Is it just me, or does everyone have ADHD now?

Lately, it seems everyone is asking the same question: “Is it just me, or does everyone have ADHD now?”

Sometimes it’s a partner, a parent, or a manager venting, and the term is used to excuse a lack of effort, work ethic, or lower standards. Other times, it’s a client looking at their own brand-new, late-in-life diagnosis with a heavy dose of scepticism—wondering whether they actually have a neurodevelopmental condition or are just bad at being an adult.

And honestly, it’s a fair reaction. When every third video on your feed is a checklist of common behaviours labelled as executive dysfunction, it’s easy to feel that the clinical bar has been lowered to the floor, as if we’ve taken the normal friction of modern life and slapped a medical label on it.

However, that’s not what’s actually happening in practice. If you step away from the internet noise and look at who’s actually walking through clinic doors, the "everyone has ADHD" narrative completely falls apart.

The "Everyone has ADHD Nowadays" Myth

The reason this myth has such incredible sticking power comes down to how human psychology works.

If I asked a room of adults whether they have ever experienced symptoms that meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, such as trouble starting boring tasks, emotional overreactions, losing track of time, and getting distracted when they should be paying attention, every single one of them would raise their hand.

Everyone loses their keys. Everyone falls down a late-night rabbit hole and ruins their sleep the next day. Everyone procrastinates on taxes or other administrative tasks they loathe. Because these are universal human vulnerabilities in a high-distraction world, it’s easy to look at a symptom checklist and think, “Wait, doesn’t that apply to everyone? Aren’t we all a bit ADHD?”

However, as clinicians, that is not what we are looking at. In medicine, a symptom only crosses the threshold to meet the diagnostic criteria when it is chronic, pervasive, and functionally disabling. Anyone can feel tired, but clinical chronic fatigue is entirely different from a bad night of sleep. Anyone can experience a low mood, but clinical depression is distinct from a rough week.

It’s the same with attention. Everyone gets distracted. But someone with clinical ADHD is dealing with a pattern of differences in executive functioning that affects multiple areas of their life—their career, their relationships, their financial stability, and their basic self-care. Those patterns have quietly dragged them down since childhood, even if they’ve spent decades exhausting themselves to mask it.

Forgetting where you parked is an annoyance. Experiencing a total neurological gridlock that physically prevents you from opening an email you desperately need to send, leading to a cascade of professional and emotional fallout? That’s completely different. Confusing normal human friction with a neurodevelopmental condition minimises the disabling impact people with ADHD navigate every single day. Our job as clinicians is to determine whether the clinical threshold has been met, while also ruling out other potential causes of ADHD-type behaviours, as there is a lot of overlap with other conditions, such as trauma, chronic stress, and mental or physical health symptoms.

Why the Sudden Surge?

Naturally, the increase in diagnoses and the recent focus on ADHD in the media might lead you to question: why are so many people being diagnosed? It seems that there may be a few things going on:

First off, we are correcting a massive historical blind spot. For decades, the medical model of ADHD was built on a very specific, biased sample: hyperactive young boys who disrupted classrooms. Girls, quiet internalisers, and high-compensating adults were systematically overlooked. The current wave of adult diagnoses isn't an outbreak; it’s a long-overdue catch-up. These are people who spent decades burning out in silence, internalising shame, and wondering why life felt ten times harder for them than for everyone else, finally finding a framework that makes sense of their lived experience.

Second, modern life is a brutal stress test. We are flooded with constant notifications, a massive rise in digital use, and multiple demands that stretch human executive function to breaking point. Neurotypical brains get strained; neurodivergent brains hit a hard brick wall. The modern world didn't invent ADHD, but it has rendered hidden vulnerabilities impossible to ignore.

Finally, the stigma is lifting. When a condition is no longer a punchline or a human flaw, the rate of diagnoses naturally rises. It’s like what happened when schools finally stopped punishing left-handed children for writing with their left hand—suddenly, the percentage of left-handed children spiked. They didn't magically appear out of nowhere; they just stopped having to hide.

The Cost of Writing It Off

When society dismisses ADHD as a TikTok fad or a convenient excuse for laziness, the fallout in the room is immediate.

People internalise that scepticism. They work twice as hard to maintain a baseline of functioning, masking their exhaustion behind elaborate coping mechanisms, only to be met with eye-rolls when they finally ask for support. The chronic invalidation they experience contributes to burnout, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, compounding a condition that is already exhausting to manage.

Dismissing the current wave of awareness of neurodivergence as perpetuating a fad does not capture the necessary nuance. The reality is far more interesting: we are getting better at listening, more precise in our tools, and finally starting to acknowledge that human brains were never designed to be the same.