Growing up as a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), I painfully remember the stigma associated with the condition. For every adult who offered understanding and accommodations, there were others who insisted I was using my ADHD diagnosis as an "excuse" for laziness or that I simply needed to "buck up." In some respects, though, I was actually lucky; in eras before my own people with ADHD were accused of being outright bad people.
Yet when I reached out to experts for this article, I repeatedly heard the same observation — that the pendulum may have actually swung too far in the other direction. These mental health professionals shared the observation that because ADHD is a "trending" condition, people may inaccurately self-diagnose as ADHD when they in fact have something else.
