It's absolutely ridiculous to me how much people coming into hn/reddit and going "wow I read these symptoms, I think I must be adhd!" blew up around 2020.

For those of us who have been ADHD our entire lives and have been acutely aware of every single thing that ADHD has affected IN our lives. Like losing relationships, partnerships, making people think we don't care about them, disinterest, spiraling into depression because we can't keep things orderly for more than a week, having to write down literally everything lest we immediately forget the next question we need to ask, getting panic attack level anxiety frustrated when we can't find something we've lost 10000 times like our keys but we KNOW we put in the same exact spot because we trained ourselves to do it, getting put down and told we were incredibly smart but didn't apply in school..

I have never, ever, once since I was probably 7-8 wondered if I did or didn't have ADHD. Nor has anyone in my entire life. And it absolutely obvious to me, as someone who has ADHD, who also has ADHD. It's absolutely a spectrum but we can 100% hear ourselves caged inside of someone elses heads.

And now, 2024, with 80% of HN now thinking they need stims because at 42 after having 3 kids running around they find it hard to focus, so now I can't get my prescriptions because they're out of stock and I pretty much can't function on weekends now because I have to limit my intake to save extra pills in case I can't get it next month and I have to get tested more frequently because now it's even FURTHER on everyones radar as a narcotic.

And I'm aware that some people just literally have no idea what some mental thing is. I have 40+ yo friends who don't know that some feeling they felt 3 days ago was panic attack level anxiety.

Well, it's time to learn about your feelings and how to identify and work with them, big boys!

Delay fun https://imgur.com/a/BVQkKOV !

Edit: I'm not gatekeeping diagnosis at all, get one if you need one and it helps. I'm just explaining what the situation is like from this perspective. It's incredibly troubling to see an illness you have blow up in popularity because there are so many things that can come with that, like the gov cutting it off for us completely, us running out of medication, etc. Although, this is ADHD. If this was cancer and it started growing exponentially i'm sure they'd do more medication creation and research, instead we're treated like coke addicts.

edit2: And I should mention, just because I was dx'd as a kid doesn't mean anything in that huge list at the top was evident to me that it was caused by ADHD and not anything else in my life. It took decades of going through the same cycles and loops and seeing the ways my adhd would cause things to be different from others and cause issues. A lot of people think "Wow if I'd gotten dx'd at 8 instead of 38 my life would be amazing."

Unfortunately not.

I didn't really figure out the interpersonal relationship issues were hugely ADHD until my 30s. ADHD when I was a kid was a "he's super hyper and can't focus" and was supposed to go aaway by "adulthood." No psychiatrist has ever given me a good understanding of ADHD that took all my own research.

Turns out it's a lifelong thing. Psychiatrists in the past were awful.