Best resources to share with unsupportive family members, to correct harmful ADHD myths?

I’ve been diagnosed for a couple years, and my husband just received his official diagnosis. His brother is saying things like “ADHD is over diagnosed these days, since your doctor is a specialist he might just be handing out diagnoses” and “just make sure you rely more on the therapy than meds because the meds are harder to come back from” (???), and “everyone has ADHD these days thanks to the internet”.

He’s not intentionally an asshole, he just knows nothing about ADHD. He doesn’t understand how extensively it impacts our entire lives, not just our attention spans. My husband is planning to sit down with his brother to go over the official report, but with how resistant he is to this I’m wondering if y’all have any good additional resources for correcting these harmful ADHD myths.

ryan,

I've had to bring up Google Images and search up "ADHD Brain vs Normal Brain" before for people. I think a lot of folks don't realize that ADHD actually comes from tangible, structural brain differences, and seeing that puts it into the same realm as other "real" medical problems for them.

Regarding:

everyone has ADHD these days thanks to the internet

I have written extensively in my comment history about the differences between ADHD (the structural and heritable attention issue) and VAST (variable attention stimulus trait, aka the brain poorly making connections when people, especially kids, are exposed to screens too long). I'll dig up that comment and post it as a self-reply, but essentially: the symptoms are very similar, but the origin differs.

ryan,

Found it. I keep recommending this book on this community. :)

From ADHD 2.0:

Modern life compels these changes by forcing our brains to process exponentially more data points than ever before in human history, dramatically more than we did prior to the era of the Internet, smartphones, and social media. The hardwiring of our brains has not changed— as far as we know, although some experts do suspect that our hardwiring is changing— but in our efforts to adapt to the speeding up of life and the projectile spewing of data splattering onto our brains all the time, we’ve had to develop new, often rather antisocial habits in order to cope. These habits have come together to create something we now call VAST: the variable attention stimulus trait.

Whether you have true ADHD or its environmentally induced cousin, VAST, it’s important to detoxify the label and focus on the inherent positives. To be clear, we don’t want you to deny there is a downside to what you are going through, but we want you also to identify the upside.

I do suspect that we're likely already seeing a spike in VAST since a bunch of kids with growing brains did online-only learning for a few years during the pandemic instead of sitting in classrooms learning to focus on something not screen related...

girl,

This is extremely helpful, thank you! I do remember seeing your post about VAST, and I completely forgot about it. I think this will be a big help.

xmunk,

How to ADHD was an absolutely great resource for my partner - I think there are several better resources for detailed information but they’re watchable and pretty informative.

youtube.com/

girl,

We love How to ADHD! The doctor that diagnosed my husband recommended it to him, and we’ve started watching. Just gotta find the right ones that my BIL will be receptive to. Thank you!

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