throwaway90135

What in your background makes you qualified to make this assertion vs decades of peer reviewed science?

I think you've misinterpreted my post.

I'm specifically avoiding revealing my background here for several reasons, but my basis begins with DSM-V and ICD-10 criteria as well as a large body of research on the underlying biology of the disorder.

If you want external confirmation, please search for the term "Hyperfocus" in PubMed, or through psychiatry textbooks, or any other well-vetted source of information. It's not there. However, you will find the term heavily used on internet forums as well as in seminars and books from a handful of doctors/authors who see ADHD everywhere, but the problem is that they're usually trying to sell you something (seminars, books, products, etc.).

You seem to have taken offense at my comment, but I please realize that I was defending the concept of ADHD as an actual diagnosis. The parent comment was the one insisting that ADHD was not a real diagnosis. I personally have relatively severe ADHD as a result of a traumatic brain injury, so I'm perhaps uniquely qualified having personally experienced both sides of the diagnosis.

I think it's clear at this point that ADHD is vastly over-diagnosed, particularly among people who self-diagnose after using the internet to confirm their beliefs.

However, ADHD and other executive disorders are very real and very debilitating for a small portion of the general population. I've unfortunately experienced this first-hand after a serious traumatic brain injury took me from normally-functioning adult to ADHD adult overnight. (Part of the reason I'm using a throwaway is that I prefer not to make this fact well-known).

This is consistent with my own experience with people who believe they have ADD. Many of them turned out to have untreated anxiety and depression.

This mirrors my experience somewhat, although I believe many people simply confuse normal human behaviors as ADHD symptoms. It's perfectly normal to prefer to focus on subjects you enjoy while experiencing difficulty when forced to focus on uninteresting topics, but somehow this has been construed as a symptom of ADHD on the internet. (As I've commented elsewhere, hyperfocus is not actually a symptom of official ADHD definitions but it's very popular on internet forums).

It's also interesting to note that there's a lot of research supporting the idea that mindfulness can decrease the effects of ADD. That seems to support the idea that ADD isn't a physiological fact, but a curable behavioral issue.

I have to disagree on several of your definitions here: There is plenty of research in to potential biological contributing factors to ADHD-type behaviors. However, the brain is remarkably plastic and capable of learning good or bad behaviors. Unfortunately, modern life tends to train us toward ADHD-like behaviors, with constant bombardments of stimuli and companies working overtime to develop products that distract us and are carefully designed to capture our attention.

It's important to note that hyperfocus is not a DSM-V criteria for ADHD. In fact, hyperfocus doesn't appear anywhere in any official diagnostic criteria for ADHD that I'm aware of (If I'm wrong, I'd love to know).

The official DSM-V criteria, along with helpful explanations, are available here: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html

I'm still not sure how hyperfocus came to be such a popular idea on internet ADD forums and self-diagnosis websites. If someone can point me toward the etymology of the idea, I'd really like to see it.

Now that I am more familiar with the symptoms this sounds a whole lot like me.

I am quite surprised I experience about 80 percent of the symptoms listed on various websites, but it never occurred to me that this can be a real condition.

If you suspect you have ADHD and you find that it is negatively impacting your life, I would suggest seeking a good psychiatrist for a professional evaluation. Be warned that some psychiatrists are all too eager to write a prescription and send you on your way, when successful treatment hinges on a deeper understanding of the condition and the development of successful coping strategies once you've identified the negative behaviors.

Moreover, it's worth noting that the author's definition of ADHD and hyperfocus doesn't actually match the medical definition of ADHD. Also, many of the ADHD websites list overly-broad ADHD criteria, such than almost any warm-blooded human could feasibly self-diagnose as having ADHD given the vagueness of the symptoms.

ADHD is, first and foremost, a deficit of attention abilities. It isn't quite as selective as the author makes it out to be, in that someone with the traditional medical definition of ADHD would not be able to focus on anything for 16 hours straight as you are able to. In fact, being able to focus for such a long period of time is a truly enviable ability, and I doubt you'd find any competent medical professional who would suggest that you have ADHD if you are able to focus on your work for twice as long as the 8-hour workday that most people struggle through.

It's important to note that we all miss appointments, we all prefer to do activities that interest us, we all occasionally stop listening to people mid-way through a conversation, and we all struggle to pay attention to boring jobs. These aren't signs of a disorder, these are just facts of life.

ADHD can be quite debilitating at the extremes. Understanding what it is and how to cope with it is extremely helpful for those who are afflicted.

That said, it's important to point out that the author of this post is defining ADD differently than the medical definition of ADD. The idea of hyperfocus is very popular among the self-diagnosed and on internet forums dedicated to ADD, but the term "hyperfocus" doesn't actually appear in any of the medical literature I can find, with the exception of a few books that seem to suggest that "hyperfocus" is more likely related to the idea of perseveration, which is a deficit in set shifting ability. However, perseveration isn't as selective as the concept of "hyperfocus," which seems selective for enjoyable tasks.

The idea of hyperfocus as a component of ADD is part of a bigger problem: The modern pop-psychology definition of ADD has been watered down and expanded so much that it is beginning to feel more like a horoscope than a medical diagnosis. Even official medical diagnostic criteria can't seem to agree on how strict the definition of ADHD is. For example, ICD-10 ADHD diagnostic criteria will yield a rate of roughly 1-2% ADHD in the general population of children. Using the DSM-IV criteria, that number rises to roughly 6-7% of children.

However, if you have the average person read an internet definition of ADHD or follow one of the first results for "ADHD test" in Google, you'd be hard pressed to find an average college student or tech worker who wouldn't identify as at least mildly ADHD per the pop-psychology definitions. Take a look at one of first results in Google for "adhd test": http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/addquiz.htm

Questions such as "How often are you easily distracted by external stimuli, like something in your environment" are so vague as to be applicable to everyone who has ever been distracted by a notification on their phone. I don't think I've known anyone who wouldn't agree with questions like "How often do you have difficulty sustaining your attention while doing something for work, school, a hobby, or fun activity" when we're expected to sit through 8+ hour desk jobs doing things that frequently aren't tasks we would have chosen to willingly pursue.

The growing misconception seems to be that for a non-ADHD person, it should be easy or somehow enjoyable to focus on the things that we don't necessarily enjoy doing. That's obviously not the case, but these casual redefinitions of ADHD as a disorder that is accompanied by an increased ability to focus on enjoyable tasks are really stretching the definition of what it means to have AD[H]D.