ADHD

TL;DR screens are short circuiting everybody's brains.

I think it's increased in the last few decades because our attention spans have been shortened from staring at screens all the time. And people who make movies and videos know how to keep our attention by catering to short attention spans, frequently cutting to new scenes, hence triggering our short attention spans and making us crave short snippets rather than in depth long subject content which require long attention spans.

Thankfully I was born in the 1970s and I was raised on books and I thoroughly loved books until the early 2000s when the internet finally took over my psyche.

The thing with books is it requires a long attention span and it's so much better for your brain as it requires thinking and visualization and analysis and you can pause and look up from the book and think about what you're reading and then go back and continue where you left off and you can learn new words and analyze the words and look up the words. These mentally-nourishing things do not happen when we are staring at screens.

I'm reluctant to blame anything besides increased awareness for any increase in diagnosis.

I didn't discover that I had it until I was almost 40, and I'm sure many others my age STILL don't realize that they have it.

People caught on that girls and women can have it too and that they can be better at masking than anticipated. Nobody bothered to check me when I had all the symptoms for all my childhood and adolescence. It took me connecting the dots after age 30 to get the diagnosis.

AFAIK, ADHD is something you're born with. The things you list make it more difficult to live with ADHD, but they don't create it.

• larger percent of people going for diagnosis
• better & more reliable diagnostics
• understanding that men arent the only ones susceptible to adhd
• understanding that adhd doesnt present identically across all populations
• better awareness in general of neurological differences

I think a bit part of it is that it's simply become harder to live with ADHD and for it to stay under the radar in your life. Rare is the person who can survive in the modern world purely on their wits. It demands that you persevere at jobs, careers and relationships over long timespans, and against an onslaught of things which have been relentlessly developed and refined over generations with the express purpose of hijacking your dopamine system and interfering with your free will.

I blame that the world, especially work, is more unforgiving of ADHD traits. Scatterbrained-ness isn't as much of a deal in agriculture (where you usually can course-correct in time, I'd imagine) or monotonous factory repetition (of course it probably really sucks for ADHD-Hs for... well... monotonous repetition), but definitely is in an office environment. Also so many things now prey on your attention in constantly developing ways (all the ads trying to sell you things, just about every online service, streaming services, social media) that it scrambles even NT peoples' brains, so of course it only makes it harder for ADHDers.

Better detection methods.

It's only relatively recently been understood, defined, and studied. As in the last 50ish years, but with a much-heavier emphasis on more recently, now on the order of ~2,500ish peer-reviewed papers per year.

The ironic part is that a lot of the people who are being diagnosed today are the ones who don't have hyperactive bodies, but hyperactive minds. So those who CAN sit in front of a computer for hours and hours without making a peep, but can't finish a project or do chores or meet on time or follow a conversation etc.

These people used to slip through the cracks because no one noticed that they spent all their day daydreaming instead of paying attention in class.

I discovered I had it at around 35, just a few years ago. It's an awareness thing. My hope is that the percentage increases so much that it no longer is seen as a rare issue, that a significant portion of the population has it and has had it, and that overall mindset and policy changes are made to accommodate. We don't work well in the society that has been built up by the normies. We are an asset, not a hindrance to a functioning society, but we really haven't been given our place in the rigid system that often counters where we can be the most productive. We can do things that are often described as super powers, capable of learning new things incredibly fast, but it's situational and often not long term, and companies for example just don't have systems in place to utilize that. We need our own dedicated style of management that all employers are aware of and how to get the most from us, which contrasts heavily to the mind-breaking, life-draining style of management that typical people thrive in.

Okay, I rambled a bit and went off topic, lol