You can't really be diagnosed with symptom (although of course your money will be cheerfully taken to do just this).
Attention and focus and other related ADHD-type issues are bell curve.
It can feel good, for sure, to externalize our weakness and failings into one of these labels, like ADD. If that is helpful to get over the psychic weight of past failures, then that is helpful and useful.
Taking stimulants definitely helps most people with ability to work and focus, regardless of where they are on the attention-ability curve. There are also drawbacks and side-effects, at least I have observed.
It is pretty well understood that people with true ADD and ADHD have dopamine deficiency and issues with dopamine regulation and re-uptake in the brain. This has been highlighted in many studies. While I understand that there is an epidemic of over-diagnosis of ADHD, it does not make it any less of a legitimate medical condition in which the only treatment for it, is to increase the usable dopamine in the brain. One of the tell tail signs of ADD/HD is that the first time one with dopamine deficiency takes an amphetamine or one of it's derivatives, they realize that they are completely clear and it's like they come out of a fog in their brain, it's more profound than just the feeling of I can get stuff done. Again that alone is not effective as a single point to diagnose attention disorders but it is a strong indicator that there could be a dopamine deficiency.
TLDR it is a true disorder, it is over-diagnosed but that does not make it any less a chemical disorder of the brain.
You can't really be diagnosed with symptom (although of course your money will be cheerfully taken to do just this).
Attention and focus and other related ADHD-type issues are bell curve.
It can feel good, for sure, to externalize our weakness and failings into one of these labels, like ADD. If that is helpful to get over the psychic weight of past failures, then that is helpful and useful.
Taking stimulants definitely helps most people with ability to work and focus, regardless of where they are on the attention-ability curve. There are also drawbacks and side-effects, at least I have observed.