science

Isn't it strange how we discovered a lot more stars after inventing telescopes?

Obviously there was an unrelated increase in stars born at that exact time.

My cousin was diagnosed by a brain scan. She signed up to be part of a clinical trial for something else, got kicked out of the trial because her fMRI showed she had ADHD.

So if we can literally scan someone's brain and diagnose them from a picture instead of all these vague "describe your symptom" guessing... why don't we?

I spent most of my life undiagnosed, because it used to be believed that only boys could have ADHD. But I knew, and was formally diagnosed as an adult only at the insistence of my partner.

This thread somehow brought out some of the most misinformed, boomer-brain takes imaginable and comes dangerously close to anti-intellectualism. We can all agree that labels can be reductive and unhelpful, but as someone with a neurological disability, seeing people debate whether a disorder that makes it incredibly hard to enjoy my life is even real or not is fucking horrible.

All of this applies to Autism, as well.

The moral panic of overdiagnosis comes from conservatism's obsession with hypernormalcy. Basically unless your really-really failed to be normal, you're not allowed to stray from it, and even then, it would be good if you were normal, because they like the virtue of normalcy, and also thinking is hard, and also also change is bad.

Yes this explains modern transphobia a lot. Some admitted, that it has to be "all undone", because people stopped trying to be normal first and foremost. This also partly explains gatekeeping in fandoms.

It’s almost as if we’ve gotten better at understanding the condition overall and in nuance.

Serious question: how would we be able to detect if we’ve over diagnosed a mental disorder such as ADHD? What would evidence for that look like?

According to the administration at a school I’m familiar with, at least 50% of the 5th grade class has ADHD.

So, not having ADHD is the disorder.

Most data suggests it is under diagnosed.

It's the left-handedness chart all over again.

I was diagnosed in my late 50's. It was a complicated process because there is another mental health co-morbidity that shares some traits.

After going through the more than a year long process, we are working on dialing in the meds.

One of the challenges for diagnosis is that the attention economy is shortening a lot of people's attention span, causing many people to feel that they have ADHD, and diverting resources from diagnosing people who actually have ADHD. Not saying that the issue shouldn't be addressed. The combination of these factors, and the rather long and complicated process of a proper diagnosis is a challenge.

Why is there never any nuance in these discussions? We can both believe that under-diagnosis occurs, and that over-diagnosis occurs. 20% of all pupils in the UK are now classified as so disabled that they require specialised assistance. "SEND" assistance for this can range from free taxi services to and from school (which recently reached £1.2 billion), to support payments, to special assistants in school. The number of ECHP students (those with the highest needs) increasing by 71%, from 253,679 in 2018 to 434,354 in 2024. SEND spending is out of control.

So what happened, exactly? The average child disability rate in Europe is 4.6%. How did the UK end up with 20%? Did the UK suffer a catastrophic nuclear event? A war? Famine? None of the above. It is clear that categorisation has become EXTREMELY loose over time on average. This does not mean that there are not children who are struggling to get diagnosed with ADHD. However ADHD and autism are a spectrum disorder. It is not binary. The UK has drawn the line far closer to the normal side of the spectrum than any other nation on Earth. If costs continue to rise at this rate, it risks destabilising the entire health system. Public sentiment will shift, and we risk undermining children getting any diagnosis at all.

IMHO, this requires at least two tactics at the same time. 1) Invest sufficiently into diagnosis resources. Stringing parents and children along for years while they wait in the system can make the issue much worse than it needs to be. 2) Draw the diagnostic line closer to where the rest of Europe does it. This will mean far fewer children are diagnosed with disabilities, but those who genuinely have a disability are treated much faster and actually receive the resources they need.