How Come Everyone Suddenly Has ADHD?
It seems like everyone you talk to these days either thinks they have or knows someone who thinks they have ADHD, so what’s going on?
Are people just jumping on the TikTok bandwagon, or is there another reason diagnosis is becoming so much more common?
Due to the vast and varied symptoms, ADHD isn’t easy to diagnose, meaning it is often misdiagnosed and is still seriously underdiagnosed, especially in older women.
Doctors believe that between 75-85% of those who could have ADHD are still not diagnosed. Research, understanding and developments in neuroscience move fast, and week by week, we are discovering more about how our brains work.
ADHD wasn’t believed to affect girls when I was young, it was something hyperactive adolescent boys had, and therefore all the research was done on, you guessed it, prepubescent boys.
Meaning inattentive types and girls like me were overlooked, written off and labelled talkative, dreamy or disruptive.
Inattentive and Adult ADHD wasn’t diagnosed until the 1990s.
This meant that, like me, many women of my generation never had the help and support to succeed that our male peers did. Even now, boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls as the presentation of symptoms can be so much more disruptive and obvious.
Thanks to new research, increased awareness and social media, there is a rise in older women (and some men too) who have spent their lives masking symptoms and feeling they are somehow less than or not enough, finally getting a diagnosis and the chance to understand how their brains work differently.
ADHDers aren’t better, worse, or more or less intelligent.
We are different, that’s all! And I am incredibly grateful that I finally got the chance to understand how my brain works, at the grand old age of forty-eight.
Everyone doesn’t suddenly have ADHD. We always have; we are just suddenly getting diagnosed.
