Reply to New York Times Magazine article questioning adhd commonplaces (including meds)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NP.  Moving what I wrote on duplicate locked thread over here.

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My son is not ADHD but he dislikes most of his school. Fortunately he's accepted his parents' insistence that he get good grades. We talk a lot about how boring school is for him, even though much of his high school curriculum is the same as what his parents liked. This article hits really hard.

On DCUM, sometimes when people want to criticize what I write or what I mention about my kids, they give me an armchair diagnosis of some neurodivergence. To the point where I wonder if they are right, although I think it's more the result of the limited context of an anonymous Internet forum. I sometimes fall into what one quoted doctor called a category of people on "the left" who blame "post-industrial society" for the rise of ADHD.

Below are some sections of the article that caught my eye.

"Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless."

"Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 11.4 percent of American children had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., a record high. That figure includes 15.5 percent of American adolescents, 21 percent of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys. Seven million American children have received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, up from six million in 2016 and two million in the mid-1990s."

"Sibley said it was important to remember that many of the symptoms of A.D.H.D. are actually pretty commonplace; at any given moment, she explained, the average American adult has two or three of them — halfway to an official diagnosis."
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The fact that 1/4 of boys get dx with ADHD is just astonishing![/quote]

Sadly, for many of us, that statistic simply validates something we've observed in the world in the last few years. If you'd asked me to estimate the percent of boys diagnosed with ADHD in the US this year, I would have guessed 20-25%. And the interesting thing is that it crosses socioeconomic and cultural boundaries, which didn't used to be the case. There used to be a big race/class element to ADHD diagnosis, where it was really a diagnosis only accessible to wealthier and white families because they were more likely to seek out (and be able to afford) specialists to address behavioral or academic problems, and the pediatricians who served those families were more likely to suggest the issue could be neurological.

That's changed significantly in recent years, and now you see a ton of ADHD diagnoses in Title 1 schools, especially for boys, and crossing pretty much all racial categories. It's now the diagnosis of choice for any boy who has any issues. The number of boys age 6-12 I know who are diagnosed and on meds is astonishing to me. Definitely at least 1 in 4, possibly more (I think the diagnosis is likely more common in urban populations, there are more ADHD kids where we live in DC than in the rural/small town environments where the rest of our families live, though that's catching up too).

ADHD went from a niche phenomenon that seemed to explain difficulties a small percent of kids were having to this bizarre blanket diagnosis. It's jaw dropping and it's wild to me that some people still won't acknowledge that clearly something else is going on here.[/quote]

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