Editorial, Opinion

EDIT: Adult ADHD on the rise

All of us have trouble focusing. Especially these days, when the demands for productivity are soaring while the outlets to avoid these demands seem to only increase in multitude. We feel like we should be accomplishing more, because it seems it should be easy to do so, as we type our papers quickly, there’s a wealth of information at our fingertips wherever and whenever we want it, we carry our email in our pockets, etc.

Monday, The Boston Globe ran a report about the rising levels of adult ADHD. The case study was a 45-year-old woman who, finding herself unable to apply herself to any single task productively, was diagnosed with the disease and began taking medication.

“It’s really time to stop trivializing ADHD as a childhood behavioral problem that’s overtreated,” said Dr. William Barbaresi, director of the Developmental Medicine Center at Children’s Hospital and leader of a recent study on the increased presence of the disease in adults. “It’s a serious health condition that persists” into adulthood, he claims, according to the Globe.

It is true that ADHD exists as a neurobiological disorder that prevents certain individuals from sitting still, concentrating, or performing other day-to-day tasks. Many people benefit from ADHD medication, be they children or adults. Also, since ADHD is a relatively recent medical discovery, increased presence of ADHD in adults in part simply indicates that these adults were not diagnosed when they were younger.

On the other hand, however, it’s been said that doctors are diagnosing patients with the disease too loosely and frequently. A difficulty focusing does not necessarily mean a person is neurologically challenged in the face of the demand to be focused and productive. It might just mean that they don’t want to do whatever task is in front of them. People have trouble focusing for the simple reason that we’re not wired to sit still for hours on end without significant inspiration. And significant inspiration is not always easy to come by, for which reason most of the time, a lot of us would rather be hanging out with our friends. Focus requires discipline, which means pulling ourselves away from fun distractions. Inasmuch as ADHD does persist into adulthood, try getting off Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Fab.com, Rue La La, your email and your favorite blog(s) before you go running to your doctor.

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2 Comments

  1. Interesting article at start but the author(s) bias shows through, particularly in the quite insulting and moronic advice at the end.

    Since ADHD adults are challenged in engagement, decision making, prioritisation and “will power” (not that there is such a discrete entity in the brain), telling an ADHD adult to “buck up, stop reading Facebook and do your expenses” is analogous to asking a journalist to actually research a topic – the reality in both cases is that it’s highly unlikely to happen – but at least the ADHD adult has a medical explanation for their problem, not sure about the authors?

    Regards

    Andrew

  2. Okay, I see this is a student newspaper. Nonetheless, “written by editors” gives a bad name to real editors, who do more than check grammar and spelling if they are any good at all. Five minutes of fact checking, perhaps in Google Scholar, could have made this a real news story instead of a cover for the clueless received wisdom of people who don’t grasp what ADHD actually is.

    The human brain has circuitry that handles things like short-term memory, persistence to a task, alerting to or ignoring extraneous stimuli, an ability to defer gratification, an ability to control emotional responses, the ability to self-motivate, and time sense.

    In an ADDer, all of these abilities are effected. Intelligence, however, is not. What results is a smart, capable person who loses track of time, makes impulsive decisions, gets bored, angry or enthusiastic easily, and cannot shift attention at will from one task to another. If he’s never been diagnosed, he has no idea what’s wrong and will fail all his life at undertakings that “common sense” tells him should be well within his skills.

    If there is an increase in diagnosis, it is because almost all adults who grew up with it did so in a time before adult ADHD was recognized. In studies worldwide, about 4% of adults test positive for it, but only a tiny percentage have ever been diagnosed and treated, typically less than 10%.

    For more complete information, log into Google Scholar and scan through a few dozen papers, or for a comprehensive overview of the topic in a video form, have a look here: “ADHD: Life Course Outcomes and Treatment Implications,”. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=WroDEcG7tJc&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWroDEcG7tJc

    Noni