To think that the ADHD label is masking other things in society?

[comoatoupeira]

Disclaimer this is NOT about being skeptical ADHD is a thing, my brother is diagnosed with ADHD by a doctor as well as a close friend of mine.

Through my job I have been doing a lot of research about the impacts of tech and social media and so on on young people, and also on the elderly who are becoming the first generation of elderly people who are high technology users.

It has all been making me see so many parallels between behaviors associated with ADHD and behaviors that are becoming more and more difficult to control because of the attention-stealing environment we are in, and other aspects of society today like consumerism always available in your pocket, long working hours and both parents working, the difficulty of taking those restorative breaks that are what helps us focus and take a step back.

I'm just feeling like we are looking at some milder cases of ADHD too much as an isolated medical thing rather than a wider societal ill.

I feel like the same thing has happened with depression, framing it as some sort of imbalance that can be fixed by drugs, when it's so much about the societies we live in.

I feel uncomfortable about all of these labels being used especially by young people with mild cases of things, it seems to imprison them in a fixed identity or frame them as having something wrong with them, when none of us a perfect and we all have strengths and weaknesses, and life is about living with them and being open to change.

What do you think?

Not just "hidden away", but completely undetected because there wasn't really any acknowledgement from laymen that children could even experience mental illness in much the same way adults do. Even now, there are plenty of people who will openly scoff at the notion of "mentally ill" children.

Not on the scale there is now, nowehere close

If you are comparing children being diagnosed and treated yes, but there are no grounds for suggesting children are suddenly getting ill in the 2020's when they weren't decades ago, because decades ago nobody was actually bothering to look.

Because no one talked about it

Indeed, and even if a child in the 70s or 80s had any sort of understanding of what Depression or Anxiety was, they wouldn't have the insight to realise they were experiencing it themselves, or the language to verbalise it, and if they somehow did, they'd have simply been dismissed as "silly" or told to "cheer up" and so on.

"what on earth have you got to be unhappy about? You are a child!"

Heard that more than once.

Adhd is a spectrum too and often co-morbid with other conditions.

Good foundations in childhood and teenage years are important too. Teaching scaffolding techniques, using systems of reminders, learning what works and what doesn't.

I tell my kids you have these medical conditions. Yes it's not fair they make life harder but you also have to learn to cope and adapt and learn about your own responses to situations.

It took me a long time to learn to adapt my work environment and techniques that enable me to be successful.

I do all of these. I rarely watch tv.

l suffer reactive depression ( severe) to do with loss. I’m not sure how this is a problem of society. Anti depressants work fine.

Dh has undiagnosed adhd. It wasn’t a thing in the 70’s. He got drunk to medicate. Dd inherited it because it’s genetic. Screens calm him and her down. Neither use social media.

Theres a lot of generalisation on this thread. The uptick in ND presentations is to do with lockdown/school environments. Those nd people or children who worked from home in lockdown functioned better in a quiet environment.

Then kids were thrown back into the hideous Victorian discipline type schools we have nowadays with endless testing and it blew their minds

if you're interested, this book is really good. Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention: Amazon.co.uk: Hari, Johann: 9781526620224: Books
makes you realise how distracted everyone is in our society, which can be linked to a lack of concentration and attention. plus the fact that most people's diets are majority ultra processed food, it's hardly surprising what all the chemicals in food are doing to people's, especially kid's, brains.

Indeed, and even if a child in the 70s or 80s had any sort of understanding of what Depression or Anxiety was, they wouldn't have the insight to realise they were experiencing it themselves

Yes, l had severe depression age 16 in the 80’s. I didn’t k ow what was wrong with me or happening to me. And the trigger was moving from school to college. Couldn’t cope with the change.

I'm highly sceptical that ADHD exists in levels that are being diagnosed. I've met precisely one person in my life who Im sure had it and it was incredibly obvious. I think the idea millions of adults suddenly being diagnosed and the concept of masking ADHD is troubling. Where is the evidence that people with ADHD can mask symptoms? Because the whole point of it surely is that those functions don't exist. ASD is different. What I truly think is the people with financial interest have decided to diagnose 'modern life' as a condition, with particular focus on women. It's not coincidence to me that the explosion happened just after several long term studies called into question the effectiveness of long term antidepressant use. Eventually I predict major lawsuits relating to ADHD meds along the lines of the oxycontin case. But that won't be for years yet. So basically I completely agree with you and I also fit pretty much every criteria for diagnosis, and have been told by 2 other friends who are diagnosed that they think I have it. So I fully understand the symptoms and impact that have in ones day to day life.

I agree with you here - and it's a massive topic, covering not just wider societal issues but also things like cultural ideas of 'identity' and 'community'. Everything's masking something else!

PP made a good point that "society has taken away many of the safety nets that allowed for better executive functioning". I would include this a cultural acceptance of individual quirks, of everyone having both strengths and weaknesses. Too old now to bother with a diagnosis, I have a screaming disorder of some kind, probably ADD / dyspraxia. It's very disabling but I've managed to have a very successful career, good relationships and so on, by virtue of living in a society that tolerated personal failings. No labels required, we all just worked with and around each other.

To throw another spanner in the works - trauma often causes symptoms very similar to ASDs. There is certainly no shortage of trauma in modern lives. It may be less intense (in general) than the traumas suffered by my parents' generation, and their parents, but tends to be long-lasting and unacknowledged. That kind of trauma can actually create more maladaptive behaviours than six years of war.

Indeed, and even if a child in the 70s or 80s had any sort of understanding of what Depression or Anxiety was, they wouldn't have the insight to realise they were experiencing it themselves, or the language to verbalise it, and if they somehow did, they'd have simply been dismissed as "silly" or told to "cheer up" and so on.

"what on earth have you got to be unhappy about? You are a child!"

Heard that more than once.

God yes, so much so. Whereas I can clearly remember worrying about things a lot as a child and that worry, while being about different things, many of which would seem trivial now, being every bit as consuming to me as a child as my adult worries can be now. I had a lovely childhood and parents but still don't recognise it as carefree. As a teenager I definitely had depression in the final two years of secondary school.

My daughter refused to go to school. We were told she was in burnout. ADHD was later diagnosed. This was the cause.

And ADHD meds helped her out of burnout and back to education.

She was the classic quiet girl at school. So not at all obvious.

I agree, not sure what the answer is though. You cannot uninvent the internet for example.

I'm not saying no one should take these drugs at all but we are heading effectively for mass prescribing of amphetamine based drugs in the population. Have you seen how the figures have exploded ? Theres no sign of it slowing either so the idea that we are just playing catch up with missed cases will soon have to be debunked. In some areas of the USA 20% of children are on these meds.

YANBU at all. Often people seem to get defensive about this because they think it's a denial or minimising of the condition. It isn't. My DD has ADHD and it is incredibly disabling in her life and has affected her mental health really badly.
BUT I think that in a different world, maybe even only 25 years ago, she would have been fine.

Indeed. DD2 has come off the higher dose stuff now and does not need to take anxiety meds as she is now home schooled.

We were just medicating her to cope with secondary school and not even that was enough. It's secondary school which is the issue in her case and I think in many others.

even before tech and internet and smart phones (yes I am that old) i would procrastinate and need a sense of urgency to do homework, i would be distracted by radio, by what was out of the window, by a different noise.
i would be distracted and have low coordination and have low attention span and need pressure and urgency and all of these things before the internet...

if there isn't internet my bran just plays infinite scenarios and has 367658 thoughts at once.

I was never medicated but coped with alarm clocks and still need 3/4 alarms to do things on time. i chose jobs with tight deadlines and where procrastination and bursts of energy are seen as beneficial (creative industries) so I managed to get to middle age fairly successfully.

So no, i don't think it's a modern phenomenon

The interesting thing with neurodivergence (depending on where it falls on the spectrum) is that in some environments it can be beneficial.

For example, people with ADHD tend to be really effective in a crisis.

Humans are supposed to operate in tribes. So variety of traits would be useful in the survival of that tribe.

I think as we've moved to a more individualistic society where people have to do more (work, raise families etc) and often with less support, you can see people struggling more. Because we weren't meant to do so much alone. Humans work best when their traits are pulled together to work in a team.

I personally think ADHD is real and has always been a part of the human gene pool. But I think the environment we live in may be creating or exaggerating ADHD like traits in people. Also bear in mind ADHD isn't just about attention span. Its about emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, sensitivity, easily becoming overwhelmed.

As for depression, I definitely think depression has been around forever.

There is a lot of technology in Finland. They actually had better internet access before the UK and their children had mobiles before those in the UK - granted they were Nokias as that's what they made.

There is also a lot of depression and other mental health problems. Some of it is related to the lack of sunlight in winter.

I hardly think it’s mass prescribing.

It’s not even 300 000

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/26/record-numbers-in-england-taking-adhd-medication-nhs-data-shows

As a previous poster pointed out, re: Victorian discipline and so on, you can't just assume that schooling and children's lives were inherently better decades ago because of a lack of tech etc without acknowledging that children decades back also had to deal with a whole gamut of things that 2020's children do not.

A lot of my contemporaries failed at school precisely because there was next to no acknowledgement that children could be ill without there necessarily being immediately obvious outwardly signs. Children with obvious physical and mental disabilities did get help, but undiagnosed ASD or ADHD, nope, and a lot of those children would have suffered the same co-morbid anxiety and depression that 2020's ASD/ADHD people do. You were still expected to just sit down, shut up, pay attention, and learn, and of course, as soon as you showed any signs of not being comfortable in that environment, the immediate response was disciplinary, not exploratory. So anything serious going on was never addressed, and you just did your best to struggle on because voicing any sort of distress would be dismissed as nonsense and "playing up".

You also had peer groups, which were vicious and nasty to kids who didn't "fit in" in no different a way to they are now, and again, anything you struggled with was interpreted as "not making an effort", and disruptive children were met with disciplinary responses from teachers, at least, the ones who didn't just ignore it, pretend they couldn't see it, and let the disruptive kids run riot in the classroom. Assaults on children by other children were an everyday occurrence, bullying was rife and more or less an accepted hazard of just going to school, and not one thing was ever done about it because kids who dared to speak up just got battered even harder and more frequently.

Do you honestly think your DD would have coped just fine and dandy?

Wow your understanding of an ADHD diagnosis is really poor. You don’t get a mild diagnosis of ADHD, you have to have struggled throughout childhood and there is a lot more involved to it than a bit of lacking in attention.

I am a 60s baby late diagnosed with ADHD.Zero tech in the 60s,70s or 80s.

There are always some environmental factors that affect how a condition is experienced - and lack of focus and hyper-focus can happen within any culture. I have ADHD. In my childhood that could mean obsessively putting my books in alphabetical order instead of doing homework, or always losing everything including track of time. Now (without meds) it can mean obsessive scrolling.

I feel uncomfortable about all of these labels being used especially by young people with mild cases of things, it seems to imprison them in a fixed identity or frame them as having something wrong with them, when none of us a perfect and we all have strengths and weaknesses, and life is about living with them and being open to change

l think you have no understanding how how severe it it. People failing degrees and losing jobs because medication has gone out of stock.

A diagnosis frees rather than imprisons.

I hear that a lot through my work, that’s it trauma not adhd, but I often think what came first (depending on the type of trauma) the trauma or the adhd symptoms.

Children with adhd are told off all the time, they are often isolated at school and labelled as a naughty child, a chaotic home life because of the disability, the likelyhood that parents also have adhd are likely finding things hard. These shouldn’t be dismissed as trauma.

My child had no trauma. She was loved and adored.

Still got severe ADHD

Ditto my children(and me).

About sleep: there are no magic tricks. We recommend very regular bed time and wake up routines, keep the bedroom clear of screens and clutter, limit caffeine and food close the bedtime. Many kids benefit from an ordinary kindle at bedtime- it means they can read as long as they want with limited light but not have the excitement of screens and blue light. Often I work with kids who are allowed iPads and snacks in the middle of the night. I have so much compassion for these families and appreciate they are exhausted and in survival mode, but it helps to break those night time habits.

all that said, this is the part I didn’t say before because it makes internet warriors angry:

ADHD can be a real and debilitating condition. It is definitely genetic and has biological causes. The demands of modern society can make life extra-challenging for these people and ideally as a society, we should examine our expectations rather than pathologise individual differences. These individuals require support greater than “have a good bedtime routine”

ADHD is usually diagnosed by observing behaviour. There is not a definitive test for ADHD. I suspect there are a growing population of people who do struggle with behaviours similar to those seen with ADHD, and they would struggle less with good diet, exercise, and sleep.

In other words, not everything that presents as ADHD has the same root cause.