I'm reluctant to blame anything besides increased awareness for any increase in diagnosis.
I didn't discover that I had it until I was almost 40, and I'm sure many others my age STILL don't realize that they have it.
I think a bit part of it is that it's simply become harder to live with ADHD and for it to stay under the radar in your life. Rare is the person who can survive in the modern world purely on their wits. It demands that you persevere at jobs, careers and relationships over long timespans, and against an onslaught of things which have been relentlessly developed and refined over generations with the express purpose of hijacking your dopamine system and interfering with your free will.
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.
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.
I blame that the world, especially work, is more unforgiving of ADHD traits. Scatterbrained-ness isn't as much of a deal in agriculture (where you usually can course-correct in time, I'd imagine) or monotonous factory repetition (of course it probably really sucks for ADHD-Hs for... well... monotonous repetition), but definitely is in an office environment. Also so many things now prey on your attention in constantly developing ways (all the ads trying to sell you things, just about every online service, streaming services, social media) that it scrambles even NT peoples' brains, so of course it only makes it harder for ADHDers.
Does Lemmy fall under that category? I wonder if it doesn't hit the dopamine like TicToc.
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.
TL;DR screens are short circuiting everybody's brains.
I think it's increased in the last few decades because our attention spans have been shortened from staring at screens all the time. And people who make movies and videos know how to keep our attention by catering to short attention spans, frequently cutting to new scenes, hence triggering our short attention spans and making us crave short snippets rather than in depth long subject content which require long attention spans.
Thankfully I was born in the 1970s and I was raised on books and I thoroughly loved books until the early 2000s when the internet finally took over my psyche.
The thing with books is it requires a long attention span and it's so much better for your brain as it requires thinking and visualization and analysis and you can pause and look up from the book and think about what you're reading and then go back and continue where you left off and you can learn new words and analyze the words and look up the words. These mentally-nourishing things do not happen when we are staring at screens.
This sounds like me. Last book I read was in the aughts the last wheel of time written by jordan that I borrowed from a friend. I hate smartphones so I was still mostly doing suduko from the free papers on the train into the teens but those all went bust. Was combining tablet use with deep breathing exersises on the train until covid when I stopped commuting.
A casual community for people with ADHD
Values:
Acceptance, Openness, Understanding, Equality, Reciprocity.
Rules:
Encouraged:
Relevant Lemmy communities:
lemmy.world/c/adhd will happily promote other ND communities as long as said communities demonstrate that they share our values.