I think you’re both right (except maybe the vast majority part).

Never? I know tons of people who are keeping up just fine. My grandmother, she just retired, but she was working up until like a year ago, she has dinner on the table at 6 every night, often with vegetables from her small garden. Her house is always clean, but she’s not a clean freak. She paints, follows a water color tutorial about once or twice a week. Two years ago, she took up drawing. A few years before that, photography. She realizes she needs something else for a recipe for dinner, runs to the store and grabs it, no procrastinating. She has an active social life, and is very involved in her church. She visits her mother.

My brother-in-law runs his own business. He pays all their family’s bills, he exercises, reads books to his sons as he puts them to bed. He eats healthy. He sets New Year’s resolutions and actually keeps them every year. His bottom floor just flooded in the hurricane, and he was very calm like yeah, a lot of our stuff just got ruined. A lot of my business stuff just got ruined. We’re going to be fine, let’s get to work.

My friend is a paralegal. Her house is spotless. She has a cat who she loves. Her boyfriend is annoying, but she loves him. She loves diet Coke. She owns her place, and wants to settle down and have kids in the next few years.

All that’s pretty foreign to me, I’m struggling to keep up. I have a lot of friends who are struggling. But there are definitely people who walk through life and are just better at it. They just seem to be able to handle things.

So these days the common complaint is that ADHD is overdiagnossd. While abuse exists, such as the online script mill in the news recently, the criticism is usually less helpful — since it implies misjudgment on the part of clinicians and parents attempting to help a child keep up, stigmatizes the ones who succeed, delays diagnosis for many others — but also is not precisely the intent. Instead they mean to question (rightly, as you did) society’s increasingly narrow definition of when someone’s best efforts are considered “enough.”

But also, you have to realise this misdiagnosing does exist.

I had excellent school success as a kid. I taught myself how to read before school. I was always the top of the class, made friends easily, had no issues. My mom is a social worker. There was never any behavioural trouble from me, nor any learning problem.

But now some 30 years later, when I’ve looked for help and been anxious at the doctors, 9/10 of them would be “perhaps you have ADHD?”, despite they core characteristic of ADHD being it’s neurodevelopmental, and I had literally zero issues in that. No matter how much I kept reassuring them and pointing out as a kid I would not have met any of the diagnostic criteria, they wanted to “test” me. The test was essentially just someone asking every clear questions about the same things I just talked about. Had I had even tje slightest inclination to answer a single question “yes”, I would’ve got a permanent prescription for pharmaceutical stimulants. Without needing one.

But as I actually wanted to figure out my issues, I didn’t take that chance, becsuse I don’t want to be misdiagnosed.

However, this is in Finland, and I can not exaggerate how common pushing this idea was, but only AFTER like 2010 or something. Before that no-one ever even considered it, despite me having gone to the doctors with the exact same symptoms.

So yeah it’s a complex issue, but I’m of the mind that doctors are clearly being affected enough to influence their objectivity on the matter.