Chapter 10 - Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Summary

Traits and symptoms of ADHD, which can potentially lead to a diagnosis, are highly prevalent in the general population. In any typical town in the UK, there may be thousands of people who would potentially match the symptom descriptions set out in the diagnostic criteria. Such a screening approach could potentially pathologise normal human experience or mislabel symptoms of a comorbid mental disorder, which should take precedence in treatment. There has been a sudden increase in the number of people seeking an assessment for adult ADHD at least in the West and a shift in their expectations about the outcome of their assessment. The demands of modern life may lead people to seek cognitive enhancement to allow them to perform. Some recent routes to seeking an assessment and treatment for ADHD may be linked to that; the ethics around neuroaugmentation are still being debated.

In the minds of clinicians, ADHD should remain a clinical disorder that can only be reliably diagnosed if the specified number of pervasive symptoms is present and another condition cannot better explain the impairment directly attributed to these symptoms. The primal purpose of this medical diagnosis is to provide access to evidence-based treatments aiming to reduce symptoms and not to validate a person’s understanding of themselves through self-diagnosis.