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Is ADHD over diagnosed?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Probably over diagnosed by people self-diagnosing. Probably significantly under diagnosed officially/clinically.
And the above is true for a LOT of conditions, not just ADHD.
My daughter has a learning disability. Dyslexia and some weird kind of error with certain fine motor skills. The diagnosis from everyone? ADHD-put her on drugs. What drugs would you like? If one drugs doesn’t fix her, we’ll try two drugs.
Thank god my wife and I resisted. Nobody could explain what was going on and how drugs would fix it. I ain’t gonna lie, her elementary school days were rough. But now, straight A college student in her junior year.
I’m sure there are people looking for it, but my experience was default diagnosis by doctors and schools pushing adhd onto kids where it wasn’t appropriate.
There's a very vague term called NLD or Neurological Learning Disorder with which I was diagnosed at the time. Iirc a big part of it is issues with fine motor skills because of bad communication between the two brain halves. Also gets misdiagnosed as ADHD quite often.
I was diagnosed with Dyspraxia as a kid which was a wildly vague fine motor skills disorder that made me near unintelligible prior to speech therapy. I still have issues slurring words from time to time, but it’s not significant.
I don’t think anyone knew what was going on with me tbh. But I def have ADHD, and there’s suspicion I’m autistic as well. I’m working on getting a neuropsych eval done now to try and understand better.
Doctors are idiots when it comes to this stuff. ADHD should be diagnosed by a psychologist, just like any other neurodivergence.
Psychologists can only really diagnose mood disorders, not psychiatric conditions. Because ADHD is a psychiatric disorder, psychologists absolutely should NOT be diagnosing it. If they suspect ADHD in a client, their job is to refer the client to a psychiatrist who is able to make such a diagnosis and prescribe medicine to manage it.
Source: bachelor’s degree in psychology
ADHD isn't particularly hard to diagnose most of the time. If we're going to wait for psychologists in every bog standard case, good luck with the upcoming twelve year waiting list to get your kid some help.
People just need to know when to identify confounders and refer out. Takes a few good training seminars.
cough cough OCD cough cough
I've noticed this too. Even people telling me i have OCD because i sort certain things in certain ways. (i do NOT have OCD. I just can't stand some things if they are not in my order.) But people are very quick to diagnose other's. wich is okay imo as long as there is reason to believe so, so that you can go to the doctor and check wether that's true. Problem is people don't know that they don't understand the illness/disability/etc. à la dunning krüger effect.
I don't have numbers but my personal experiences tends to show me what it's over diagnosed, at least in California. Got many people around me that are diagnosed, with meds, and they take it as part of their identity, bringing it up all the time.
My kid talked to a therapist a few times for some minor anger issues, and he's already talking about getting him diagnosed for ADHD. He's the top student in his class, can focus for hours building anything he wants, is outgoing, and gets along with all his friends. He just has a few emotional outbursts at home, which don't affect his functionality or happiness. I don't understand the point of a diagnosis. It feels like a label would just follow him around and box him in, so we decided not to pursue.
"He's the top student in his class"
With studying, or without?
In my experience, being top of the class without working for it is a great way to wind up crashing and burning as soon as one gets to college and suddenly isn't the smartest in the room
That's kind of what happened to me. Never needed to study in grade school. Had to scramble and learn how to study in college.
Still didn't register why I had so much trouble focusing or remembering stuff until the last year or so.
So...your child is exhibiting symptoms of being high-functioning ADHD, according to their therapist?...
The point of a diagnosis is to allow them to get help with things that are challenging for people with ADHD. It's not something that is going to do them any harm or cause them to be discriminated against, contrary, if it is a correct diagnosis, it can be of great help. I did but get an official diagnosis until I was in my 30s and had a very similar experience in childhood, with my parents but moving forward with diagnosis. Not having access to resources when I was younger caused measurable harm and issues that I could have otherwise avoided.
Would you mind elaborating? Understanding what your issues where that were addressed by help could help see what I'm misunderstansing. I obviously want to do what's best for my child.
Not the person you replied to, but I definitely had emotional outbursts but was the top student in my class. I was diagnosed as ADHD in graduate school, at the age of 23. Meds were life-changing for me - I not only had classic ADHD, so I had study patterns to unlearn (studying with music + TV + snacks + distractions) but I also had Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria - basically, I would hyper-focus on any perceived critical comment, rejection, slight, etc. I would contemplate whether I could ever show up in class again after a side comment from a teacher. It took so long to unlearn that (and some antianxiety meds as well). If your kid actually has ADHD, the best thing you can do for them is have them work with a therapist to learn coping skills and the proper way to do things. Meds may enter the picture eventually, but a therapist that works with ADHD and autistic people primarily will be the most helpful. Little things - fidget toys that help you pay attention to auditory stimuli, weighted lap blankets to work at your desk, etc. help so much sometimes, and they're relatively simple fixes, but if you don't know to look for the issue, you don't find a solution.
Please, diagnose your kid even if you think he doesn't have ADHD