Consider how it affects people's life trajectory through school and work, the opportunities out of reach due to the condition. It's essentially a situational cognitive impairment, when I think about it that way it seems profoundly disabling.
When I was living with family they were used to this stuff, and just let me be if I was obsessed with something. They let me satisfy those last-minute compulsions where I procrastinated and was unable to execute on my todo list earlier. etc etc.
I thought I had light ADHD but it effects my relationship, friends, and work responsibilities so much. I hate that I do everything at the last minute, with only a suitable stress to make my thoughts order themselves. And it appears entirely un-ordered when I'm doing x-y-z quickly.
Why couldn't I do it all earlier?
This also frustrates my wife, but I think less so than it would be to have the signal being an errand I'm already late for.
Getting around other people made it more obvious I had some issues. Like, my partner and I will go on walks and they'll get annoyed if I point out an interesting animal or thing I'm seeing if they're in the middle of a topic. At work I always set reminders on my phone, sent emails to myself, and left stickies on my desktop. My supervisor pointed out he'd never seen someone do that as much as I do, and started requiring me to show up with a notepad in meetings. He'd tell me to do 2 things, and then have to ask me what the first thing I told him was as I left - then the notepad became necessary.
I worked to get onto an employee advocacy group at work and we do a lot of writing to identify systemic issues and propose solutions. I had 2 months to create a paper covering issues with hiring and on the last day - after I turned in the paper - I hit reply-all to add an additional thing that was critically important. Something I knew was an issue before I started the paper. For 2 months it was completely gone from my head. So I have whiteboards around my room, and I'm trying to move to using digital whiteboards to remember these things and organize them so I can even keep my supervisor and coworkers in the loop. "This is my MS Team Whiteboard for Monday stuff, buwhahaha"
I just remember being 25 and feeling like this didn't affect me so much. It still feels like I'm joking when I talk about it. ADD /sounds/ like a non-serious condition. But all these relationships have suffered because I'm forgetful and disorganized, and people are tired of my excuses. :-( I felt normal before.
2 days ago I had a big argument because my partner says I should be taking my medication. I usually don't take it on the weekends, because I shouldn't need to "focus" then, right? I hate that the meds for ADD are addictive, and sometimes it works when I need it - other times it kicks in a day later and it feels like a double-dose. That scares me.
Because plenty of people say they are OCD too, but they don't mean the diagnosed condition. And it's quite different to "being tidy and needing things to be ordered" that the common vernacular makes it out to be.
Same as ADHD. Plenty of people who say they are "a bit ADD" mean something else.
ADHD was originally a diagnosis of exclusion - lack of executive control not explainable by any other known condition. But you can lack executive control for a wide variety of reasons including depression, sleep deprivation, electrolyte imbalances, and so on. Often doctors don't look - they just shove you out the door with Adderall. The side effects of which include loss of appetite and insomnia - both of which can make symptoms worse in the long run!
If we're going to treat ADHD as the serious disorder that it can be, we should treat diagnosis and treatment as more than an opportunity to prescribe profitable drugs. But instead we have a combination of on the one hand not taking it seriously, and on the other treating it like something serious at the oddest of moments.
These are the "visible" disabilities. ADHD, amongst other conditions, are more invisible[1]. I have diabetes but "look" normal. I know a guy with epilepsy. They too, unsurprisingly, don't "appear" disabled. (I know this wasn't your main point but I think it's important for people to know.)
ADHD as a disability was never respected, there was a 2 year time period post 2018 in which people sort of took it seriously but not really.
Pre-acceptance period we had "Is ADD real?" articles on the regular, now post-acceptance we have "Are ADHD sufferers faking it?" articles on the regular. Nothing substantial has changed for people with ADHD, the common man still does not try to understand.