I am unsure if I mentioned this before, but I got diagonsed with ADHD a while back.

I don’t know how official it all is, but a psychiatrist with my medical insurance told me that I have fairly textbook ADHD symptoms and that she believes I have it. I didn’t get a certificate, or an explanation paper on what to do now, or any medication, so that’s why I say i’m unsure on the “officiality” of it all, but on the other hand I also mentioned I didn’t really want medication as I am decently functional in day-to-day stuff.

Now, even though I went there explicitly to confirm or deny whether or not I have ADHD (as my friends were making that joke one too many times for me to actually start doubting myself), I still am not fully convinced. It felt… too easy, I suppose. The doctor straight up asked me if I want to have the diagnosis or not during the conversation, so it felt like she was doing so to appease me rather than for any medical reason. My friends say I’m a textbook case and that this diagnosis didn’t shock them at all but… I dunno, still feels odd.

Mainly because I feel like what I feel is standard? I am unsure how to phrase it without making it seem like I think ADHD is some demonic possession incident but, it’s a diagnosis of a medical condition, right? And I have friends who have it hit them HARD. I have a friend who was constantly failing classes until he got on Attent, and now he’s finishing his degree. That was an ADHD diagnosis where I went “yeah no shit”. But… me, really? I am fully functional I’d like to say, don’t need meds, have some procrastination but it feels standard, so like, how did I get it?

This unsureness also comes because of discourse regarding “overdiagnosis” - the idea that people who do not have ADHD or autism are being given that label due to… something, I dunno. ADHD and Autism seem to have been… I’m not sure if fetishized is the right word, but pretty-fied by the internet and popular discourse. Autism and ADHD are quirky, and cool to have, and hot, and the new trend, but the ADHD and Autism I see in this depiction are not the ones I’ve seen from people I know. They’re closer to how Millenials abused the term OCD, in that regard: a faded facsimile which bares only surface relevance to the original copy.

Cultural ADHD is being casually inattentive and nothing else. Cultural Autism is having a personality. I see people bring up “hyperfixiation” in the context of any mild interest people have, as opposed to the times I’ve had friends exclusively want to talk to me about Star Wars for several months (I do mean exclusively. 70%+ of the conversations turned to star wars). This is exacerbated by self diagnosis which, while not necessarily malicious or negative, does run into the same issue year 1 psych students discover: everyone has elements of every mental disorder, and it only crosses into a disorder once it actively harms your day-to-day functioning.

My friends constantly make jokes about me having both Autism and ADHD. The former is prohibitively expensive to get diagnosed for as an adult. The latter I tested professionally, and got told “you have it”.

And yet still… do I? Is it, or is it just trendy to say so?

Do I have a diagnosis, or did people butcher what the term means?