I’ve heard a lot of people saying that ADHD is overdiagnosed and now understand what they mean.

Going by a definition taken from an editorial piece in the British Medical Journal it states that “Broadly, overdiagnosis means making people patients unnecessarily, by identifying problems that were never going to cause harm or by medicalising ordinary life experiences through expanded definitions of diseases.
Overdiagnosis has two major causes: overdetection and overdefinition of disease “

They’re not saying that there aren’t people out there requiring diagnosis or who have ADHD without knowing, I think that they are saying that there are people getting diagnosed who shouldn’t be. To be fair, in the assessment many of the questions of leading and obvious if you want a diagnosis of ADHD. The better ones will get input from people close to you and study how you handle the assessment, speech patterns etc. but there is room for overdiagnosis, not to say that there aren’t may more out there needing diagnosis.

So, isn’t it better to state that there is a level of misdiagnosis of ADHD rather than overdiagnosis as this then changes the tone from ‘everyone thinks they’re ADHD’ to ‘people may be inappropriately diagnosed but there are many out there still diagnosed’.

It may be semantics but I can’t help but feel that when people talk of over diagnosis they imply that there are too many people diagnosed when in truth there probably are nowhere near enough people being diagnosed.

Does that make sense? Should we challenge the notion of overdiagnosis and have emphasis to misdiagnosis? Or accept that overdiagnosis means that some people shouldn’t have been diagnosed but state that there are far more people requiring diagnosis and support who have yet to get it?