It's like height. Everyone has a height, but if you're 180cm tall you'll find the world caters to you well, but at 250cm you struggle to fit and basic tasks are difficult.
I read it as, "everyone experiences the symptoms of ADHD to some extent, including those who don't experience symptoms beyond the threshold of a disorder."
The big question is, do you see that fact as a tool for the average person to trivialize or to empathize with the ADHD experience?
Having both OCD and ADHD I can tell you that people who say they are "a bit OCD" or "a bit ADHD" have never wished they were dead because their executive function is shot and their emotional regulation is so compromised, and that they're fed up of washing their hands until they bleed.
Everyone has some traits of most disorders from time to time. What marks a disorder is that it is constant, unrelenting, pathological and happiness destroying.
Ironically, headlines like this contribute to the idea that “everyone has ADHD”. Once you identify 27 different variants as being linked to ADHD, a lot of people are going to have at least one of those variants. That doesn’t mean they have ADHD, because the correlation to any singular variant is insignificant. But a lot of people are going to find one or two or three of these variants and assume, wrongly, that it means they have ADHD.
The more variants that are “linked to” a condition, the more people will have at least one of those variants and get confused. When you have as many as 27 variants linked, it could be the case that virtually everyone has at least one of those variants, depending on how common they are.
These aren’t diagnostic for ADHD in any way. They’re more of loose correlational hints for further research.
Like telling an alcoholic that everyone enjoys drinking, you just need to control yourself.
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
This, under some atheist/agnostic worldviews, is roughly equivalent to "you just need to control yourself".
That program works for some people, doesn’t work for others. It’s not any sort of standard that gets handed out universally by treatment programs, though.
Having that “pain” taken away was amazing. I can focus better without meds now that I know what it’s like. No where near as with meds. But still a big improvement.
And now we call every guy who goes on a bender an alcoholic and send them to AA though most people drink less as they get older without any intervention of any kind.
So what do you do for people like me who without medication can't even do things we want to do or have an interest in, no matter how hard we try? It's not always as simple as being stimulated by different things.
Call it ADHD or not, in extreme cases it can be absolutely debilitating for people and it's not simply because they're lazy, or not trying.
I just believe that its so overly diagnosed these days. It's similar to depression. It's very common to just throw drugs at the problem when some people don't need drugs, they need a lifestyle change, sometimes that means using drugs to begin with as a bridge to a lifestyle change.
But we are in this weird state where people go to a doctor and its like "oh you sneezed? here take these 15 drugs" "how do you feel, on can't focus, must be ADHD, take this" "oh you feel down, must be depression, take these 6 drugs"
Sometimes I feel like we treat a problem before we diagnose the problem.
Many people say this, but where's the evidence? Probably the best quality article to date in support of overdiagnosis and overtreatment is [1], and that paper is incredibly weak. It does not give any concrete numbers as to the rate of overdiagnosis, only really claims that there are populations of less severe ADHD that have inferior reward/risk outcomes of pharmacotreatment, while also admitting ADHD is underdiagnosed and undertreated in subpopulations, especially girls and minorities.
In other words, it's likely all just misdiagnosis, due to limited sensitivity and specificity.
My hypothesis is that ADHD detection, like any medical test, has limits to its accuracy, and considering even quantitative tests with 90% accuracy have quite large false positive populations, we are seeing a similar situation with the far more qualitative ADHD test system.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042533/#!po=9....
On the other hand comments like that are among things that contributed to me not getting diagnosed for years, so consider what are the confirmed facts when talking about medical treatments, ok?
I’ve tried a few times over the years to stop, and each time my career has taken a tail spin. I go from being a top performer when taking a small amount of Adderall to having difficulties doing the most basic work tasks because they’re boring.
I can acknowledge all I want that I’m stimulated by different things, but without a diagnosis to give a professional an idea of the symptoms I face, I wouldn’t be a successful or happy member of society.
Before my diagnosis and treatment I was EXTREMELY depressed and anxious all the time. The diagnosis has been literally life changing in the best way possible.
Now that I'm an adult with a diagnosis and proper, legal medication, it has helped immensely. It makes me wonder where I would/could be if I got on the right path earlier in life.
It might be nice to think it's really just part of a rainbowy spectrum of everyone is different and koombaya, but it's simply not true.
Similar to another commenter here, I told myself this story until my early thirties and suffered the whole time thinking I was using the ADHD "label" as a crutch.
ADHD and other mental illnesses get this "just a label" treatment because we don't walk around with missing limbs or eyeballs. Most people with ADHD mask their symptoms enough to feign normality. That normality is enough to make them functional while enough to fool others the stray from normal is akin to the occasional distractability of neurotypical brains.