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Comment by pureagave | Hacker News Reader

Just wait until the Guardian finds out about all the ADHD diagnostic centers, tutors, therapy mills and drugs. Some might say there is a giant money printing industry of nonsense around ADHD.

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Your comment could use a better tone, but I do agree that, especially with the difficulties that people are having finding a job these days, there has been elevated interest in ADHD and thus there are more attempts to prey on people with genuine issues. Just see how many body-doubling articles hit the HN front-page lately... I sincerely doubt that this is the result of organic interest and not an astroturfing campaign.

> Your comment could use a better tone, but I do agree that, especially with the difficulties that people are having finding a job these days, there has been elevated interest in ADHD and thus there are more attempts to prey on people with genuine issues

When you say “prey,” what kinds of products or services do you have in mind? I’ve seen some pretty dubious offerings, but I believe most creators genuinely want to help fellow ADHDers. Whether those solutions continue to work after the initial novelty wears off is another question.

I gave the example - IMO body-doubling is an arrificially created hype to take advantage of people with real problems. It's just perfect -- a subscription service, no permanent effect, added sprinkling of human contact to take advantage of people feeling lonely as well. No medical oversight or any oversight whatsoever...

Maybe some of the companies marketing it, of course there are people looking to exploit it just like in nearly every other industry. But the concept itself isn’t some ADHD specific thing, it’s just using technology to exploit a quirk in human psychology, and there are free options available. I’m in a discord server that has hundreds of people spread across various video call rooms at any moment. I haven’t used it enough to say how effective it is, but I definitely wouldn’t call that exploitative. If it works it works, if it doesn’t don’t use it.

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