom struggles everywhere, but you won't know based on the achievements.

This sounds like bipolar manía and/or personality issues. That’s the problem with calling everything “ADHD.”

The problem is in giving diagnosis on the internet. She is was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety by a professional at 60. And, given that my sibling and I were both independently diagnosed with ADHD, I’d rely on the professional opinion, not yours.

DP but as we've discussed, it can be exceedingly easy to be diagnosed with ADHD "by a professional" these days.

If your mom was diagnosed 15 years ago, I buy it. If it was within the last 5 years... it's a super trendy diagnosis and the idea of someone being diagnosed with a disorder that definitionally presents in early childhood makes me skeptical.

Who am I to pass judgment on your mom's diagnosis? No one. But don't go discussing it on the internet if you don't want people to weigh in.

Yes, my mistake of making an example of my mom. Yet, I don’t see where I invited anyone to weigh in her diagnosis?

Speaking of tbe diagnostics, the area made a big progress in ADHD detection and treatment in the past 15 years. Would you want to be examined for cancer using the current instruments or the ones that were used 15 years ago? Same here.

There has been virtually no advancement in "ADHD detection" in the last 15 years. Search for biomarkers? Failed. Comparing this to cancer is a joke. Of course cancer detection is better now than it was 15 years ago, cancer can be tested for via physical tests on bio material, and cancerous growths can be seen on scans. ADHD is diagnosed using a questionaire. Do you think today's questionnaire is groundbreakingly better than the one they used 15 years ago? It's not. In theory, a good diagnostician would also do a behavior analysis and a complete workup that examines whether there may be another medical explanation for the symptoms, but this virtually never happens when people are diagnosed as an adult. You do see this when kid's are diagnosed and it's common for physicians to observe the way the child behaves in the exam room and collect information from the child's parents about their behavior at home and at school. But with adults, doctors (or NPs as is often the case, usually people with no specialized knowledge about ADHD) simply take the word of adult requesting the prescription.

Treatment for ADHD is somewhat better than it used to be (far more options for both stimulant and non-stimulant medication, and pharmaceutical advances in how the medication is released into the system) but still very problematic. Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. There is also a trend of people choosing selectively to take meds when they "need" them and avoid them when they don't, which raises questions about what it means to have ADHD.

Can you point me at the discussion of the failed biomarker reasearch? I believe they found biomarkers but are not at the stage of usign them at scale.

What's wrong either the "ADHD detection" expression for you to put it in quotes?

I did a three-hour battery of tests followed by a bunch questionnaires and therapist report to get diagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist. I was 29.

"Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. " This contradcts by what my psychiatrist told me, and she's a research-practitioner.

People dropping their meds is a common problem in mental health treatment. Nothing specific to ADHD.

There are no biomarkers for ADHD. Lots of people have looked. They have studied radiographic, molecular, physiologic, or histologic markers. The only ones that returned any possibility of diagnostic value was the radiographic markers (brain scans), however subsequent, larger studies did not find discernible differences in the brain scans of those diagnosed with ADHD and those without. Likewise, early molecular and physiologic studies found that there might be biomarkers in blood cells, but the results could not be repeated on a larger scale. Scientists remain hopeful they will find a biomarker for ADHD but despite multiple studies, there is no reliable biomarker and it's certainly never been used in diagnostics at ANY scale.

And while you may have undergone a "three-hour battery of tests" conducted by a psychiatrist when you got your diagnosis, that's not required to get an ADHD diagnosis and in fact almost no one does that. I'm guess you were tested for a variety of neurological disorders at the same time. But at the end of the day, the diagnostic screening for ADHD is a fairly brief questionnaire that relies on patients self-reporting their symptoms, and the diagnosis can be made by anyone capable of writing a scrip for ADHD meds. There is not some magically improved way of diagnosing ADHD versus 15 years ago that would explain the explosion in diagnoses.

In terms of the long-term impact of ADHD medication, follow-up studies on kids with diagnosed ADHD and prescribed stimulants consistently show that symptoms recur at higher rates past the two year mark. Researchers disagree over what this means. Some believe it shows that the positive impacts of meds diminish or disappear after two years. Others believe the studies are unreliable because so many kids stop taking their meds or take them unreliably as they age, plus researchers don't trust the self-reporting of both medication habits and symptoms in these follow up studies. Either way, it appears that kids don't experience the benefits of their stimulation medication after 24 months.

You might say, well okay, that's kids. Adults are better at taking medication and more likely to truthfully report their symptoms and medication habits. Sure, maybe. There's never been a longitudinal study of adults and ADHD medication so who knows. Into this blank space has rushed a broad variety of companies and pharmaceutical companies who are happy to profit off the general malaise of the population by selling them ADHD diagnoses and drugs. I guess that doesn't bother you. It bothers me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

You should be mad at the people claiming to have ADHD who don’t.

This. Not one person on this thread has claimed ADHD isn't real. The question is why/how people who have a demonstrated history with high achievement that can only be accomplished via sustained executive function are suddenly getting ADHD diagnoses.

And it is sudden. Even 10 years ago, this wasn't a thing. Now I know a dozen people diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s and 40s, all with impressive resumes and graduate level educations. Of course people are going to ask questions about that trend. It doesn't make sense.

One issue is how you define “high achievement.” Someone can look like they are high achievers from the outside, but you have no idea what’s really going on.

What does that even mean?

If some successfully graduates from high school, college, and law school with good grades, passes the bar, and works successfully as a lawyer for a number of years, they have achieved difficult academic and professional accomplishments that require a fairly high level of executive functioning.

ADHD is a chronic, debilitating disorder that disrupts executive functioning via some combination of the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD exists on a spectrum with some people struggling more than others, but in order to qualify as ADHD, these symptoms must combine to actually impact the individuals ability to function normally. While all humans may experience these symptoms in some level and combination at some point in their lives, a person with ADHD has them persistently in a way that inhibits normal academic, professional, and social functioning.

Thus, if you are able to function not only normally but at a high degree of difficulty in your academic, professional, and social life for decades, you do not have ADHD. You may have other issues. You may be burned out at work, dealing with depression, anxiety or other mental health concerns, having a midlife crisis, or simply in the wrong career or relationships. But unless you have struggled to function at school, work, and socially due to ADHD symptoms for your entire life, you don't have ADHD.

On paper, my mom is a high-achieving professional (world-class) with family and friends. But in real life, she is such a freaking mess and has always been. She is extremely cognitively gifted and hyperfocused at work. My sibling and I, are less smart, and our ADHD is much more obvious, but we've been always "googd kids", and you'd never guess that mom is a all over the place at home. When younger, there were days when she just did not come from work because she was so hyperfocused on some interesting task. I won't list all the impulsive crap she did over the years, but I was much more tame as a teenager than she was at 40. Again, none of that would be obvious, and I'd never tell a soul. My dad is also a good partner for her, he forgives her impulsivity and goes along with her ideas. That is to say, my mom struggles everywhere, but you won't know based on the achievements.

This sounds like bipolar manía and/or personality issues. That’s the problem with calling everything “ADHD.”

The problem is in giving diagnosis on the internet. She is was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety by a professional at 60. And, given that my sibling and I were both independently diagnosed with ADHD, I’d rely on the professional opinion, not yours.

DP but as we've discussed, it can be exceedingly easy to be diagnosed with ADHD "by a professional" these days.

If your mom was diagnosed 15 years ago, I buy it. If it was within the last 5 years... it's a super trendy diagnosis and the idea of someone being diagnosed with a disorder that definitionally presents in early childhood makes me skeptical.

Who am I to pass judgment on your mom's diagnosis? No one. But don't go discussing it on the internet if you don't want people to weigh in.

Yes, my mistake of making an example of my mom. Yet, I don’t see where I invited anyone to weigh in her diagnosis?

Speaking of tbe diagnostics, the area made a big progress in ADHD detection and treatment in the past 15 years. Would you want to be examined for cancer using the current instruments or the ones that were used 15 years ago? Same here.

There has been virtually no advancement in "ADHD detection" in the last 15 years. Search for biomarkers? Failed. Comparing this to cancer is a joke. Of course cancer detection is better now than it was 15 years ago, cancer can be tested for via physical tests on bio material, and cancerous growths can be seen on scans. ADHD is diagnosed using a questionaire. Do you think today's questionnaire is groundbreakingly better than the one they used 15 years ago? It's not. In theory, a good diagnostician would also do a behavior analysis and a complete workup that examines whether there may be another medical explanation for the symptoms, but this virtually never happens when people are diagnosed as an adult. You do see this when kid's are diagnosed and it's common for physicians to observe the way the child behaves in the exam room and collect information from the child's parents about their behavior at home and at school. But with adults, doctors (or NPs as is often the case, usually people with no specialized knowledge about ADHD) simply take the word of adult requesting the prescription.

Treatment for ADHD is somewhat better than it used to be (far more options for both stimulant and non-stimulant medication, and pharmaceutical advances in how the medication is released into the system) but still very problematic. Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. There is also a trend of people choosing selectively to take meds when they "need" them and avoid them when they don't, which raises questions about what it means to have ADHD.

Can you point me at the discussion of the failed biomarker reasearch? I believe they found biomarkers but are not at the stage of usign them at scale.

What's wrong either the "ADHD detection" expression for you to put it in quotes?

I did a three-hour battery of tests followed by a bunch questionnaires and therapist report to get diagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist. I was 29.

"Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. " This contradcts by what my psychiatrist told me, and she's a research-practitioner.

People dropping their meds is a common problem in mental health treatment. Nothing specific to ADHD.

There are no biomarkers for ADHD. Lots of people have looked. They have studied radiographic, molecular, physiologic, or histologic markers. The only ones that returned any possibility of diagnostic value was the radiographic markers (brain scans), however subsequent, larger studies did not find discernible differences in the brain scans of those diagnosed with ADHD and those without. Likewise, early molecular and physiologic studies found that there might be biomarkers in blood cells, but the results could not be repeated on a larger scale. Scientists remain hopeful they will find a biomarker for ADHD but despite multiple studies, there is no reliable biomarker and it's certainly never been used in diagnostics at ANY scale.

And while you may have undergone a "three-hour battery of tests" conducted by a psychiatrist when you got your diagnosis, that's not required to get an ADHD diagnosis and in fact almost no one does that. I'm guess you were tested for a variety of neurological disorders at the same time. But at the end of the day, the diagnostic screening for ADHD is a fairly brief questionnaire that relies on patients self-reporting their symptoms, and the diagnosis can be made by anyone capable of writing a scrip for ADHD meds. There is not some magically improved way of diagnosing ADHD versus 15 years ago that would explain the explosion in diagnoses.

In terms of the long-term impact of ADHD medication, follow-up studies on kids with diagnosed ADHD and prescribed stimulants consistently show that symptoms recur at higher rates past the two year mark. Researchers disagree over what this means. Some believe it shows that the positive impacts of meds diminish or disappear after two years. Others believe the studies are unreliable because so many kids stop taking their meds or take them unreliably as they age, plus researchers don't trust the self-reporting of both medication habits and symptoms in these follow up studies. Either way, it appears that kids don't experience the benefits of their stimulation medication after 24 months.

You might say, well okay, that's kids. Adults are better at taking medication and more likely to truthfully report their symptoms and medication habits. Sure, maybe. There's never been a longitudinal study of adults and ADHD medication so who knows. Into this blank space has rushed a broad variety of companies and pharmaceutical companies who are happy to profit off the general malaise of the population by selling them ADHD diagnoses and drugs. I guess that doesn't bother you. It bothers me.

What bothers me is the abscence of citations in your post and many false statements. It all points at you using AI to help you craft the argument Tell your chatgpt that biomarkers are not used for clnical diagnostics but it's misleading to say there are biomarkers for ADHD. Chen, H., Yang, Y., Odisho, D., Wu, S., Yi, C., & Oliver, B. G. (2023). Can biomarkers be used to diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?. Frontiers in psychiatry, 14, 1026616., for example - the first article I found since 2020.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because most girls are undiagnosed, do we go through life coping and struggling until they finally get a diagnosis. It’s a relief to know that there we weren’t crazy— there was a problem
all along and here are the ways to fix it.

This. It’s not about what’s happening now as much as it is making sense of what happened over the course of one’s life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

You should be mad at the people claiming to have ADHD who don’t.

This. Not one person on this thread has claimed ADHD isn't real. The question is why/how people who have a demonstrated history with high achievement that can only be accomplished via sustained executive function are suddenly getting ADHD diagnoses.

And it is sudden. Even 10 years ago, this wasn't a thing. Now I know a dozen people diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s and 40s, all with impressive resumes and graduate level educations. Of course people are going to ask questions about that trend. It doesn't make sense.

One issue is how you define “high achievement.” Someone can look like they are high achievers from the outside, but you have no idea what’s really going on.

What does that even mean?

If some successfully graduates from high school, college, and law school with good grades, passes the bar, and works successfully as a lawyer for a number of years, they have achieved difficult academic and professional accomplishments that require a fairly high level of executive functioning.

ADHD is a chronic, debilitating disorder that disrupts executive functioning via some combination of the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD exists on a spectrum with some people struggling more than others, but in order to qualify as ADHD, these symptoms must combine to actually impact the individuals ability to function normally. While all humans may experience these symptoms in some level and combination at some point in their lives, a person with ADHD has them persistently in a way that inhibits normal academic, professional, and social functioning.

Thus, if you are able to function not only normally but at a high degree of difficulty in your academic, professional, and social life for decades, you do not have ADHD. You may have other issues. You may be burned out at work, dealing with depression, anxiety or other mental health concerns, having a midlife crisis, or simply in the wrong career or relationships. But unless you have struggled to function at school, work, and socially due to ADHD symptoms for your entire life, you don't have ADHD.

It’s about the how, not the what. If you’re smart you can procrastinate and mess up until you are so far behind you panic, and then get a huge adrenaline surge, and with that surge you hyperfocus, and stay up all night, and the night after that…then maybe the night after that you let yourself sleep for 3.5 hours, just so you can begin again in the morning

And while you’re hyperfocusing on THAT thing, you’re of course completely unable to do other things, and so now those things get neglected until they’re urgent, which means when you come out of the first urgent thing (and crash for a day or three, because goddamn you’re so tired and strung out), you have to face the fact that something new is urgent and the cycle begins anew.

Meanwhile people keep saying things like, “just start sooner, just focus, you just have to focus,” and you’re like, “how? How? It only works when it’s do-or-die?” But you can’t even explain yourself. Why CAN’T you just sit down and focus? No matter how many times you try, how many systems you attempt, why do they never work?!

Anyway, you can get through school this way, and graduate school, too. You can write briefs and dissertations and books this way. And if you’re smart enough, the work you do can be really good. You can get a LOT done on adrenaline and all-nighters!

But it’s a hard way to move through the world, and it’s path that’s filled with self-recrimination, and I wouldn’t really recommend this as a way of life if you can avoid it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

You should be mad at the people claiming to have ADHD who don’t.

This. Not one person on this thread has claimed ADHD isn't real. The question is why/how people who have a demonstrated history with high achievement that can only be accomplished via sustained executive function are suddenly getting ADHD diagnoses.

And it is sudden. Even 10 years ago, this wasn't a thing. Now I know a dozen people diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s and 40s, all with impressive resumes and graduate level educations. Of course people are going to ask questions about that trend. It doesn't make sense.

One issue is how you define “high achievement.” Someone can look like they are high achievers from the outside, but you have no idea what’s really going on.

What does that even mean?

If some successfully graduates from high school, college, and law school with good grades, passes the bar, and works successfully as a lawyer for a number of years, they have achieved difficult academic and professional accomplishments that require a fairly high level of executive functioning.

ADHD is a chronic, debilitating disorder that disrupts executive functioning via some combination of the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD exists on a spectrum with some people struggling more than others, but in order to qualify as ADHD, these symptoms must combine to actually impact the individuals ability to function normally. While all humans may experience these symptoms in some level and combination at some point in their lives, a person with ADHD has them persistently in a way that inhibits normal academic, professional, and social functioning.

Thus, if you are able to function not only normally but at a high degree of difficulty in your academic, professional, and social life for decades, you do not have ADHD. You may have other issues. You may be burned out at work, dealing with depression, anxiety or other mental health concerns, having a midlife crisis, or simply in the wrong career or relationships. But unless you have struggled to function at school, work, and socially due to ADHD symptoms for your entire life, you don't have ADHD.

On paper, my mom is a high-achieving professional (world-class) with family and friends. But in real life, she is such a freaking mess and has always been. She is extremely cognitively gifted and hyperfocused at work. My sibling and I, are less smart, and our ADHD is much more obvious, but we've been always "googd kids", and you'd never guess that mom is a all over the place at home. When younger, there were days when she just did not come from work because she was so hyperfocused on some interesting task. I won't list all the impulsive crap she did over the years, but I was much more tame as a teenager than she was at 40. Again, none of that would be obvious, and I'd never tell a soul. My dad is also a good partner for her, he forgives her impulsivity and goes along with her ideas. That is to say, my mom struggles everywhere, but you won't know based on the achievements.

This sounds like bipolar manía and/or personality issues. That’s the problem with calling everything “ADHD.”

The problem is in giving diagnosis on the internet. She is was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety by a professional at 60. And, given that my sibling and I were both independently diagnosed with ADHD, I’d rely on the professional opinion, not yours.

DP but as we've discussed, it can be exceedingly easy to be diagnosed with ADHD "by a professional" these days.

If your mom was diagnosed 15 years ago, I buy it. If it was within the last 5 years... it's a super trendy diagnosis and the idea of someone being diagnosed with a disorder that definitionally presents in early childhood makes me skeptical.

Who am I to pass judgment on your mom's diagnosis? No one. But don't go discussing it on the internet if you don't want people to weigh in.

Yes, my mistake of making an example of my mom. Yet, I don’t see where I invited anyone to weigh in her diagnosis?

Speaking of tbe diagnostics, the area made a big progress in ADHD detection and treatment in the past 15 years. Would you want to be examined for cancer using the current instruments or the ones that were used 15 years ago? Same here.

There has been virtually no advancement in "ADHD detection" in the last 15 years. Search for biomarkers? Failed. Comparing this to cancer is a joke. Of course cancer detection is better now than it was 15 years ago, cancer can be tested for via physical tests on bio material, and cancerous growths can be seen on scans. ADHD is diagnosed using a questionaire. Do you think today's questionnaire is groundbreakingly better than the one they used 15 years ago? It's not. In theory, a good diagnostician would also do a behavior analysis and a complete workup that examines whether there may be another medical explanation for the symptoms, but this virtually never happens when people are diagnosed as an adult. You do see this when kid's are diagnosed and it's common for physicians to observe the way the child behaves in the exam room and collect information from the child's parents about their behavior at home and at school. But with adults, doctors (or NPs as is often the case, usually people with no specialized knowledge about ADHD) simply take the word of adult requesting the prescription.

Treatment for ADHD is somewhat better than it used to be (far more options for both stimulant and non-stimulant medication, and pharmaceutical advances in how the medication is released into the system) but still very problematic. Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. There is also a trend of people choosing selectively to take meds when they "need" them and avoid them when they don't, which raises questions about what it means to have ADHD.

Can you point me at the discussion of the failed biomarker reasearch? I believe they found biomarkers but are not at the stage of usign them at scale.

What's wrong either the "ADHD detection" expression for you to put it in quotes?

I did a three-hour battery of tests followed by a bunch questionnaires and therapist report to get diagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist. I was 29.

"Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. " This contradcts by what my psychiatrist told me, and she's a research-practitioner.

People dropping their meds is a common problem in mental health treatment. Nothing specific to ADHD.

There are no biomarkers for ADHD. Lots of people have looked. They have studied radiographic, molecular, physiologic, or histologic markers. The only ones that returned any possibility of diagnostic value was the radiographic markers (brain scans), however subsequent, larger studies did not find discernible differences in the brain scans of those diagnosed with ADHD and those without. Likewise, early molecular and physiologic studies found that there might be biomarkers in blood cells, but the results could not be repeated on a larger scale. Scientists remain hopeful they will find a biomarker for ADHD but despite multiple studies, there is no reliable biomarker and it's certainly never been used in diagnostics at ANY scale.

And while you may have undergone a "three-hour battery of tests" conducted by a psychiatrist when you got your diagnosis, that's not required to get an ADHD diagnosis and in fact almost no one does that. I'm guess you were tested for a variety of neurological disorders at the same time. But at the end of the day, the diagnostic screening for ADHD is a fairly brief questionnaire that relies on patients self-reporting their symptoms, and the diagnosis can be made by anyone capable of writing a scrip for ADHD meds. There is not some magically improved way of diagnosing ADHD versus 15 years ago that would explain the explosion in diagnoses.

In terms of the long-term impact of ADHD medication, follow-up studies on kids with diagnosed ADHD and prescribed stimulants consistently show that symptoms recur at higher rates past the two year mark. Researchers disagree over what this means. Some believe it shows that the positive impacts of meds diminish or disappear after two years. Others believe the studies are unreliable because so many kids stop taking their meds or take them unreliably as they age, plus researchers don't trust the self-reporting of both medication habits and symptoms in these follow up studies. Either way, it appears that kids don't experience the benefits of their stimulation medication after 24 months.

You might say, well okay, that's kids. Adults are better at taking medication and more likely to truthfully report their symptoms and medication habits. Sure, maybe. There's never been a longitudinal study of adults and ADHD medication so who knows. Into this blank space has rushed a broad variety of companies and pharmaceutical companies who are happy to profit off the general malaise of the population by selling them ADHD diagnoses and drugs. I guess that doesn't bother you. It bothers me.

What bothers me is the abscence of citations in your post and many false statements. It all points at you using AI to help you craft the argument Tell your chatgpt that biomarkers are not used for clnical diagnostics but it's misleading to say there are biomarkers for ADHD. Chen, H., Yang, Y., Odisho, D., Wu, S., Yi, C., & Oliver, B. G. (2023). Can biomarkers be used to diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?. Frontiers in psychiatry, 14, 1026616., for example - the first article I found since 2020.

I suspect they got a lot of that from the NYTimes, which did a big piece that said exactly that — they did a Daily podcast about it too. It said something else too, that PP didn’t mention, which is that dx’ed ADHD individuals feel a lot better about their work/life/themselves, and they feel significantly more functional.

Anyway the research is still emerging. It’s interesting, and I’ll bet there’s more to come.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

You should be mad at the people claiming to have ADHD who don’t.

This. Not one person on this thread has claimed ADHD isn't real. The question is why/how people who have a demonstrated history with high achievement that can only be accomplished via sustained executive function are suddenly getting ADHD diagnoses.

And it is sudden. Even 10 years ago, this wasn't a thing. Now I know a dozen people diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s and 40s, all with impressive resumes and graduate level educations. Of course people are going to ask questions about that trend. It doesn't make sense.

One issue is how you define “high achievement.” Someone can look like they are high achievers from the outside, but you have no idea what’s really going on.

What does that even mean?

If some successfully graduates from high school, college, and law school with good grades, passes the bar, and works successfully as a lawyer for a number of years, they have achieved difficult academic and professional accomplishments that require a fairly high level of executive functioning.

ADHD is a chronic, debilitating disorder that disrupts executive functioning via some combination of the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD exists on a spectrum with some people struggling more than others, but in order to qualify as ADHD, these symptoms must combine to actually impact the individuals ability to function normally. While all humans may experience these symptoms in some level and combination at some point in their lives, a person with ADHD has them persistently in a way that inhibits normal academic, professional, and social functioning.

Thus, if you are able to function not only normally but at a high degree of difficulty in your academic, professional, and social life for decades, you do not have ADHD. You may have other issues. You may be burned out at work, dealing with depression, anxiety or other mental health concerns, having a midlife crisis, or simply in the wrong career or relationships. But unless you have struggled to function at school, work, and socially due to ADHD symptoms for your entire life, you don't have ADHD.

On paper, my mom is a high-achieving professional (world-class) with family and friends. But in real life, she is such a freaking mess and has always been. She is extremely cognitively gifted and hyperfocused at work. My sibling and I, are less smart, and our ADHD is much more obvious, but we've been always "googd kids", and you'd never guess that mom is a all over the place at home. When younger, there were days when she just did not come from work because she was so hyperfocused on some interesting task. I won't list all the impulsive crap she did over the years, but I was much more tame as a teenager than she was at 40. Again, none of that would be obvious, and I'd never tell a soul. My dad is also a good partner for her, he forgives her impulsivity and goes along with her ideas. That is to say, my mom struggles everywhere, but you won't know based on the achievements.

This sounds like bipolar manía and/or personality issues. That’s the problem with calling everything “ADHD.”

The problem is in giving diagnosis on the internet. She is was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety by a professional at 60. And, given that my sibling and I were both independently diagnosed with ADHD, I’d rely on the professional opinion, not yours.

DP but as we've discussed, it can be exceedingly easy to be diagnosed with ADHD "by a professional" these days.

If your mom was diagnosed 15 years ago, I buy it. If it was within the last 5 years... it's a super trendy diagnosis and the idea of someone being diagnosed with a disorder that definitionally presents in early childhood makes me skeptical.

Who am I to pass judgment on your mom's diagnosis? No one. But don't go discussing it on the internet if you don't want people to weigh in.

Yes, my mistake of making an example of my mom. Yet, I don’t see where I invited anyone to weigh in her diagnosis?

Speaking of tbe diagnostics, the area made a big progress in ADHD detection and treatment in the past 15 years. Would you want to be examined for cancer using the current instruments or the ones that were used 15 years ago? Same here.

There has been virtually no advancement in "ADHD detection" in the last 15 years. Search for biomarkers? Failed. Comparing this to cancer is a joke. Of course cancer detection is better now than it was 15 years ago, cancer can be tested for via physical tests on bio material, and cancerous growths can be seen on scans. ADHD is diagnosed using a questionaire. Do you think today's questionnaire is groundbreakingly better than the one they used 15 years ago? It's not. In theory, a good diagnostician would also do a behavior analysis and a complete workup that examines whether there may be another medical explanation for the symptoms, but this virtually never happens when people are diagnosed as an adult. You do see this when kid's are diagnosed and it's common for physicians to observe the way the child behaves in the exam room and collect information from the child's parents about their behavior at home and at school. But with adults, doctors (or NPs as is often the case, usually people with no specialized knowledge about ADHD) simply take the word of adult requesting the prescription.

Treatment for ADHD is somewhat better than it used to be (far more options for both stimulant and non-stimulant medication, and pharmaceutical advances in how the medication is released into the system) but still very problematic. Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. There is also a trend of people choosing selectively to take meds when they "need" them and avoid them when they don't, which raises questions about what it means to have ADHD.

Can you point me at the discussion of the failed biomarker reasearch? I believe they found biomarkers but are not at the stage of usign them at scale.

What's wrong either the "ADHD detection" expression for you to put it in quotes?

I did a three-hour battery of tests followed by a bunch questionnaires and therapist report to get diagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist. I was 29.

"Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. " This contradcts by what my psychiatrist told me, and she's a research-practitioner.

People dropping their meds is a common problem in mental health treatment. Nothing specific to ADHD.

There are no biomarkers for ADHD. Lots of people have looked. They have studied radiographic, molecular, physiologic, or histologic markers. The only ones that returned any possibility of diagnostic value was the radiographic markers (brain scans), however subsequent, larger studies did not find discernible differences in the brain scans of those diagnosed with ADHD and those without. Likewise, early molecular and physiologic studies found that there might be biomarkers in blood cells, but the results could not be repeated on a larger scale. Scientists remain hopeful they will find a biomarker for ADHD but despite multiple studies, there is no reliable biomarker and it's certainly never been used in diagnostics at ANY scale.

And while you may have undergone a "three-hour battery of tests" conducted by a psychiatrist when you got your diagnosis, that's not required to get an ADHD diagnosis and in fact almost no one does that. I'm guess you were tested for a variety of neurological disorders at the same time. But at the end of the day, the diagnostic screening for ADHD is a fairly brief questionnaire that relies on patients self-reporting their symptoms, and the diagnosis can be made by anyone capable of writing a scrip for ADHD meds. There is not some magically improved way of diagnosing ADHD versus 15 years ago that would explain the explosion in diagnoses.

In terms of the long-term impact of ADHD medication, follow-up studies on kids with diagnosed ADHD and prescribed stimulants consistently show that symptoms recur at higher rates past the two year mark. Researchers disagree over what this means. Some believe it shows that the positive impacts of meds diminish or disappear after two years. Others believe the studies are unreliable because so many kids stop taking their meds or take them unreliably as they age, plus researchers don't trust the self-reporting of both medication habits and symptoms in these follow up studies. Either way, it appears that kids don't experience the benefits of their stimulation medication after 24 months.

You might say, well okay, that's kids. Adults are better at taking medication and more likely to truthfully report their symptoms and medication habits. Sure, maybe. There's never been a longitudinal study of adults and ADHD medication so who knows. Into this blank space has rushed a broad variety of companies and pharmaceutical companies who are happy to profit off the general malaise of the population by selling them ADHD diagnoses and drugs. I guess that doesn't bother you. It bothers me.

What bothers me is the abscence of citations in your post and many false statements. It all points at you using AI to help you craft the argument Tell your chatgpt that biomarkers are not used for clnical diagnostics but it's misleading to say there are biomarkers for ADHD. Chen, H., Yang, Y., Odisho, D., Wu, S., Yi, C., & Oliver, B. G. (2023). Can biomarkers be used to diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?. Frontiers in psychiatry, 14, 1026616., for example - the first article I found since 2020.

DP. I guess you didn’t read that article.

every word PP says is true.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Threads like this are why I won’t tell people I have ADHD. Congrats on your shaming ignorance. You all suck.

You should be mad at the people claiming to have ADHD who don’t.

This. Not one person on this thread has claimed ADHD isn't real. The question is why/how people who have a demonstrated history with high achievement that can only be accomplished via sustained executive function are suddenly getting ADHD diagnoses.

And it is sudden. Even 10 years ago, this wasn't a thing. Now I know a dozen people diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s and 40s, all with impressive resumes and graduate level educations. Of course people are going to ask questions about that trend. It doesn't make sense.

One issue is how you define “high achievement.” Someone can look like they are high achievers from the outside, but you have no idea what’s really going on.

What does that even mean?

If some successfully graduates from high school, college, and law school with good grades, passes the bar, and works successfully as a lawyer for a number of years, they have achieved difficult academic and professional accomplishments that require a fairly high level of executive functioning.

ADHD is a chronic, debilitating disorder that disrupts executive functioning via some combination of the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD exists on a spectrum with some people struggling more than others, but in order to qualify as ADHD, these symptoms must combine to actually impact the individuals ability to function normally. While all humans may experience these symptoms in some level and combination at some point in their lives, a person with ADHD has them persistently in a way that inhibits normal academic, professional, and social functioning.

Thus, if you are able to function not only normally but at a high degree of difficulty in your academic, professional, and social life for decades, you do not have ADHD. You may have other issues. You may be burned out at work, dealing with depression, anxiety or other mental health concerns, having a midlife crisis, or simply in the wrong career or relationships. But unless you have struggled to function at school, work, and socially due to ADHD symptoms for your entire life, you don't have ADHD.

On paper, my mom is a high-achieving professional (world-class) with family and friends. But in real life, she is such a freaking mess and has always been. She is extremely cognitively gifted and hyperfocused at work. My sibling and I, are less smart, and our ADHD is much more obvious, but we've been always "googd kids", and you'd never guess that mom is a all over the place at home. When younger, there were days when she just did not come from work because she was so hyperfocused on some interesting task. I won't list all the impulsive crap she did over the years, but I was much more tame as a teenager than she was at 40. Again, none of that would be obvious, and I'd never tell a soul. My dad is also a good partner for her, he forgives her impulsivity and goes along with her ideas. That is to say, my mom struggles everywhere, but you won't know based on the achievements.

This sounds like bipolar manía and/or personality issues. That’s the problem with calling everything “ADHD.”

The problem is in giving diagnosis on the internet. She is was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety by a professional at 60. And, given that my sibling and I were both independently diagnosed with ADHD, I’d rely on the professional opinion, not yours.

DP but as we've discussed, it can be exceedingly easy to be diagnosed with ADHD "by a professional" these days.

If your mom was diagnosed 15 years ago, I buy it. If it was within the last 5 years... it's a super trendy diagnosis and the idea of someone being diagnosed with a disorder that definitionally presents in early childhood makes me skeptical.

Who am I to pass judgment on your mom's diagnosis? No one. But don't go discussing it on the internet if you don't want people to weigh in.

Yes, my mistake of making an example of my mom. Yet, I don’t see where I invited anyone to weigh in her diagnosis?

Speaking of tbe diagnostics, the area made a big progress in ADHD detection and treatment in the past 15 years. Would you want to be examined for cancer using the current instruments or the ones that were used 15 years ago? Same here.

There has been virtually no advancement in "ADHD detection" in the last 15 years. Search for biomarkers? Failed. Comparing this to cancer is a joke. Of course cancer detection is better now than it was 15 years ago, cancer can be tested for via physical tests on bio material, and cancerous growths can be seen on scans. ADHD is diagnosed using a questionaire. Do you think today's questionnaire is groundbreakingly better than the one they used 15 years ago? It's not. In theory, a good diagnostician would also do a behavior analysis and a complete workup that examines whether there may be another medical explanation for the symptoms, but this virtually never happens when people are diagnosed as an adult. You do see this when kid's are diagnosed and it's common for physicians to observe the way the child behaves in the exam room and collect information from the child's parents about their behavior at home and at school. But with adults, doctors (or NPs as is often the case, usually people with no specialized knowledge about ADHD) simply take the word of adult requesting the prescription.

Treatment for ADHD is somewhat better than it used to be (far more options for both stimulant and non-stimulant medication, and pharmaceutical advances in how the medication is released into the system) but still very problematic. Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. There is also a trend of people choosing selectively to take meds when they "need" them and avoid them when they don't, which raises questions about what it means to have ADHD.

Can you point me at the discussion of the failed biomarker reasearch? I believe they found biomarkers but are not at the stage of usign them at scale.

What's wrong either the "ADHD detection" expression for you to put it in quotes?

I did a three-hour battery of tests followed by a bunch questionnaires and therapist report to get diagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist. I was 29.

"Stimulants do work but longterm studies indicate that the benefits dissipate with time, and other studies show that the side effects of stimulants are meaningful in the long term and lead many ADHD sufferers to skip or drop their meds altogether. " This contradcts by what my psychiatrist told me, and she's a research-practitioner.

People dropping their meds is a common problem in mental health treatment. Nothing specific to ADHD.

There are no biomarkers for ADHD. Lots of people have looked. They have studied radiographic, molecular, physiologic, or histologic markers. The only ones that returned any possibility of diagnostic value was the radiographic markers (brain scans), however subsequent, larger studies did not find discernible differences in the brain scans of those diagnosed with ADHD and those without. Likewise, early molecular and physiologic studies found that there might be biomarkers in blood cells, but the results could not be repeated on a larger scale. Scientists remain hopeful they will find a biomarker for ADHD but despite multiple studies, there is no reliable biomarker and it's certainly never been used in diagnostics at ANY scale.

And while you may have undergone a "three-hour battery of tests" conducted by a psychiatrist when you got your diagnosis, that's not required to get an ADHD diagnosis and in fact almost no one does that. I'm guess you were tested for a variety of neurological disorders at the same time. But at the end of the day, the diagnostic screening for ADHD is a fairly brief questionnaire that relies on patients self-reporting their symptoms, and the diagnosis can be made by anyone capable of writing a scrip for ADHD meds. There is not some magically improved way of diagnosing ADHD versus 15 years ago that would explain the explosion in diagnoses.

In terms of the long-term impact of ADHD medication, follow-up studies on kids with diagnosed ADHD and prescribed stimulants consistently show that symptoms recur at higher rates past the two year mark. Researchers disagree over what this means. Some believe it shows that the positive impacts of meds diminish or disappear after two years. Others believe the studies are unreliable because so many kids stop taking their meds or take them unreliably as they age, plus researchers don't trust the self-reporting of both medication habits and symptoms in these follow up studies. Either way, it appears that kids don't experience the benefits of their stimulation medication after 24 months.

You might say, well okay, that's kids. Adults are better at taking medication and more likely to truthfully report their symptoms and medication habits. Sure, maybe. There's never been a longitudinal study of adults and ADHD medication so who knows. Into this blank space has rushed a broad variety of companies and pharmaceutical companies who are happy to profit off the general malaise of the population by selling them ADHD diagnoses and drugs. I guess that doesn't bother you. It bothers me.

What bothers me is the abscence of citations in your post and many false statements. It all points at you using AI to help you craft the argument Tell your chatgpt that biomarkers are not used for clnical diagnostics but it's misleading to say there are biomarkers for ADHD. Chen, H., Yang, Y., Odisho, D., Wu, S., Yi, C., & Oliver, B. G. (2023). Can biomarkers be used to diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?. Frontiers in psychiatry, 14, 1026616., for example - the first article I found since 2020.

DP. I guess you didn’t read that article.

every word PP says is true.

Lol

[Anonymous]

I got diagnosed at 37. Things made much more sense. Found the root of my anxiety/mild depression, mood swings,high intelligence but low production. I took an adderall and my mind was so quiet I took a nap. My life would’ve been so different if I had been diagnosed as a kid. I’m still pissed about it.