Writer Sophie Knight, 37, lives in Amsterdam. Most mornings, she unlocks her bicycle from beside her apartment building so she can ride to work as a freelance journalist and researcher. “There’s a sequence of things I need to do when I unlock it,” she explains. “I need to put my gloves on, put an earphone in and link it to my phone, put my phone in my bag, put my bike cover in my bag. Unmedicated, I can end up unlocking and re-locking my bike; I forget what’s going on with my gloves, what I’ve done with my earphone …” She laughs. “It’s sort of impossible to figure out where I am in the process.”
Like Knight, I also need to unlock my bike to ride to work. Even in Sydney, I also wear gloves in winter, and I often find myself putting them on, only to realise I need my thumb free to unlock my phone. So I take my gloves off, unlock my phone, put my keys and phone in my backpack, then realise I need my keys to start my bike battery. On and on it goes, until I feel like tearing myself limb from limb with frustration.
You are viewing: Why Does Everyone Have Adhd
Read more : Which Best Explains Why The Church Was Powerful
Knight – who is charming and articulate, with Mitford-style bobbed hair and lashings of green eyeshadow – has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I do not. But in our relative experience lies one of the central quandaries of the condition. The fact is, we all sometimes display the behavioural characteristics of ADHD. We all get frustrated, forget our keys, find it hard to focus on boring tasks. Many of us live in some version of domestic chaos, struggle to be on time for appointments and, frankly, spend inordinate amounts of time buggerising around with our bikes. That is ADHD. But it is also life.
Today in Australia, more than 1 million people have ADHD, according to the ADHD Foundation Australia. Globally, by many estimates, ADHD may now be the most common mental health condition on Earth, by some counts affecting some 366 million symptomatic adults worldwide – significantly larger than its closest competitor, anxiety, at 300 million, according to the Journal of Global Health and the World Health Organisation – even without counting children.
Read more : Why Are Italians Called Guineas
In Australia, ADHD medication levels have more than doubled in the past five years: from 1.4 million prescriptions given to 186,000 people in 2018, to 3.2 million prescriptions to 414,000 people in 2022. During the same period, the costs to taxpayers through the federal government’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) rose accordingly, from $59.2 million to $151.96 million.
The net result is that suddenly all of us – kids at school, adults at dinner parties, HSC and VCE students in their exam rooms – are discovering that our friends, colleagues, family members, even we ourselves, have ADHD. What’s more, a bewildering multiplicity of factors – COVID-19 and TikTok, devices and historic under-diagnosis, Big Pharma and Instagram influencers – have been implicated in its rise.
But alongside this ADHD reality is another. ADHD has also become, arguably, the most controversial neurological condition in contemporary life. Confusion reigns: there are people for whom the condition has affected every aspect of their daily lives, and those who do not have a single symptom visible to the outside world; people whose lives have been transformed by diagnosis, and people who struggle to believe the condition exists at all.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
