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As a kid, you build your identity and coping mechanisms through emotional experiences, but when your emotion engine is 'broken' or works differently, you develop differently.
The intensity, frequency, and impact of these experiences for someone with ADHD is far beyond what neurotypical people experience.
It's not about occasional forgetfulness or distraction - it's about a brain that's structurally and functionally different, affecting every aspect of daily functioning.
Getting diagnosed isn't about finding an excuse, it's about finally understanding why basic things others find easy have always been so much harder for you.
I think getting ADHD isn’t special or interesting at the population level—when you aren’t face to face with it—but it certainly matters to individuals. I wanted to believe I was just being a human, but the reality is that I don’t have a typical human experience. I have a lot of overlap with everyone I know, but most people I meet genuinely can’t understand the experience at all. However, they are often confident that they get it. Meanwhile, they would not qualify as disabled on cognitive assessments.
To me that’s the big difference. People with ADHD often carry around legitimate, often hidden disabilities. Usually more than one.
i have been diagnosed as having ADHD multiple times, both as a kid as well as an adult. my parents decided not to put me on drugs, and as an adult, i have found behavioral interventions to be the most useful. i have not found perceiving it as a disability to be very helpful.
A couple scores were still quite low at the 15th and 22nd. Those are clearly issues for me as well, though nowhere near as much. I don't know, I think this stuff makes a meaningful difference. For the cognitive attributes I scored far higher in (high 90s in some cases), it's abundantly clear what a disadvantage many people are at in that regard. Even someone scoring closer to the 50th.
You could say it all balances out, but it doesn't seem to. The high scores I get are all undermined significantly outside of test settings. Major deficits have a serious toll on you. I'm not complaining at all, though. To me it's a fact of life, something to accept and address (with behavioural interventions as you mentioned), and try to find strategies to move forward. You get what life gives you. Generally speaking, it could be a lot worse. I'm very grateful for the parts of my brain that work well.
50 years ago there were not that many people with type 2 diabetes because people ate less and moved more (at work and at home).
Your comment is overly idealistic about neurodivergent people dealing with their problems. If it was a simple as accepting that our symptoms are normal, don't you think that we would gladly take that as an option? Psychologically, it just isn't a very effective tactic for dealing with our symptoms.
You can absolutely rephrase "that's my ADHD" to "that's within the range of normal after all", but having a proper label for a cluster of people who stand out as a clearly distinct normal curve from the rest of the population is helpful.
This is like trying to climb a tree with one arm. It won’t work. You need to take a step back, look at the problem, and develop systems which accommodate the missing arm.
ADHD only works well for us when we involve ourselves in activities which benefit from having one, extremely well-practiced arm. That’s usually our happy place. The world typically asks for all limbs in tact, though. We inevitably hit those walls.
If we pretend we won’t hit those walls and we don’t prepare ourselves, life is disproportionately hard.
We also need to ensure we accept the disability such that when we do our best to be prepared, but we fail to be, we recognize that it’s a fact of life and we do our best with what we’ve got.
I’m not a fan of the super power framing. I’m a fan of looking at it as a disability with positive, optimistic framing. When we get it right, life can work really well for us. We will always be at a disadvantage in some ways, but the skills and experiences we get because of that can be invaluable.
It's really a societal problem, and is being treated as a human failing. I contend that it's society that's expecting humans to behave in a way we haven't needed for most of our evolution.
These include: having exacting time standards disconnected from seasons and day/night cycles, having to juggle many more cognitively intense tasks that we need to quickly switch amongst, being exposed to media and technology specifically designed to capture your attention for as long as possible, etc.
It's not "a societal problem" if I fail to notice my body getting hungry for 6 hours as I try to work out a particularly enticing programming problem, and end up irritable and headachy.
It's not "a societal problem" if I blow up at a friend (or partner, or coworker, etc) because I have trouble regulating emotions, and trouble recognizing what's happening inside until it's too late.
There are certainly some symptoms of ADHD, and some ways that they manifest, that are, indeed, only a problem (or vastly exacerbated) by current societal expectations. But many of the symptoms just make life harder no matter what society is like.
ADHD is a disability, and should be treated as such.
Unfortunately, it's the kind of disability whose most common manifestations mostly make even very well-meaning people think that those who suffer from it are lazy, immature, or lacking in willpower.
Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.
Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.
"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.
it's crazy that there's so much focus on adhd but comparitively little on dyslexia, which by most estimations has similar prevalence but arguably even more child impact. i'm sure there's many more of disadvantages all across the spectrum that we haven't even classified / become aware of.