Just something I have anecdotally noticed occuring with more frequency. Several creators I follow have spoken about being diagnosed with ADHD in recent years, and their experiences with medication like adderall. When I was a kid, ADHD was something only kids had, and was famously overdiagnosed in America as an excuse to get a ton of kids on pills.
Is this just a more recent extension of that? Is it just as simple as big pharma looking for more addicts? I have definitely noticed that my own attention span has been eroded by the 24 hour news cycle and too much screen time, but I'd never think to go to the doctor about it.
I was diagnosed ADHD about 30 years ago, I think I was maybe 5 or 6 years old when I got those pills, it's been a while, I was living in my first house at the time. I was apparently a nightmare to deal with, according to my grandmother. So they threw me on the generic form of Ritalin, which then led to other complications as my weight was extremely low to the point that the pediatric doctors I was sent to as I had to go every month for psychiatry due to the high dosage reported my weight and it was at the point they said if I didn't start to gain weight my body would literally begin eating my organs for sustenance.
So for a while they put me on Aderal and that had some severe side effects that if known they would have never put me on that one and tried something else to get my weight up.
I needed Chlonidine and a second drug I can't remember just to be able to sleep at night.
So as someone who went through all of that for over a decade before I just couldn't stand being on the drugs anymore, I've noticed a lot of the. "I might be ADHD" or "My ADHD is acting up" from people who have never had a diagnosis and are just bored.
That's what a lot of these people have, boredom. They never learned how to cope with having nothing to do, or at least nothing interesting to do.
It's not like actual ADHD where you literally cannot focus, your brain will not let you focus on the thing in front of you, not because it isn't interesting or engaging but that if you aren't moving right fucking now you want to peel off your own skin
When you do focus you have to worry about hyperfocusing to the point that 3 hours will have passed and nothing got done because you were planning out 50 different tangents on one thing because you couldn't actually decide which made the most logical sense.
I've been off the meds for about as long as I had been on them and I think sometimes I need them again, because I'm struggling to actually get the things done that I need to do.
I'm sorry to hear you had such a personal experience with ADHD. I hope that you can overcome it without drugs.
My wife had a brief experience with ADHD when it was a popular diagnosis among children in America. Whatever drug her mother put her on made her have shivering and twitching fits. She used to pretend to take the pills and stuff them in the house's HVAC vents, lol. Thankfully her father was responsible enough to put a stop to it when he saw what it was doing.