ADHD Isn’t Suddenly Everywhere: Why More Adults Are Being Diagnosed (and Why That Doesn’t Mean “Everyone Has ADHD”)

Another friend. Another colleague. Another celebrity on a podcast.

And then, at some point, the sentence you've heard at a barbecue or in a comments section: "Everyone has ADHD these days."

If you've wondered why so many adults are being diagnosed now, this post is for you. And if you've been wondering about yourself and that sentence made you feel a bit silly for it, this post is especially for you.

Here's the short version. ADHD hasn't become more common. We've started noticing the people who were overlooked the first time.

How common is ADHD, actually?

Let's start with the numbers, because the numbers are calmer than the headlines.

In Australia, the national guideline puts ADHD at between 6 and 10 per cent of children and adolescents. The most recent national survey found 8.2 per cent of children aged 4 to 11 and 6.3 per cent of teenagers aged 12 to 17.

For adults, there is no Australian study yet using the current diagnostic criteria. The guideline says adult prevalence here is likely to match international figures, which sit between 2 and 6 per cent.

Worldwide, the largest review of adult ADHD found 2.6 per cent of adults have ADHD that was diagnosed in childhood and persisted, and 6.8 per cent meet the criteria now, whether or not anyone ever noticed as a child. Hold onto the gap between those two numbers. It's most of this post.

One more figure. A 2019 economic report estimated about 533,000 Australian adults live with ADHD. That's nearly twice the number of children. ADHD is not a children's condition that a few adults happen to have. Most people with ADHD are grown up.

And none of this has exploded. A review of three decades of childhood studies found no evidence that more children meet the criteria now than did in the 1980s. The differences between studies came down to how they were done, not when. What's changed is awareness. Not incidence.

Why were so many adults missed as kids?

If the numbers are steady, where did all these newly diagnosed adults come from? They were there the whole time. Four things kept them out of view.

ADHD was seen as something children have

For most of the last century, the assumption was that children grew out of it. They often didn't. A long-running study that followed children with ADHD into young adulthood found only about 9 per cent reached sustained remission. Ninety per cent still had symptoms, and most went through periods of better and worse rather than a clean ending.

The expectation that it would fade meant nobody kept looking. If you'd like the long version of how the picture changed, I've written a short history of ADHD.

Girls and quiet kids didn't fit the picture

The ADHD that got noticed was the boy out of his seat. The girl reading under the desk, the daydreamer, the child who was "away with the fairies" but never in trouble, didn't match. Nobody flagged a problem, because from the outside there wasn't one.

The strategies stopped being enough

This is the part I see most in my work. Bright, conscientious kids worked twice as hard to hide what was difficult. They built their own systems before they knew what they were building them for, and those systems held for years.

Then adulthood kept adding weight. A career. A second child. A return to study. The years with toddlers at home during the pandemic. And for a lot of women, perimenopause and menopause, which I've written about in Why Perimenopause Hits Differently When You Have ADHD.

Nothing about the ADHD changed. The load did. Capable people don't get assessed. They get given more to carry, until the strategies that held at 25 can't hold at 45.

The pathway got clearer

In 2022 the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association published Australia's first national ADHD guideline, which gave GPs, psychologists and psychiatrists a shared framework for recognising and assessing ADHD in adults. People who had been told "we don't really do adult ADHD" finally had somewhere to go.

So why does it feel like everyone has it?

Because four things are happening at once, and from the outside they look like one thing.

Missed adults are being found. Someone diagnosed at 42 isn't a new case. They're a case that waited.

Stigma is dropping. More people feel safe asking, which lifts the diagnosis rate without changing how many people have ADHD.

Social media makes it relatable, and blurry. A thirty-second clip about losing your keys will get a lot of people nodding. Relating to a clip isn't the same as meeting the criteria, which are about a lifelong pattern that gets in the way across more than one part of life. The clips raise the question. They don't answer it.

Headlines simplify. "ADHD diagnoses soar" is a better headline than "adults who always had ADHD are finally being assessed". Only one of them is the story.

If you're the one wondering

Here's what "everyone has a bit of ADHD" does to the person who is privately wondering. It makes you feel like you're claiming something that isn't yours. Like the sensible response is to stop.

I'd put it differently. Everyone loses their keys sometimes. Not everyone has spent their whole life working three times as hard as the people around them to look like they're keeping up. The difference isn't the trait. It's the cost.

And if you've been putting off asking because you don't want to look like you're jumping on a bandwagon, the numbers above are your answer. The people being diagnosed in their 40s and 50s aren't following a trend. They were in the 6.8 per cent the whole time. Nobody counted them.

What's new isn't the number of people with ADHD. It's the number of people finally being understood. That's not something to roll our eyes at. That's progress.

If you'd like to talk through whether what you're noticing might be ADHD, I work with adults across Australia by telehealth. You can see the full assessment process and the fees before you decide anything, and you don't need a GP referral to start. You can book a session here.

Does this resonate? I'd love to know. You can follow me on LinkedIn and Facebook, where I share a new post most weeks.

Interested in reading more? Why ADHD Often Goes Unnoticed in Women

This post is general information, written to help you understand your own experience. It isn't therapy, and it isn't a substitute for advice from a health professional who knows you.