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1. ADHD always existed, is a problem that needs solving for someone to participate in society, and everyone went untreated. Diagnosis has improved.
2. ADHD has increased because of environmental changes such as pollution, food, chemicals, screens, how we raise children, or some other factor.
3. ADHD is a description of a group of people who have different preferences and corporate interests have identified it as a profitable problem and have become dependent on it to hit their revenue targets, so they tell themselves and customers that their kids will not be successful in life without their drugs.
4. Schools and society operate differently now and so opportunities that fit well for people who thrive in more physically active settings have been diminished (more time indoors, less free roaming outside, less physical jobs, etc).
5. A combination of several items above when brought together caused real or perceived increase in ADHD.
6. Something else?
Williams, Jonathan, and Eric Taylor. "The evolution of hyperactivity, impulsivity and cognitive diversity." Journal of the Royal Society Interface 3.8 (2006): 399-413.
The reason why this system exists is because it is the most effective system, most effective in the sense that it as outcompeted other systems where the pressure for survival was how useful in furthering our industrial age.
In small tribes, people with "ADHD" would likely have easily found a place and no one would really find it unusual if some children weren't good at studying abstract concepts for 6 hours a day...because most wouldn't need to do that.
The fact that ADHD is classified as a disorder is because children with ADHD are simply less effective at serving our highly industralized system, which incidentally is not making us happier, but only more efficient at giving people differential advantages through economic growth, which in turn is making us sicker.
People with ADHD might have a harder time concentrating and sitting still, but it is our society which has the real disease.
One sympton of children with ADHD are they have a tendency to be far more impulsive and make far more risky decisions, with some correspondingly awful consequences. That was happening before the disorder was discovered, only at the time no-one knew why the behaviour was occurring.
Williams, Jonathan, and Eric Taylor. "The evolution of hyperactivity, impulsivity and cognitive diversity." Journal of the Royal Society Interface 3.8 (2006): 399-413.
(I honestly think that "a group with members who both seek novelty and avoid it is more likely to prosper than one that doesn't have a mix" is probably true. It's just impossible to prove).
I do wonder if the nature of our modern lives- less physical activity, fewer working hours, with more 'mind' or white-collar jobs- has made us as a society less resilient to attention disorders like ADD or ADHD.
It's possible that, given the lack of extensive recorded research into it at the time, we don't know that these kids who were observed as having grown out of it were properly accounted for. A poor sample could easily make 50% seem like "most" after all.
Even so, it is worth wondering if non-pharmacological therapeutic treatment might be worth emphasizing more heavily. I don't know what it's like for kids in college now, but I recall meds like Adderall prescriptions being surprisingly common, and that it was being abused was something of an open secret.
I only have had these problems since I was about 22, before that I concentrated great.
It shouldn’t be a surprise then when one of them gets diagnosed, the rest eventually look into it and get diagnosed too.
It helps that in the last 3-5 years talking publicly about ADHD has become less stigmatised (one of the reasons I continue to do so). I first suspected having it over a decade before looking more into it. I wouldn’t have hesitated if social conversation then is like it is now.
The internet doesn’t cause ADHD, neurodivergence is likely more prevalent than expected. We (neurodivergent’s) have all been masking and developing strategies to survive the modern world. Then covid happened, and the normal support structures fell away, coping mechanisms failed.
All of a sudden things went from hard to basically impossible, it’s no wonder some of us decided to ask whether or not the experience was normal or if there might be something else at play.
Diagnostically ADHD symptoms need to be present when you were younger (IIRC 10-12), so if they just started at 22 it might be something else. Or it might be you left home, made a major life change, and your previous coping strategies no longer work.
Exactly. Looking back at my own life the symptoms were there since the very beginning; they just weren't causing me as much trouble as they can do now, so I didn't even know they were "symptoms" at all. ADHD doesn't mean "I can't concentrate", it means "I can't choose what I concentrate on", and for the most of school time it turned out that I was interested enough in most of the things I had to learn to not cause me real troubles until later in my life.
I also had no comparison and didn't know that other people don't suffer so much when trying to learn something that doesn't spark their interest. They're not excited about it, but they just do it. I had to fight with my own brain that actively resisted and thought it was what everyone else had to do as well and that they were just better at it than I am.
I ended up doing things like composing music to poems I had to learn and recording them as songs just because it was pretty much the only way not to suffer tremendously while trying to learn them. Back then it just seemed like one of my "quirks" - it wasn't a problem because I successfully managed to tackle it, but now it's obvious that most people didn't even have to tackle it in the first place.
Individual people who need penicillin are doing better today, but as a whole past generations did as well as today, at least in the fact that they survived and produced us. In other words, we are doing BETTER when it comes to average individual comfort but the same in terms of surviving.
As a “whole”, how did past generations do with maternal/infant/toddler/child mortality and morbidity? Was that “as well” as today?
but sure, lets ignore over a century of research and progress because someone wants to ask "what if" and treat all that as an emotional response.
Virtually every medication has risks/issues, so responsible use requires understanding those risks and be prepared to change course as conditions warrent it.
That said, medication should be one facet of many (behavioral modification, diet, exercise, meditation, etc). We're also all ultimately responsible for our own health so passively consuming pills without taking ownership is not license to blame your parents, "the system" or anything else.