To be fair, Internet grumblings on Reddit were actually a good starting point for me. The first, most important step, was learning that ADHD existed as something much more than just the wild child that’s bouncing off the walls.
Then I started seeking out people with ADHD sharing their experiences (and, of course, memes), and I was shaken by how much some of them resonated with me. There were habits, fidgets, quirks I had that I had never seen or heard of anyone else doing that turned out to be common with ADHD.
To your point, yes, there were and still are plenty of people recklessly and inappropriately linking everything to ADHD or promoting harmful misinformation, which is why I purposely stuck with reading personal perspectives and not “authoritative” statements. Even so, I kept seeing more and more things that perfectly described me and I finally felt seen. Which led me to looking into professional research about ADHD that ended up explaining even more of my entire life, in turn pushing me to finally seek a diagnosis.
All that to say there are some good resources on the US side. You just have to be willing to dig through mountains of dog shit–and recognize that it’s dog shit in the first place–to find the occasional nugget.
To be fair, Internet grumblings on Reddit were actually a good starting point for me. The first, most important step, was learning that ADHD existed as something much more than just the wild child that’s bouncing off the walls.
Then I started seeking out people with ADHD sharing their experiences (and, of course, memes), and I was shaken by how much some of them resonated with me. There were habits, fidgets, quirks I had that I had never seen or heard of anyone else doing that turned out to be common with ADHD.
To your point, yes, there were and still are plenty of people recklessly and inappropriately linking everything to ADHD or promoting harmful misinformation, which is why I purposely stuck with reading personal perspectives and not “authoritative” statements. Even so, I kept seeing more and more things that perfectly described me and I finally felt seen. Which led me to looking into professional research about ADHD that ended up explaining even more of my entire life, in turn pushing me to finally seek a diagnosis.
All that to say there are some good resources on the US side. You just have to be willing to dig through mountains of dog shit–and recognize that it’s dog shit in the first place–to find the occasional nugget.