It’s perhaps a meme now that adhd is over diagnosed, but I’d guess the majority is pill seeking individuals looking to compete at school or at work and less false positive diagnoses such as yours.
Net net you seem to have solved it fairly quickly so at least that’s good: even when you get the diagnosis wrong if you can backtrack without significant cost then maybe it’s not absolutely horrible.
But sometimes I think difficult children are automatically labeled ADHD and the solution is drugs without trying to find the cause.
I reminded of this Ted talk https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_c...
Most people blamed the behaviour of difficult children on their difficult parents.
That being said there are a lot of people who are purposely seeking ADHD meds who know they are not ADHD just to get drugs. Those people are kind of ruining it for everyone else. They are usually pretty easy to spot though
Being able to focus (sometimes to self-destructive levels) on things we enjoy are as much a part of ADD as being chronically unable to focus on things we find boring.
I’m curious what you think ADD is, since what you describe here is practically textbook symptoms.
I didn’t say ADD/ADHD don’t exist. I said it’s over diagnosed. We just like to label kids and tell them they are broken and needs drugs when in reality most kids are bored of the sterile environment of learning with the dumbed down education system that teachers are forced to adhere to because acknowledging that not all kids learn the same way as other kids is too hard.
No, it's trying to see if they have a condition which is readily and effectively treated through medication. I have ADHD, and my daughter has ADHD, so I've been through this a few times with the docs. The _gold standard_ for determining if a patient has ADHD is treatment with stimulants. There are assessment surveys they have you fill out and such, but there's tons of other underlying issues which can cause similar symptoms and lead to false positives. The best, easiest, most reliable way to tell if someone really has ADHD is to give them Adderall and see what happens.
My psychiatrist says that he has done this even with patients who end up getting diagnosed with other issues like bipolar. Why? Because despite being a scheduled drug, stimulants are incredibly safe at pharmaceutical doses, without any serious side effects. It's harmless to try, and if it doesn't work you move on to try something else.
Btw what studies have been done have shown that if anything ADHD is under diagnosed, and severely so in the case of girls. A lot of people who have had other underlying issues have initially been misdiagnosed as ADHD, but this is not the same thing as general over diagnosing, and generally is because ADHD must be first considered and ruled out before moving on to conditions which require the use of more serious drugs.
Wow no wonder america has such a drug problem…
Over-the-counter pain medications are more far more dangerous in all categories: allergies, overdose, effects of long-term use, etc.
Stimulants are one of the safest medications used. There is plenty of data to support this.
Could also just be you have a mild form of ADHD and you do not need medication at all and Physics and similar is the thing you like to hyper focus on. For some people the ADHD is a huge gift if the thing their brain happens to want to latch onto is also something they enjoy and/or can make a career out of.
Also do we really want to be shifting blame onto teachers at this point? They are overworked and already taking enough shit from parents as it is. And the ones I know and have talked to are constantly finding new and creative ways to get kids interested in their teaching
Funny you make a broad and sweeping conclusion based on one single message posted on a forum.
> Also do we really want to be shifting blame onto teachers at this point?
Not just teachers. The education system as a whole. You know with math, there's often multiple ways to achieve the same answer. I failed math one year because even tho I showed the work to get to the solution and it was a completely valid method with a correct solution, I got 0 because I did not do it the textbook way. Teachers are not allowed to teach math any other way than what the department of education dictates. Math can be quite fun and engaging, but you know, better to keep kids dumb and medicated than helping them.
Oh and before you jump to conclusions and claim this is one single experience. It's not a single experience.
What makes you believe that? I hear people spout this all the time, but it's an irrational belief to me. The condition is still diagnosed via interviews, pseudoscientific psychometrics, and other arbitrary and vague heuristic. There are still no biological markers than can be used to diagnose the condition. At least, not with a high level availability nor a price point that would justify the mainstream usage of such methods.
Thus, if we have no clear and definitive way to know if someone has the condition, then, if you will forgive my poor analogy, it's all just Schrodinger's ADHD -- both over diagnosed and under diagnosed at the same time.
What is quite clear is that a subgroup of the population suffers greater in some areas than others, and we kind of found something that helps those people. I find that much more important than gatekeeping people who would benefit from treatment.
You concluded this just based on your single experience?
It could be wrongly diagnosed for many people and still be under diagnosed overall.
Put me in physics class, technical drawing, cooking, math, I focused and did really well. Every other class was boring and non stimulating and so I acted up.
ADD is over diagnosed.