To think this is real adult ADHD and not part of a trend

[ReadyTeddyGoooo]

I'm 35 and I've had anxiety since childhood. Over the years, I've had times where it has been extremely complex and debilitating. I've had both NHS and private therapy and been on meds for a long time. I have severe health anxiety linked to ocd. I have a panic disorder and have also had pnd twice.

My 4 year old son is going through the assessment process for adhd. Since researching it for him, I've discovered that I could also have it. Obviously it's highly hereditary so it would make sense.

However, since exploring adhd, it seeks to have become over saturised on social media it seems and could almost be seen as a trend. There seems to be a lot if people getting diagnosed and it makes me wonder, do this number of people actually have adhd?

I had an appointment with a psychiatrist coming up primarily for my anxiety problems but I do also want to talk about adhd with her. But don't want her to think that I'm just jumping on the bandwagon with it.

I feel I do have adhd because...
I'm terrible at time keeping and I'm always running late.
My house is chaotic. There's little order and I lose things all the time.
I can be quite reckless in some ways, e.g. parking where I shouldn't and getting fines.
I leave everything to the last minute. Especially things that seem too overwhelming. Even my wedding - it was somewhat a rushed job.
I find big shops snd supermarkets very overwhelming. If there's too much choice and things to look at, I just flounder.
I have mind chatter and songs plating in my head a lot! Constant ideas too. I dart from one thing to the next.
I rarely finish projects.
I've never been great at reading books, I feel like I don't have the patience.

Does this sound like proper adult ashd?

I have a theory that ADHD is actually quite widespread and so many adults resonate with it because they’ve been living undiagnosed, struggling forever and there’s much more awareness and understanding now.

I also think some symptoms are just human behaviour, and whether it could be ADHD depends on the intensity of the symptoms - how difficult they are to manage, and how much it impacts your life. I think a lot of people can recognise ADHD traits in themselves, but if an adult is driven to seek diagnosis for why parts of their lives have always been in chaos, I would tend to take them seriously.

A fair few of my friends have had adult diagnosis, leaving me wondering if I have inadvertently been drawn to other people who are similar to me. Birds of a feather and all that.

I have that brain chatter and music in my head all my life. It does stop me sleeping frequently. Thought everybody did.

Well if a stimulent isnt a stimulent if you have adhd, it rather prooves they had adhd.
My experience in a school of witnessing ritalin on pupils is nothing like you describe. Either in numbers, when it was taken or the effect.

If you can afford private get a private assessment. Google nice guidelines for adhd - even these days underdiagnosed in woman and often misdiagnosed as anxiety. I was diagnosed at 52 but only after I read an article on the symptoms. I also have ocd which is driven by my adhd.

The problem with ADHD is that none of the symptoms are unique to ADHD - you can't look at one thing and say yes - that occurs in ADHD people but never in non-ADHD people.

The difference is the frequency and the stacking. Everyone has a bad day sometimes where they miss the bus and realise when they get to work (late) they forgot something important. The difference is that the ADHD person probably was late because they couldn't find their keys and had to put on already-worn clothes and they arrive at work and realise they not only forgot that folder but also to brush their hair and put on deodorant. Because there was a cascade of failures going back to the night before and further than that.

Then imagine this every single day and the despair and self loathing and the looks that you get and the fear that everyone knows you're a total mess barely hanging on by a string. And actually suffering real world consequences, like losing jobs, or losing large amounts of money, or losing housing, or losing your children, or struggling with addiction or depression.

That to me is ADHD. There are some tiktoks that seem to suggest if you ever have trouble getting started on a task or with procrastination or organisation then you have ADHD and I don't think it's the same. It's like the difference between feeling down, everyone has periods of low mood, and clinical depression.

That said - the root difficulty of ADHD is executive functioning, and I think executive functioning is a very useful thing to understand and a lot of people struggle with it, and I would be really happy about more resources for developing or supporting poor executive function. I'm also glad that the narrative that shame doesn't fix executive functioning is becoming better known.

OTOH it's frustrating that I can't access my badly needed medication because of the backlog of people who want to be diagnosed even though they are basically functioning and I am not.

I'm pretty sure I have ADHD. Currently waiting for NHS assessment (waiting list in our area is 4 years!)
I think the mocking of people seeking diagnosis is social bullying (pretty familiar with that if you have ADHD anyway) - Of course there's an upsurge in people seeking treatment. It has only relatively recently been recognised and those of us in our forties, fifties, sixties who have struggled all our lives, massively under achieved, drifted from job to job as we can't handle the day to day, have choatic homes, forget everything including our own anniversaries and family members birthdays even though we love them, never finish anything (that's the one that drives me to distraction about myself - pathological inability to complete a project) - well of course we want a diagnosis. It has crippled our lives since childhood.
I forgot to turn up to an A level exam, even though I was highly academic and applying to Oxford.
I never graduated. The whole process of returning after I had left the city was 'too much'.
I had CCJ for tiny debts that mounted because I kept forgetting to pay them. £49 turning into over a grand back in the 1980s. Nobody chooses to live like that. If we could just 'get organised' we would.
I spent most of my life with a churning self hatred for my total inability to achieve things other people just coped with. I've finally in my late fifties forgiven myself and when an acquaintance got help and said it had transformed her life, I chose to do the same. I look forward in my sixties to discovering how NT brains function.

ADHD isn't that uncommon. I think 5% of the population is one figure I read. I do think that modern life exacerbates ADHD and leads to people burning out because they're exhausted by masking and juggling. We also don't have the ability to see what's happening and hit the brakes accordingly.

Diagnosis has undoubtedly helped me understand myself and my family better.

The Tik Tok wave will break and move on. It's already shifted towards dissociative identities.

Next wave? Detransitioners but sadly we're not quite there yet. Those stories are going to be heartbreaking.

If ADHD medication is making somebody like a zombie then the dosage is wrong. This sounds like it may have been a while ago since the extended release is common now whereas that didn't used to be available. It can take some time to get the right dose, but ADHD medications aren't sedatives. They are mostly stimulants. In somebody who is very hyperactive and has poor impulse control the stimulant medicine can "wake up" the part of the brain that does the impulse control and/or provide the level of stimulation that person is constantly seeking, which is why it seems to calm them down. But zombie is not right. I can only think this must have been 15, 20+ years ago because that's when all the "zombie children" stories were in the media, and I wonder if it was to do with rougher prescription guidelines or less refined medication options back then.

Interestingly I had a go on an EEG machine at a conference once showing a program which can help train people to be more relaxed, and although I had not mentioned that I had ADHD, they instantly said that my brain wave pattern (more than average of the "relaxed" brain wave type and less than average of the "alert" brain wave type - can't remember which was which - beta something) was typical of somebody with an attention disorder. Although from what I remember from a documentary I watched years ago, you can't use brain scans in diagnosing ADHD because there is too much overlap with the normal levels. You can see a difference if you overlay the average brain scans of say 100 ADHD patients and 11 non ADHD people, but looking at one person's brain scan may well place it in the grey area.

This is me at the moment at 51, trying to get a doctors referral. I'm getting a lot of eye rolling from my family and friends - because I am a dizzy, oversensitive drama queen🙄,who leaves jobs, homes, cities and relationships at the drop of a hat. They literally can't see that there might be something in that and it's so upsetting.. And I'm expecting my doctor will be the same , despite being on AD for years.

But honestly, it has been a revelation to discover why I might be the way I am.

Yes, it was around 1999-2000.

ADHD is the new social media anxiety, but absolutely doesn't mean that people don't genuinely have it and that it isn't debilitating for some.

I was diagnosed with ADHD after having my son. I have always suffered with anxiety and been medicated and recieved therapy for it but after pregnancy it was just amplified and everything was a battle. They did suspect PND so I had an assessment and they referred me due to other things about my past and my life. The diagnosis process was bloody long and ironically quite hard to manage, they took statements from people I'd known growing up to build a picture of my childhood etc. Anyway I am now medicated for ADHD and my anxiety is so much more manageable, I haven't had a panic attack since a week after I started them. In women, as with lots of mental health conditions, it can present differently and not sure if it's usual but yeah it helped my anxiety also.

It's not a trend. There are a lot of women out there in their 50's who only become aware when their children are diagnosed. This is me. My student son was diagnosed and we all immediately became aware of where he got it from. I am pretty high functioning and outwardly very successful although I have always felt a failure. but all my life has been a huge struggle to keep it all together and hide the whirlwind of chaos I live in. I am not pursuing a diagnosis as I am now retired, but it has helped me to make sense of my life and make peace with how I struggled when younger and some of the decisions I took.

So not only is your opinion based in anecdotal data, its also 23 years out of date. OK.

Totally agree!

Rejection sensitivity? Nobody likes rejection!

Why does everyone want a label??

One GP and an ex-school admin?

OK.

I agree some do, but for some it impacts on their life to the extent they can't cope day to day. It's like with anxiety- being anxious is a normal human emotion, but being anxious to the level it makes you physically ill and affects your life as you can't do x or y and without a trigger ie it's not just when you have reason to feel anxious but it's constant then it's an issue. Same with ADHD, many of the behaviours are normal if theyre to an extent you can still function, but for some they are so overwhelming that it isnt the case. Similar to some physical illnesses i suppose, some can manage the symptomz fine without intervention and some cant. The point of a 'label' is that you can access treatment for it that for many is life changing.

How on earth have you come to the conclusion that 1 to 5% of diagnosis are genuine? How are all of these people getting incorrect diagnosis anyway when the wait list on the NHS is years long and the threshold high, or private has a wait list and ends up costing thousands if you get a prescription? Does a diagnostic process heavily weighted towards how it presents in men really overdiagnose half the population, or does logic suggest the opposite is more likely to be true?

You don't think GPs have access to data and don't see trends, don't confer with their colleagues? As if he came to his conclusion in isolation?

If it looks like a trend on your Tiktok it's probably because you are viewing adhd content, apparently there are lots of people who go on Tiktok and it's just dance videos and things like that, but you get more of the content you watch and interact with, so you're Tiktok has lots of adhd content because that's what you are watching and or interacting with. That's why people say that the algorithm diagnosed them!

If everyone is trying to get a diagnosis, then of course there will be a wait list. And the threshold is certainly not high at all.

YANBU! I first sought my diagnosis in 2019 so before the current buzz about ADHD. It was hard back then and I imagine it would be even harder now because doctors are already keen to brush off ADHD - if you come across as having diagnosed yourself on tiktok that’s going to be even harder! Even though I know there’s thousands of women seeing those videos and thinking omg finally I make sense! The doctors don’t get it.

For what it’s worth it does sound to me like you have all/most of the same traits as me!

I have recently been diagnosed in my late 40s. The whole "trend" thing and "aren't we all a little ADHD" put me off seeking help for a couple of years even though a psychologist suggested I go for diagnosis.
My diagnosis involved a lot of things - including providing school reports, evidence from my family when I was about 7 years old etc.
Apparently I may also have austism but I am not seeking that diagnosis too.
I am on stimulant medication and for the first time, my mind is quiet and I feel calm - not what I would have anticipated a stimulant to do.
I have not been able to sleep properly since I was a child, I have behaved in ways others don't understand, I have suffered from severe emotional outbursts and frustration since I was a child, I lose thing all the time, I can only work under extreme pressure. And I failed at things I should have suceeded at - I got a long way muddling through then hit a brick wall at University. It's ruined relationships for me, I have problems around staying in touch etc. The list is endless. I scored full marks on the inattentive part of the criteria.
I am sure people will be secretly critical of me as I am only too aware there are a lot of negative attitudes towards adults being diagnosed.
I finally decided to look into it properly when I hit a low point in summer realising that I had never reached my potential - I felt like I had failed after a conversation with a family member discussing what the children I grew up with were doing. I didn't want to be bitter, I just wondered if there was a reason.

GPs refer on they don't diagnose and if in their spare time they want to read up on stuff outside of their speciality well anyone else could too.