The adult ADHD trap

I was on the bus recently and bored when I decided not to ignore but to answer one of those online questionnaires about adult ADHD. It was on Facebook, I think. Question 1) Am I easily distracted? Well, yes. 2) Am I often late? 3) Do I regularly forget appointments? Yes and yes.

By the time I had arrived at work I had signed up to something called Impulse brain training. And in a few days I was quite sure that I’d been bravely suffering with undiagnosed ADHD for decades. I was half-caught in the adult ADHD trap, though I didn’t know it yet.

I asked my brother and my friends what they thought and instead of laughing, they nodded sadly. Yes, yes. They’d seen the online tests too and it all made sense. In fact they were reasonably sure they all had ADHD too. All brave sufferers together, it turned out. I began to read enticing accounts of the soothing effect of Ritalin (a stimulant) and Adderall (an amphetamine) on the ADHD brain and to wonder, given the great and growing demand and the national shortage of medication, how I might get my mitts on some.

If the trap didn’t close on me, I owe it to a news story I saw last Friday out of the corner of my eye: “ADHD drugs significantly raise risk of heart disease in adults.” It was as if I’d woken up on a surgeon’s table to find myself about to undergo an unnecessary op. How did I get here? Why was I even considering the nasty drugs? Why have so very many other adults done just the same?

Not so long ago ADHD was a childhood disorder — something gone a touch awry in the brains of those boys in class who couldn’t focus and bounced about on their chairs. Now there’s a great crush of perfectly normal adults bullying meds out of their GPs, and none left for the poor bouncing boys. And there’s suddenly a great clamor of nonprofits all “raising awareness” of adult ADHD and a boom town of clinics in Central London offering private Ritalin prescriptions — (almost) no questions asked.

But it’s nonsense, all of it, isn’t it? Of course some adults are disorganized and distracted. We work, we have children, some of us are scatty, but that’s character, not disease. Our short-term memories have been boiled alive by Apple Inc. but that doesn’t mean we have ADHD. In fact it’s precisely because we don’t have adult ADHD that it’s become such a horrifyingly successful industry. The worried well have cash to burn on meds and personalized brain training plans.

Just enter the letters “ADHD” into a search box and you’ll see. It’s like spilling blood into the water around Amity Island. The sharks begin to circle almost instantly. For younger generations, it’s online influencers. The ADHD hashtag on TikTok has more than 20 billion views; #adhdawareness has nearly a billion. And views mean money. #ADHD delivers clips and survival tips; hot girls in a hot mess, and not just an explanation for your unreliability but a blanket excuse. Are you always late? Do you let your friends and family down? Don’t worry! Don’t sweat it! That’s just your ADHD. Nothing to be done. Only a fascist would hold you accountable.

For older adults, the sharks come in the form of tests and then tailored life plans delivered to your inbox — thanks Impulse! — for just (let me check) $39.98 a week. (Argh! What was I thinking?) The tests pop up everywhere now, on every internet page I visit. And I marvel at the speed with which they convert self-pitying curiosity into an established diagnosis in a few quick tick-box stages. 1) Find out if you have ADHD. 2) What’s your ADHD type? 3) Here’s how to manage your unique ADHD type. A little begging the question, a little sunk cost fallacy and Bob’s your direct debit.

All the age-old huckster tricks are deployed in the adult ADHD grift. A TIME magazine piece, while of course not skeptical, did at least note that approximately half the ADHD TikToks made assertions so vague almost everyone could feel they applied to them. “If you don’t like doing homework, you have ADHD”; “If you zone out during meetings, you probably have ADHD.” These are known as Barnum statements, named after the showman P.T. Barnum whose catchphrase was: “A sucker is born every minute.”

Britain’s National Health Service has been so overwhelmed by the rise in adult ADHD that it’s launched a new taskforce, and as I read about it, up popped an ad for another clinic: “The letter you see here defines your ADHD type!” “Only adults with ADHD can solve this problem!”

But even once you’ve seen through the racket, it’s surprisingly hard to leave adult ADHD behind. “Mary, we’re sorry to see you go! Why did you cancel? Did you forget your personalized plan? Regain control of your life! Don’t let ADHD hold you back. Claim your plan and get up to 20 percent off! Make that 50 percent… 75 percent!”

The most repulsive of the countless British nonprofits set up to combat the “stigma” around adult ADHD is ADHD UK, whose chief executive, a Henry Shelford, sounds almost as if he’s threatening any adults in denial: “It’s chilling to see so many forced into hiding their neurodiversity because of fear of stigma and discrimination.” Chilling? Forced into hiding? How can it be chilling when it’s very uncertain that adult-onset ADHD exists at all, and when tests done on adults with self-reported ADHD have for the most part shown them to be perfectly neurotypical with none of the distinctive mental patterns found in children diagnosed with ADHD?

Another nonprofit, ADDitude, suggests that if adults with ADHD have family members who “mistakenly believe only children can have ADHD,” it might be better not to engage but simply to cut them from your life. Cling tight to these family members, I say, because they’re almost certainly right.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2024 World edition.