It really is, and I only used ADHD as an example. Still:

> The diagnosis may result in exclusion or special scrutiny in various militaries.

How: The military can require access to your medical records.

> Mental health is legally required to be considered in a custody dispute to evaluate the "best interest" of a child. A diagnosis can make it a legal fact that you have a mental health problem.

How: The courts can request your medical records.

> Immigration to other countries, notably America, especially under Trump, denies people with disabilities entry under certain circumstances and always gives them special scrutiny. This can impact both the disabled person and anybody with disabled family members. This specific issue is actually potentially impactful to somebody on HN.

How: Immigration will find out by simply asking you and threatening you if you lie.

> When trying to get medical services, healthcare providers who have access to your medical records themselves stigmatise the condition[1], and know that you have it. Also diagnosis of virtually all disabilities correlate to having other issues, obesity/asthma/sleep disorders in the case of ADHD. However, the very fact you have the diagnostic overshadowing[2] where physical health problems just get treated as mental health symptoms by doctors, and are less likely to be treated.

How: Medical records can be directly looked at.

> It's also that once the data about somebodies disability is on a database, it could be there for a century, and it can leak. Unexpected social changes are a bit of a threat. Germany went from conservative christians to socially left to far right in about a generation and went from totally being against killing the disabled, to totally being in favour of killing disabled. This, incidentally was facilitated by German doctors, who were early and fervent Nazi Party supporters[3].

How: Medical records will be directly looked at.

> There are sperm bank bans on donating with ADHD and other disabilities[4], and even more commonly than that policies of disclosing any diagnosed disability, so generally being diagnosed as disabled makes you subject to contemporary eugenics as well.

How: Such places will request medical records.

>K-12 schools, I can go on and on about the practice of removing disabled kids from PE classes to try and get them to study more and ignoring their physical health problems, or about the systemic unwillingness to consider what the disabled child wants to any degree when it comes to something like accommodations in an IEP (not accommodating them in socially stigmatising ways for instance). Private schools notably can just straight up discriminate against students for having ADHD and this DOES happen although I think the ADA in the US does outlaw this[5][6].

How: The school needs to either be told or have formal confirmation of a disability here

>Casual employment discrimination happens all the time

How: Generally word of mouth has to get around.

>Some people really do have negative attitudes towards anything considered a disability

How: Generally word of mouth has to get around

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4219761/ - hard to find a good source this is more illustrative
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23040706/
[4] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/harley-street-sperm-b...
[5]https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/disabled-childre...
[6]https://www.westernwheel.ca/beyond-local/airdrie-parent-clai...

P.S. Out of everything here, "diagnostic overshadowing" is the issue that seems most relevant to this topic. If some physical issue started causing a bunch of health problems that looked like mental health problems, what are the changes we would attribute it to a physical health condition instead of "mental health awareness" and the patient population simply being more woke than in the prior year?