I'd say ask people around you (friends/family especially) besides just taking a psychiatrist's or doctor's word. It is very easy to be diagnosed with something you may not really have because it's a complicated thing to tell if someone has a personality disorder and psychiatrists are a bit bias in that they are supposed to notice certain "cues."

Many teenagers or 20 somethings are stressed out from the drama and other junk that goes on during college as well. And feeling depressed is normal sometimes. If you are happy all the time then you probably have a different personality disorder lol.

I have a soapbox here:

AD(H)D is severely underdiagnosed. According to my own psychiatrist, studies have been done to find the base-rate of ADD/ADHD in the population--meaning not the people being treated for it, but the people who perfectly fit all the criteria and would respond excellently to treatment if it were provided--and it seems that only about 7% of the people who are "model candidates" for the disease, know they have it. And these are studies of adults, not children--people who have been living with strong, debilitating ADD/ADHD for years or possibly decades without any awareness or coping strategy.

Honestly, if I get Bill Gates-level rich, I'm going to dump my charity-dollars into ADD/ADHD-awareness. Disregarding how much better my own life has been since I started being treated for it, if all the people who are currently out of the work-force, can't hold a job, or underachieving at their job--who think they're just "naturally lazy"--and who could start achieving the things they want to achieve if they knew they had a treatable condition--got help--well, perhaps it's a bit optimistic, but I like to imagine percentage-point gains in GDP and drops in that mysterious "base unemployment" figure that just never seems to dip below 5%.

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Also, just as regards "If you are happy all the time then you probably have a different personality disorder": ADD/ADHD is orthogonal to (clinical) depression--though you can certainly be depressed from all the ways your life sucks, and your life is more likely to suck if you can't stay focused and motivated long enough to achieve anything.

However, how I would describe my own state, previous to treatment, was, "perfectly content to be laying in bed all day doing nothing much at all." I had studied Zen long enough to just not be all that worried about doing nothing. There was nothing wrong with doing nothing. And yet, really, I was just avoiding setting goals I knew I couldn't meet, which is to say, any goals at all. Blowing away the fog of demotivation I was wrapped in for most of my life has not suddenly made me upset with the idea of laying around doing nothing--it can't do anything so powerful as changing your mind. But it has made me feel that much more is possible. And that has made me upset with the idea of wasting what is I can suddenly see as my potential.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:ADHD_Prevalen...

So what do you think the prevalence rate should be? How is it even a disorder if it affects 15%?

(This is a response both to you, and to the sibling comment:)

I would say that the best comparison is nearsightedness.

I imagine humans used to have, on average, pretty excellent distance-vision (we can't know for sure--eyes don't leave fossils--but "seeing clearly" seems to be something with a lot of selective pressure, as far as survival goes.)

But now that that selective pressure is taken away [have you ever thought "they're not attractive, because they need glasses"?] nearsightedness runs rampant, and just keeps getting worse as nearsighted people cross their genes together.

But does it matter? Of course not! The people affected just wear glasses or contacts. And then they're normal.

You wouldn't call a person wearing glasses an "enhanced baseline human." They're obviously the result of something going wrong, somewhere. The glasses are a crutch.

But still, we don't add moral judgement to "having bad vision"; it's not something to be pitied. We don't run donation drives to get poor people glasses.

But on the other hand, living your whole life being unaware that you're nearsighted, and unaware that if you just put on a pair of specs, you could read signs twenty feet away like a regular human being--that's a terrible fate.

  We don't run donation drives to get poor people glasses.

Actually, my church has participated in just such a donation drive. The main difficulty, I think, is that it's hard to get people the correct strength of corrective lenses out of a random bag of glasses. Just FYI, your main points are good.

Two things -

I didn't make a moral judgement on improving baseline humans, I just said it was a different lens to look through as compared to saying someone has a condition.

If ADHD is that prevalent (5-15% and severely underdiagnosed) then having ADHD is actually being a regular human being !

What is baseline or normal is highly subjective. There are enough near-sighted humans in the world to say that sight problems are pretty much just part of the human condition, for pretty much everyone at some point in life. Whether you consider a pair of glasses to be a defect fix or an enhancement is up to you. I place no moral value on either option.

Is this why you (or someone) voted me down? Because you assumed an implied criticism in my looking at ADHD remedies as an enhancement?

You'll find me the last person to argue that enhancing humans is a bad thing. I wanna live forever and have robot parts :)

> I didn't make a moral judgement on improving baseline humans

I meant more, when someone has cancer, that's bad and you pity them. Cancer is an Evil that we should Fight. Whereas we don't tend to think this about nearsightedness. It is, like you say, "part of being human." It's just a screwed-up part of being human that we universally reject and patch over without thinking too much about it. Like having worms[1].

The reason I wouldn't compare it to having robot parts, is that I don't want people to associate it with having robot parts. Because some people don't think we need robot parts.

Imagine if glasses didn't exist, and we had just invented them--with everyone already being as nearsighted as they are. There are some people who would insist--in the mode of thinking of glasses as an "enhancement"--that people should just "learn to cope" with their nearsightedness, and "use their willpower" (that is, squint).

It seems pretty clear to me that there is a distinction between "things people deserve to have to make them functional" (like glasses) and "things people could use to make them even better" (like, say, a Google Glass headset.) I want to be clear that ADD/ADHD medication should be thought of as the former, not the latter.

(And I didn't vote you down, if you're curious.)

1: http://www.radiolab.org/2009/sep/07/sculptors-of-monumental-...

Oh believe me, I know the mindset. It annoys the hell out of me.

As soon as someone mentions (for instance) hypothetical longevity treatments, some talking head pops up to tell you how it needs to be regulated and probably put on hold while we consider the societal ramifications and how fair it all is and really, philosophically aren't we all 'supposed' to live a certain length of time and that gives meaning to our lives?

And mostly I just want to punch them in the face until they shut up, because people that think like that will be the reason I can't get robot parts and live forever :)

So I can understand if you think it's important to frame the debate in a particular way, though I don't really make the distinction myself between your two categories of things.

That was kinda what I was thinking. If it's already at 5-15%, and severely under-diagnosed, maybe ADHD is just part of the human condition.

That's not to say that treating it then won't be beneficial, but it would be a different angle to look at it from - improving baseline humans through medication, rather than fixing some sort of defect.

Clearly some people suffer more from it than others. The question is, is it more like being short, which no one seems to think requires intervention, or like being nearsighted, which everyone does.

Not to mention that it would pretty fucking cool in a sim-city sense to watch what happens when you give a larger population strong stimulants. I remember watching a fascinating that posed the idea that the enlightenment was a result of caffeine becoming a regular part of the European diet. I wonder if you would see another explosive burst of productivity.

Even if it's under-diagnosed, that doesn't mean it's under-treated. The most common prescribed treatment for AD(H)D is a stimulant-- and how many adults do you know drink coffee, tea or soda for its caffeine properties?