What happens when diagnosis? Seeking help (add your own scare quotes) will get you amphetamines with an expensive monthly 5 minute refill appointment.
Fixing systematic problems will improve things. Besides, I don't have an issue with medical doctors prescribing such things if it is generally recognized as the commonly most effective treatment for a disorder. Give the doctors the time (through the systematic fixes), and there is time to discuss treatment options. Actually fix both physical and mental health care so folks can afford it while fixing systematic issues means folks can actually get coping mechanisms and other such training from a psycologist or psychiatrist as well, which might be especially attractive to folks that shy away from medicines or certain types of medicines.
Here's what people can expect from diagnosis and treatment. Whether this is what's provided is another question.
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg72
The recommendations are short and clear: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg72/chapter/Recommendation...
Not to mention that therapy and just knowing about the problem can help too.
And like I said, there is also therapy and lifestyle changes that can have a huge impact as well. I'd say that the benefits of my therapy and the medication are about even in terms of effectiveness of managing my ADHD.
Tools like how I greatly benefit from a very strict schedule that needs many things packed tightly together at some points, but very big gaps in others, and I need to follow it to the t. Tools like knowing that exercise and eating right help quite a lot, tools like how to structure my days and put external reminders or blocks up that can keep me on track. Tools like being able to figure out that I work well in COMPLETE silence, or a very chaotic atmosphere, but not much in between. And information about things like "hyperfocus" which is an ironic symptom of ADHD for many people, and ways that I can kind of "trigger" it sometimes and use it to my advantage (while making sure I set alarms to make sure I don't keep working until 9PM because I forgot what time it was and the last time I looked at a clock was 3 in the afternoon...)
They are basically just people that have dealt with ADHD before, and can help me find what works best for myself. Also, just talking to someone about how something you tried (either medication or lifestyle change) worked can be really eye opening. You never really think on your own about how something you tried in your life really affected it, and just verbalizing that helped dial in medication amounts and show the effectiveness of lifestyle changes.
The important thing is to go to the appointments, which was tough at first, but after a bit the appointments were the "anchor" that I started learning how to schedule my life around, and then I was eventually able to schedule the appointments around my life.