One of them is the increased number of people caring for mental status, but the other one is, we are living in an era that requires long hours of computer usage which is against the living way of an ADHD person. We need to walk, go out, spend energy, but nowadays we have to stay in an office, look at a screen, which is so boring.
People caught on that girls and women can have it too and that they can be better at masking than anticipated. Nobody bothered to check me when I had all the symptoms for all my childhood and adolescence. It took me connecting the dots after age 30 to get the diagnosis.
The ironic part is that a lot of the people who are being diagnosed today are the ones who don’t have hyperactive bodies, but hyperactive minds. So those who CAN sit in front of a computer for hours and hours without making a peep, but can’t finish a project or do chores or meet on time or follow a conversation etc.
These people used to slip through the cracks because no one noticed that they spent all their day daydreaming instead of paying attention in class.
It’s 100% this, it’s the folks that bounce their kegs and fidget in their chairs but don’t feel the urge to actually get up and move. The ones that read 3 books a week in high school because our brains just need something to stimulate them and doing the same math exercises for the third week in a row isn’t cutting it. We are the ones that work in IT now, jumping from fire to fire but never being able to fix the underlying issues (but that’s okay since there isn’t money, time, or people to fix them anyways). We learned to hide the struggle because otherwise we were just called lazy, told to focus more, or work harder. Often we are pretty smart since instead of running in circles at lunch we read yet another book on some esoteric subject (and now have access to Wikipedia whenever we want which is not a blessing). In older parlance we have ADD, not ADHD, in modern terms we are often inattentive type, or combined. If we did well in school and weren’t the TV trope ADHD kid, no one bothered to check us.
- larger percent of people going for diagnosis
- better & more reliable diagnostics
- understanding that men arent the only ones susceptible to adhd
- understanding that adhd doesnt present identically across all populations
- better awareness in general of neurological differences
AFAIK, ADHD is something you’re born with. The things you list make it more difficult to live with ADHD, but they don’t create it.
Sort of. Medical science doesn’t know exactly, but there is good evidence pointing to genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors during gestation and early development. There is also things like subclinical (minor) cases then age and covid really amping them up.
