Political Memes

As a coincidence, much of my degree is about essentially the very topic you’re describing.

The TL;DR of it is that yes, a lot of people (and children especially) are getting diagnosed with things they probably don’t really need to be diagnosed with. Especially recently autism is a really big one. People see their 5 year old act like a 5 year old and think “wow, I didn’t act like that! There must be something wrong with little Tommy here where he’s such a picky eater and he doesn’t do what I say sometimes and lashes out.”. It’s very easy to ‘shop around’ 3 or so different doctors and eventually find one that will get you the diagnosis you might consciously or subconsciously want. This isn’t limited to children, as a lot of teens and adults also often go “wow, I feel so awkward around people I don’t know, like I truly can’t relate to them. Sometimes I have weird habits and thoughts I don’t like.” And then they ‘shop’ for this diagnosis to have.

ADHD is similar, just swap out traits associated with autism for things like “I can’t pay attention! It’s hard for me to just sit down and write a 15 page paper!” “I want to study for 5 hours straight but just can’t sit still!l When, yeah. Of course. Doing that just blows.

Experts in this stuff acknowledge these patterns (in more formal wording) but the question is just… how do you combat it? I’m of the opinion that it’s not like doctors are being bought off en masse, they simply don’t see their patients all that much. All they have to go off of is the one hour or whatever that someone shouts their symptoms, and some doctors would rather have more false positives and others would rather have false negatives.

I really don’t know how you deal with it in a way that isn’t just like “stigmatize mental illness again” because obviously we don’t want that either. It’s a tough problem.