You'd be lucky then, the result of myself going off chasing red herring diagnoses was the entire medical establishment and outer society leaving me behind for decades. I wish I had chanced upon people like you when I had hope. If I'd had the smarts and the luck not to have to chase non-existent solutions to my problems sooner, I would have taken it. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.

The article itself says a catch-all solution for ADHD will never happen. At that point I think the term "ADHD" is misleading. It should be split up into multiple different categories, each of which either specifies the underlying cause (trauma, biology, idiopathic, others) and the "attention deficit" symptom renamed such that it is not mistaken for a disorder to be medicated itself. These are multiple distinct causes all rolled up under a single label causing doctors, psychologists and patients to argue past each other about what this singular term is supposed to mean. This is a futile situation, because they're really talking about more than one disorder. "ADHD" has become too loaded a term culturally and diagnostically to be specific enough and helpful. It has to go away entirely.

The "H" for hyperactivity in my diagnosis didn't even apply to me beyond elementary school, the "ADD" stemmed from me being metaphorically smacked down for the perceived "H" at too early an age for me to fully recover. Hence the truly negative issues in my case were environmental and not biological - even though biology may have played a part at inciting those around me into action. The whole deal was iatrogenic, put into motion by people close to me I had no choice but to trust, and stimulants were a dead-end.

The fact is, parents don't want to be blamed for traumatic upbringings, so they can pin it on the child's brain and almost always succeed - creating more trauma, symptoms and learned helplessness in the process. And nobody ever realizes the truth. Literally everyone you're supposed to trust buys into the same narrative of medicalization - guardians, teachers, counselors, doctors, the media - which means what what you think of yourself is set in stone from an early age, and the worst part is that it's totally false. You have to spend years trying to undo the damage stemming from this by yourself - and that only gets you so far. Some of it never goes away.

If I had been interviewed for this article decades ago, I probably would have said something like "I'm taking these stimulants. They seem to work for school, but I'm not sure yet. I'll keep seeing what's out there." Opening up about an issue as personal as childhood trauma - the real cause - wouldn't have happened since I had yet to do enough soul searching. This hesitance is from personal experience - youth and depression. So my fate was basically sealed for all those years.

All this is to say that leaving the conversation at "ADHD" would be a grave disservice to people in my situation. This is decades of one's life on the line, spent chasing solutions to symptoms instead of causes, proclaimed by people that don't understand me at my core being. And I still have yet to find something that works well enough for me.