AIBU to wonder whether ADHD is normal and society is the issue

[LadyBeatriceBeaHiggins]

No offence intended

Discussing about Adhd with a friend who has Adhd and we wondered what if Adhd is naturally a part of being human and its the way society trys to make humans into machines that is the problem ?

so figured id open up our debate for fellow mumsnetters

I meant 'neurotypical' not 'neurological'.

can’t edit - depends on the child but also many other circumstances around them too - it’s so very individual. But I believe that the options should be there and all things trialled.

The issue can be the consistency of environment when they move from primary to secondary. At a key point in development, puberty. So much can happen at that stage as the brain goes through enormous changes- the right support can make a huge difference. Lack of support can be disastrous.

I'm pulling just shy of 190kg and would still struggle without the meds. I told myself for years that I was fine without them and after a couple of years back on them I wish I'd never stopped.

Could I cope without them? Yes. I did all throughout my 20s. However, my life was immeasurably harder and I missed out on a lot of good times through always being stressed and having to spend my evenings catching up on work.

A lack of dopamine isn't something that can be fixed through routine IME. That's probs why so many ADHD sufferers are dependent on self medicating with cannabis to address their emotional difficulties.

Sorry, just read your comment about avoiding a diagnosis. No offence but you might not even have ADHD. I'm sure you're aware with the job you do that anxiety is often mistaken for ADHD.

I don’t really care any more!

Colleagues and friends who’ve recently been diagnosed tell me I am. 🤷🏻‍♀️

This is an interesting paper too:

Conclusions

We show that being exposed to ADHD awareness reliably increases false self-diagnosis among healthy young adults for at least one week; a brief nocebo education intervention is efficacious in substantially reducing and later eliminating it. Nocebo education is a promising adjunct for balanced awareness efforts that could be applied in various contexts.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13054899/

Yes and I think addiction seriously needs to be looked at.

I've seen families where both parents have had issues with addiction and drugs (often weed), are clearly struggling terribly to manage normal life, and the child has adhd. SS involvement to support all of them. More recently I’ve been aware parents are getting the diagnosis. And I do wonder what would have happened if those parents had perhaps had access to better systems and a diagnosis earlier in life? Because they’re from families with low socioeconomic status, low education and no access to the kinds of resources that would drive them to seek better health, they’ve struggled through life. And now their children are too.

At the same time, addiction can be pure addiction as it’s a linked to basic biological survival features all creatures have.

Was having this conversation yesterday. I think it's both a natural variation and can be a disability. I usually use the social model of disability (although that has its flaws). Having re-looked at some of the diagnostic criteria only a few days ago, some of our current understanding of ADHD does appear to be pathologising very "normal" aspects of childhood, like "climbed trees". I guess our idea of normal and functional changes over time. That said, clearly people with ADHD are often at a disadvantage, and in some it can be (and even historically would have been) severely disabling - a lot of prisoners have ADHD because they cannot control their impulses etc.

I can see why people with ADHD get upset by some of this whole discussion though - autism and ADHD are relentlessly targeted as sort of not real conditions with a load of fakers. It always starts off with one question and then people will say that "mild" cases don't really have it, there are no biomarkers, why has it exploded, etc etc. Almost no-one is saying the same for anxiety, depression, ocd, even learning disabilities (based on IQ) or schizophrenia - all natural human variations, all increasing, no biomarkers, all psychiatric conditions have arbritrary diagnostic lines drawn in the sand that might shift over time, all would have been present before the ever dreaded screens...

I’m autistic and feel the same ( for my level of autism) . Why should I be made to feel odd , because I say exactly what I mean, instead of hinting . Can focus on a task without getting distracted and can make clear decisions based on facts not feelings or vibes .

I remember an article where they got a panel of ADHD experts to watch a load of TikTok vids. They concluded that 25% were 'misleading', 50% were 'subjective', and only 25% were deemed to have some accuracy.

I hope everyone here who has been diagnosed and found it helpful/ life changing is ok.

Haven’t watched the documentary.

The TikTok research you refer to is this one
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9659797/

considering the Nocebo research upthread, if people are fed a stream of misinformation without understanding the nocebo effect, they may well seek and get adhd diagnosis.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/inform-and-do-no-harm-nocebo-education-reduces-false-selfdiagnosis-caused-by-mental-health-awareness/74B66FDBFDD635A0951337FE9FC4CC9D

Also I recently read in one article on all this an expert saying that everyone is a better version of themselves on amphetamines. (Stories of mums taking children’s meds comes to mind here)

The condition definitely existed however, I’ve spent 25 years teaching children with adhd and seeing them so well either with the changes to how they’re taught OR drugs, and also both. My 20 yr old niece wouldn’t be studying without medication. Only diagnosed during alevels

It's a physiological issue resulting in less available dopamine in the brain. Does that make type 1 diabetes normal, as it's just less insulin? Why do people still see brain disorders as less believable than other organ disorders? We could say any disease is on the continuum of normal, but if we have a treatment then let's allow people to have it without stigma.

Is there less dopamine available to the brain?

Although I broadly agree with your other points. Many diseases (and probably every psychiatric and most neurodevelopmental conditions) are just somewhere on bellcurve of normal with arbitrary cut offs for 'pathological' and yet ADHD and autism appear to take most of the heat.

Both my children are what used to be called 'severely' autistic, one in particular remains non verbal, was thought to have a form of epilepsy, and has severe learning disabilities, is doubly incontinent. He has no genetic abnormalities (that they could find), a completely normal MRI scan and normal EEGs. No one would look at him and think that his presentation was a 'myth' and yet no underlying pathology has been identified as far as the science available on the NHS can tell us!

That’s the problem, it’s not physiological from the pov that it can be diagnosed via any scientific method.

It’s a psychiatric diagnosis, which is based on observation and patient self reporting symptoms.

Both of these are be subjective, and subjectivity is affected by a range of things including culture, social trends and bias.

Diabetes blood sugar measurements can be affected by stress and perception. It doesn’t mean the person doesn’t have diabetes but perception can help or hinder the condition. At the same time it’s been proven that type two can be cured via environmental conditions / eating in certain ways.

That’s the issue facing this particular medical debate as it’s likely some cases can be resolved and well managed “environmentally” (and with extra support/ coaching - the education system attempts to make everyone the same when they’re really not) and others really can’t; we just don’t have a biological diagnostic test (yet.)

I teach children in a send school. many are diagnosed with adhd. For some our environment helps them access learning and develop emotional regulation and resilience skills. For others medication is the only thing that helps.

Yeah definitely agree. I also think if this is how we're going to view ADHD, it's how we should view all psychiatric diagnoses and neurodevelopmental conditions though. Let's face it, with "Learning Disability/ Intellectual Disability" we literally just took the bell curve of normal and drew a line at 2 standard deviations below to say this side is a condition and this side isn't. The difference of an IQ at 68 vs 72 is likely completely arbitrary at an individual level. Even LD can be present differently in different environments and be viewed differently from different lenses (e.g. cultural lenses). I know it is, in reality, slightly different to ADHD, but I'm not really sure why this "social construct" stuff seems to land so much on ADHD (and to a slightly lesser extent autism).

Depression is a social construct. How sad is clinically sad? It's mostly based on subjective self report and it is definitely viewed very differently across different times and places. Some people are saying this in the media (alongside ADHD, autism, anxiety etc), but really not many.

School was like this in the 1980s too though. There were many ND kids but only the more outwardly presenting got diagnoses.
i agree with posters who say the threshold for diagnosis should be higher and that many high functioning ND people are probably more disabled by society than being ND.

You misunderstand depression. Depression is not just being sad. It's just one of the symptoms. You can check the NHS website for a list of symptoms.

In theory I think these symptoms need to have been present for at least 3 weeks to be classed as depression but in practice I think people wait for months or years before they seek help thinking they just need to try harder to get better or thinking they don't deserve help.

I once read an article that described how measuring variables in activity in the brain linked to specific learning difficulties would mean escaping generalised labels and moving towards more fine tuned support for the specific difficulties.

Ive since understood that brain related measurements are very challenging which is why it never took off but the central premise of fine tuning into specific difficulties makes much more sense.

It would love away from an identity led label and also direct support and learning to those specific areas. I think this has happened to dyslexia from what I’m aware of. It’s now called SLD (specific learning difficulty) with three areas: reading, writing (composing and formation) and spelling and dyscalculia.

If adhd were given a more generalised description of executive function differences/ difficulties and then a list of the issues that are a challenge it could help both clinicians determine if meds are helpful also help fine tune specific support. Both via more strategies and environmental changes.

Specific mental health support and coaching is also really important.

in some cultures being sad is seen in a very different way. It’s interpreted as a very natural reaction to certain things and even embraced as normal - eg grief etc. The culture is designed around allowing and acknowledging sadness and then moving through it.

The human givens approach re frames depression as it describes a set of specific basic human needs - when someone doesn’t have one or two of those fulfilled nor the access to gain those things, depression is the result. From this perspective depression can be seen as a social construct.

The medical construct is that it’s a serotonin imbalance (recently proven simplistically incorrect). The medical research around inflammation is interesting though as many drug reduce inflammation- as does diet and exercise. And also the arts - apparently 150 mins per week of engaging with the arts is equivalent to the 150 mins per week of exercise when measuring health impacts.

Evidence around things like volunteering etc is also similar.

I also came across a book yesterday framing adhd culturally from a pov of inheritance of traits from the past around hunters v farmers.

This, absolutely.
As a teacher I do think adhd is being overdiagnosed and some parents want the label so they can say its not their fault that Johnny is a little git. Lots of children don't fit our outdated system. Lots of children need more wiggles, fidgets etc.
But there are also children who simply can't focus and are limited by ADHD and or ASD.
I do think threads like this are potentially doing a lot of damage to people who are already stigmatised.

I don't, I just picked one of the symptoms. Why 3 weeks and not 1 or 20?

My point is that ALL psychiatric conditions are social constructs to some degree, but the suffering or level of disability can still be very real. I don't really understand the media's relentless spotlighting of ADHD I this regard.

I'm an author with ADHD and it is a positive for me. When I get hyperfixated on a book I am writing I can get the first draft down in six weeks. I write VERY fast because it is my all absorbing interest.

I wasn't diagnosed until my sixties and only then because my DD was diagnosed. In my young days I was impulsive, rather wild and not always bound by societal norms, shall we say. But I did well at school because of the very tight structure and discipline. My mum also kept a very tight rein and would smack my legs if I crossed boundaries - so I learned to stay within them. So although I've had bouts of feeling as though I was an alien in my own life, so did many of us during our teenage years and most of those are NT.

What is the book please?

I haven’t seen the programme itself, but it struck me as interesting that the academic who is disputing her contribution said this about the child participant who was successfully withdrawn from medication for ADHD

This ‘experiment’ provided nothing but anecdotical evidence confounded by a host of factors,” she said. “The child was not only taken off medication, but also off screens, off additives and junk food, subjected to more nature experience and by implication to more interaction with family, friends and parents.

If improved diet, lifestyle and relationships can negate the need for medication I do think that implies
these imbalances can be a cause in the first place.

www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/20/the-great-adhd-myth-channel-4-programme-contributor-expert-criticism

"If improved diet, lifestyle and relationships can negate the need for medication I do think that implies these imbalances can be a cause in the first place."

Appreciate you said "if", because n=1 on a TV show would prove nothing but I also would just be really wary around this. Firstly, just because something improves something doesn't mean whatever is missing is the cause. Exercise and diet help almost all kinds of mental illness, even serious ones, but mental illness is not caused by poor diet or lack of exercise. Secondly, many parents of children with these needs already beat themselves up, thinking they caused it etc - it's unhelpful and untrue. "If improved diet, lifestyle and relationships can negate the need for medication I do think that implies these imbalances can be a cause in the first place."

Appreciate you said "if", because n=1 on a TV show would prove nothing but I also would just be really wary around this. Firstly, just because something improves something doesn't mean whatever is missing is the cause. Exercise and diet help almost all kinds of mental illness, even serious ones, but mental illness is not caused by poor diet or lack of exercise. Secondly, many parents of children with these needs already beat themselves up, thinking they caused it etc - it's unhelpful and untrue. Finally, when you see all kinds of children in all kinds of settings with ADHD, you can quite clearly see a very real phenomenon. I've seen learning disabled children without ADHD who are completely passive and compliant and watched their learning disabled peers with ADHD literally bouncing around the room for hours on end even with intense specualust sensory input - the types of pervasive and significant attwntion and hyperactivity disability in the latter group just is not down to screens (which they all have).