What’s driving the rise in adult ADHD diagnoses
🥱 If today is your first day back from a long weekend, build a few rest breaks into your day to ease yourself back in…
Issue #85: Unconventional parenting, engineering principles, and embracing limits
By Harris Sockel
“I was not diagnosed until adulthood, as is the case for many women with ADHD,” recalls Rachel Inberg in a personal essay about finally putting a name to her symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder at 33. “I’ve learned that living with ADHD means there will always be another shiny object to possess, a material or behavioral acquisition you never knew you needed until five minutes ago.”
The rate of adult ADHD diagnoses has doubled in the last 10 years (it’s only grown a few percentage points in kids). Here’s one possible reason: Millennial parents are noticing traits in their kids that they exhibited decades ago — before they could get an accurate diagnosis.
Doctors aren’t equipped for the influx of adults who now want answers about why they couldn’t focus in the ’90s. There’s a history of gender bias in ADHD diagnoses, too: Boys are diagnosed almost twice as often as girls, often because girls’ symptoms are confused for other things — depression, introversion, or just having really vivid inner lives. As a result, some women are lowkey diagnosing themselves. (I have a few friends who’ve been diagnosed as adults, both of whom sought out a psychiatrist after doing a ton of research themselves.)
A few firsthand perspectives that deepened my understanding:
- A writer who was diagnosed at 65: “I feel acute sadness for myself and so many other women who have been labeled as hysterical, attention-seeking, weak, neurotic, lazy, flaky, and weird.”
- Amy Huang, who was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in high school before seeking an ADHD diagnosis later in life, describes the symptoms as “you desperately want to be in control, but the more you want to be in control, the less you are.”
- And here’s linguist Ana Krajinovic, who visualizes adult ADHD in cartoons and argues that some behaviors people associate with it (like chasing excitement and novelty) are typically pretty gendered:
“Pleasure-seeking and chasing a life where everything is exciting is something society associates with men and not women. Women are discouraged from seeking pleasure in high-excitement activities, instead, they are encouraged to pay attention to often unnecessary details and beauty. But my attention just never goes there.”
What else we’re reading:
- Concrete advice for finding your “voice” as a writer: Your unique cadence “shines through when you talk about details you’re comfortable with.”
- I nodded my head through this list of 7 software engineering principles that should be applied daily (many of which also apply to just working, generally!). One of them: avoid premature optimization. In other words: Don’t waste time perfecting something before you’ve tried the basic version.
🦕 From the archive: magic parenting
Eleven years ago, children’s book author Refe Tuma convinced his kids their dinosaur figurines had come to life in their sleep. One night, the dinos ripped open a box of cereal…
…the next, they invaded the fridge.
“In the age of iPads and Netflix,” Tuma reflects, “we don’t want our kids to lose their sense of wonder and imagination. […] All it takes is some time and energy, creativity, and a few plastic dinosaurs.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about embracing limits
If you’re like me, you have a tendency to pile way too much onto your todo list (and then feel disappointed when you got a fifth of it done later). Drawing wisdom from Oliver Burkeman’s bestselling time management tome Four Thousand Weeks, Parker Klein urges us to work within our limitations rather than fighting them. Ask yourself: What limitation am I avoiding and how can I accept it?
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
