Why are you so confident that it wasn't your generation that was trying to fit into a social group? Maybe when you were a teenager, there were still the same number of LGBTQ kids around you but they were hiding it for whatever reason... like say, the high likelihood of getting ostracized or beaten up because of it.

There was a huge increase in left-handedness when we stopped demonizing people for being left-handed, and I think it's pretty obvious that describing that as "more people are left-handed now that we're pressuring them to be left-handed" would be very silly. Rather than being "some kind of social contagion", maybe it's just that they were always there and we're not suppressing them quite so much now?

So you can find other people who are weird in similar ways, or so you can find help and support for those issues?

Giving names to things makes it possible to talk about them. It's hard to find like-minded people, a support community or medical help if you don't know the name of the thing you need help with.

Um, no. The vast majority of autistic people don't do any of that. You're talking about people who are autistic and have some major other issues.

But implicitly discriminatory hiring practices are fine? Because that's what you get by default if you don't try to do something about it.

If you have hundreds or thousands of tabs open... it may be a hint you have ADHD.

The tabs form a mix of a todo list (they're things you want to do but, because of executive dysfunction, you can't get yourself to do them), and a coping mechanism for "out of sight, out of mind" (which is common for ADHD). Bookmarks don't work as an alternative because those are out of sight.

If you're not familiar with it, executive function is the part of your brain that turns the knowledge that you need to do something into actually doing the thing. If that's not working properly then you'll struggle to get yourself to work on things (even things you want to do or that you know are important), and you'll also struggle to stop doing things once you get stuck into them (like, reading books for hours straight). It's a big part of ADHD (which, frankly, is very badly named, it's more dysregulation of attention than a lack of it, and you'd think hyperfocus being a thing would have been a hint to the namers but apparently not).

I'm pointing this out in the hopes that it helps somebody. ADHD is treatable, but first you have to figure out you have it, and most people only know wrong stereotypes about it rather than anything accurate that would let them recognize it in themselves. I really wish someone had pointed out some of the obvious ADHD things I do so I could've got it treated sooner... so here's my attempt at doing that for somebody else.

I suspect saying this won't go down well with the crowd here at /., the place seems to be infested with the sorts of people who would argue you're just being lazy or some stupid shit, but... that's not the case. It's an actual physical problem with your brain that can be treated.

You should "be a slave" to them - by which you mean help them - because one day "these people" may include you.

Even if, as appears to be the case, you have zero compassion for other people, you should still do it for purely selfish reasons. Nothing at all is stopping you from ending up as a person that needs help. That's why you should care.

That's very relevant. Essentially, your country is already doing this experiment all the time, and the only people who actually end up homeless there are the ones where the extra money doesn't help. It'd be reasonable to expect that targetting those people specifically with extra money wouldn't help.

The situation in America is... very different, and I suspect Canada isn't that much better.

And "yourself". I can't see any good reason at all why that advice would even be on the list, let alone right at the top and capitalized.

You're arguing that we should force trans kids through the wrong puberty. This is an example of the abuse you accuse me of lying about.

"Trans ideology" is an idea made up by people who hate trans people. So, hey, I guess it is.

Like I say, kids aren't being pushed into "being trans" - which is impossible anyway, it's not something you can force someone to be. Nobody is forcing them to pretend to be trans either. Much the opposite: they're heavily pushed into pretending to be cis, or into failing to realise that they're trans. These are things we shouldn't be doing either, yet we are.

This is your idea. Trans people are not suggesting this.

Nobody is pushing kids to be trans. In reality there's huge pressure on kids to be (or pretend to be) cis. You're pushed into looking and acting like you are, you're not even taught the possibility that some people might not be, and schools, parents and now even the government will abuse you if you present as anything else.

What you're describing as "pushing trans on kids" is actually just doing the above slightly less.

For one, it doesn't have a massive ego that you need to massage to get help from it.

I suspect a lot of people on /. haven't encountered this problem themselves (it's a bigger issue for women), but ask in any disabled community and there'll be no end of stories from people who've had to carefully manipulate a doctor into coming up with a diagnosis "by themselves" because they won't accept hearing it from the patient.

Some people spend a decade trying to get a correct diagnosis because their doctors just won't listen to them. Maybe ChatGPT will, or maybe doctors will listen to it. Either would be an improvement.

It's not because it's trendy, it's because it's rare.

About 5% of the population have ADHD. If we tested them all, using psychiatrists that were 99% accurate, we'd have the following breakdown:

True positive: 4.95%
False negative: 0.05%
True negative: 94.05%
False positive: 0.95%

Even with a 99% accuracy rate, 16% of the people with a positive diagnosis wouldn't have ADHD. The sheer size of the "doesn't have ADHD" group means that even rare errors are a significant number of people compared to the "does have ADHD" group.

(Obviously we aren't actually testing everybody, and 99% is unrealistically high, and modelling false positives and false negatives at the same rate isn't correct. But the point is: even with unrealistically accurate diagnoses, you still get this outcome due to the relative rarity of ADHD.)

Thanks, that was uncalled for.

I have ADHD. One of the consequences of it is that if I don't keep some visible reminder of something around, it'll fall out of my brain and never come back. Those tabs are reminders about things I wanted or needed to do, and if I close the tabs then I know full well I won't ever get around to them. Shuffling them off into bookmarks is the equivalent of putting them into a drawer, which is another good place to put things if I want to forget about them.

Having ADHD also means your brain's executive function (i.e. the part of your brain that turns "I need to do <X>" into actually doing X) is broken, which means I rarely end up getting around to doing the things those tabs represent... and the end result is, obviously, hundreds of tabs sitting around.

I don't enjoy being in this situation, but what am I supposed to do about it? This is just how my brain works (or... fails to work), and the part of my brain that would be responsible for doing something about it is the part that's broken. But sure, just call me a psychopath and an unwashed hoarder why don't you, I'm sure that will help.

I can think of an (awful) potential reason: people may be after it as an actual pain killer, for actual pain. If it's been made hard enough to get legally then some people with chronic pain are going to be willing to get it less legally.

ADHD isn't about not being able to do "boring jobs". It affects everything. Yeah, it'll cause you trouble at work, but it makes it hard to do things you actually want to do as well! Plus all of the other problems, like constantly forgetting stuff, sleep issues, inability to keep track of time, losing things, ... - it affects your entire life.

The only thing the drug is good for is to trick your brain into believing that otherwise boring tasks are actually worth completing

This is an interesting way of putting it, because... this is how your brain gets itself to do things: it tricks itself into thinking that it should be doing them. It's one of the critical internal functions your brain needs to do in order for you to get stuff done, regardless of whether the stuff is boring or not. ADHD is the (very badly named) condition where your brain can't do that properly, and fixing that with medication that targets the problem isn't a bad thing.

Your response to Ritalin doesn't mean medication is bad, it just means you don't get along with Ritalin. Other medication is available that may work better for you (although possibly it wasn't available back when you were at school).

(To be clear: obviously you get to choose what you do or don't take, but I don't want other people thinking they should avoid getting help for ADHD just because you had a bad reaction to one of the possible medications for it.)