ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
ADHD is not a disease. It’s a collection of symptoms that have been arbitrarily grouped together. My son’s psychiatrist who was diagnosing my son for ADHD said that it’s psychiatry’s dirty little secret.<p>Back in the 60s or 70s ( I can’t remember what he said) people were starting to notice that kids were having behavioral problems, trouble focusing etc.<p>So what they did was collect a group of symptoms, and then arbitrarily said “if the child has 6 out of 11 of these symptoms then they have ADHD.”<p>The reason why they chose 6 was because if they chose 5 then too little number of children would get diagnosed, and if they chose 7, then too many children would get diagnosed. Having 6 would mean that 7-10% of kids would get diagnosed which “looked right” so they chose 7.<p>It’s not a real disease like other diseases, it’s a collection of symptoms. Which is why kids get misdiagnosed all the time. Anxiety can produce ADHD-like symptoms. Other things like giftedness and boredom can also fry diagnosed as ADHD.<p>There really are children with focus issues where medication like adderall will absolutely help. It will make kids with anxiety worse though so a misdiagnosis will ruin lives. But the origins of where ADHD came from explains why there is so many issues with ADHD disgnoses.