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I have no doubts that ADHD existed before, but there's no way the sudden influx of people with it was just 'always there but hidden'. Pretty much all my friends

I have no doubts that ADHD existed before, but there's no way the sudden influx of people with it was just 'always there but hidden'. Pretty much all my friends have diagnosed ADHD. Something is going on. In large part, likely the internet destroying our attention spans. I only have had these problems since I was about 22, before that I concentrated great.

ojkelly 3y ago
Anecdotally, I continue to see friend groups form where near all of them are neurodivergent without knowing it. Because their brains work differently, when they find someone else whose brain works in a similar way it’s less effort to spend time with them. 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.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  > 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.
seba_dos1 3y ago
ADHD and autism are quite correlated and neurodiverse people tend to form bubbles of friends even without realizing that they're neurodiverse, and I assume that was also true even before these were being formally diagnosed.

ojkelly 3y ago

Anecdotally, I continue to see friend groups form where near all of them are neurodivergent without knowing it. Because their brains work differently, when they find someone else whose brain works in a similar way it’s less effort to spend time with them. 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.

seba_dos1 3y ago
> 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.

seba_dos1 3y ago

ADHD and autism are quite correlated and neurodiverse people tend to form bubbles of friends even without realizing that they're neurodiverse, and I assume that was also true even before these were being formally diagnosed.