For most of human history, people looked into the night sky and saw stars. Then we invented telescopes, and suddenly, they saw a lot more stars.
Except, of course, there weren’t more stars. The telescope didn’t create a single star. It simply allowed us to see stars that had been there all along.
Along came the microscope. Suddenly we could see organisms and structures nobody had known existed. The microscope didn’t create bacteria; it revealed them.
Blood tests didn’t create high cholesterol. Genetic testing didn’t create genetic variations. Better instruments don’t produce more of the thing we’re looking for. They all simply make us better at seeing what was already there.
Recently I read an article in ADDitude about the apparent increase in ADHD diagnoses.
The article reported on a systematic review of 40 studies across 17 countries examining ADHD prevalence before and after 2020. The researchers found something interesting: although more people are being evaluated and diagnosed with ADHD, the underlying prevalence appears relatively stable.
In other words, there probably aren’t suddenly a lot more ADHD brains walking around. We’ve gotten better “telescopes.”
We understand the condition better. Diagnostic criteria have improved. Clinicians receive better training. Average people know more about what ADHD can look like.
Perhaps most importantly, we’ve gotten better at recognizing ADHD in people who didn’t match the stereotype. For a long time, the picture many of us carried around of ADHD involved a little boy who couldn’t sit still in class. That picture wasn’t entirely wrong, just woefully incomplete.
ADHD can also look like the girl quietly staring out the window. It can look like the adult who has built an elaborate collection of alarms, calendars, lists, timers, and systems just to accomplish things other people seem to do without thinking about them. (Raising my hand for that one.) It can look like somebody who can concentrate intensely for six hours on something fascinating and then forget the simple task they intended to do fifteen minutes ago. (Is that my hand still raised? Yep.)
Once we know what we’re looking for, we start seeing people who were there all along—sometimes including in the mirror.
But seeing something more clearly doesn’t necessarily mean we understand what to do with what we see. That’s where I think our conversations about ADHD and other kinds of neurodiversity can go wrong in two opposite directions.
One direction treats ADHD almost entirely as pathology. The very name encourages this: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Deficit. Disorder. Something is wrong with this brain, and the obvious goal becomes making it behave more like a “normal” brain.
I would prefer something like Attention Divergent Hyper-Drive. But that tends toward the other direction of relentless, maybe even toxic, positivity.
“ADHD is a superpower!”
Maybe. Sometimes.
But if you’ve ever spent twenty minutes looking for your phone while holding your phone, “superpower” likely isn’t the first word that comes to mind (or out of your mouth).
ADHD exacts genuine costs, real impacts including executive-function difficulties, time blindness, emotional dysregulation, and forgetting things that matter to people you love. Believe me, having a brain that refuses to engage with something you desperately need to do, while happily devoting enormous energy to something considerably less urgent, can be maddening.
Pretending those difficulties don’t exist doesn’t honor neurodiversity. It romanticizes it. At the same time, treating ADHD exclusively as a collection of deficits doesn’t honor reality either. After all, the ADHD brain can yield unusual connections, curiosity, creativity, intense engagement, rapid associative thinking, improvisation, and an ability to notice possibilities other people miss.
Not every person with ADHD has those characteristics, of course. Neurodivergent people are no more interchangeable than neurotypical people are.
The most useful question probably isn’t, “How do I make this brain work like everybody else’s?” A more useful question is, “How does this brain work?”
As the old saying indicates, a round peg is badly designed for a square hole. But there’s nothing inherently defective about the peg. Put it in a round hole and suddenly nobody is talking about its deficiencies.
I think that’s one reason understanding neurodiversity matters so much. We don’t want to deny limitations, but to understand the actual equipment we’re working with.
If my brain struggles to hold certain kinds of information internally, instead of beating myself up about it, I need to externalize that information (a fancy way of saying, “Write it down”).
If I have difficulty sensing the passage of time, I benefit from recognizing my need for visible clocks, alarms, timers, and external deadlines.
If interest activates my attention more reliably than importance does, I need to think differently about how I structure work.
That isn’t surrender; it’s design for reality.
We do this everywhere else in life. Nobody criticizes a left-handed person for buying left-handed scissors. We don’t tell someone who needs glasses that they should squint harder. We alter tools and environments because human beings differ. I think brains deserve the same courtesy.
That’s the larger lesson behind all those new ADHD diagnoses. We haven’t created a generation of people with strangely different brains. We’ve gotten better at seeing them.
The telescope has improved.
Now the more interesting question is what we do with what we can finally see.
How will a better understanding of your unique blend of characteristics help you? If you’re comfortable with it, tell us in the comments.
King’s Chronicles is a place for thoughtful readers, writers, caregivers, and curious people trying to live meaningful lives in a noisy world.
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