According to the Checklist, I Have ADHD. So Do You. So, on the Evidence, Does the Dog.

This morning I lost my reading glasses. This is not news. I lose them roughly as often as the Earth completes a rotation, and my search protocol is by now a thing of forensic beauty: it begins in the fridge, takes in the boot of the car and the dog's bed, and ends with my girlfriend pointing wordlessly at the top of my own head, where they have been sitting, like a tiara, the whole time. The wrinkle this morning was that I'd written a note the night before saying where I'd put them — and I couldn't read the note, because to read it I needed the glasses, which I'd lost. This is the sort of closed causal loop that brings down aeroplanes.

All of which, according to a checklist I read this week, means I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Now, careful, because ADHD is real and I'll come back to that. But I read the whole list, and recognised myself in about ninety per cent of it. "Starts household jobs without finishing them" — there is a shelf in my utility room that has been eighty per cent up since the coronation. "Underestimates journeys" — I once allowed forty minutes to reach Carlisle. "Impulsive spending; subscriptions barely used" — I am, as I write, paying for four streaming services, a meditation app I have opened once, and a gym in a town I no longer live in. I handed the list to my girlfriend, who recognised herself in the other ten per cent, and concluded that between us the United Kingdom constitutes a live clinical emergency of a scale not seen since the Black Death, only with worse punctuality.

A waiting list the size of Sheffield

Look at the numbers, because on this I have, ironically, developed hyperfocus. The English waiting list for an ADHD assessment has gone from around 365,000 in December 2024 to roughly 562,000 a year later. That is not a queue; that is the population of Sheffield, tapping its feet. Six adults in ten on it have already waited over a year, and in parts of Kent, Sussex and London people are told the wait is five to seven years. Think about that. The waiting list to be diagnosed with an inability to wait is seven years long. Nobody on it can wait for a kettle; we're asking them to wait for a leap year. Longer than most marriages, most jobs, and the last four Prime Ministers combined. Prescriptions have doubled in six years. And one in four British adults now suspects he has the condition, against a genuine adult prevalence of two or three in a hundred.

All net and no mesh

One in four thinks he's (pronoun neutral) got it. Two or three in a hundred actually have. Spot the modelling problem. Put it another way: at your next dinner party, one in four guests has ADHD. Look around the table. If you can't tell who it is — it's because you weren't listening, which is item one on the list, so it's probably you. Because that is what this is — a modelling problem, and I say so as a man who spends his evenings elbow-deep in spreadsheets while sensible people watch the telly. Any test must catch the people who have the thing and let go of the people who don't. This checklist is world-beating at the first and cheerfully hopeless at the second. "Fidgets." "Distracted by notifications." "Enters a room and forgets why." Show me one adult with a smartphone and a pulse who reads that and thinks "no, not me." That person is lying, or a fern. Psychologists call it the Barnum effect — the reason horoscopes work. Make a description vague and flattering enough and everyone swears it was written about them. But none of that fits a fifteen-second video, and so the list has bolted from the clinic and been monetised by people flogging forty-nine-pound coaching bundles who are no more qualified than my spaniel — and less, because the spaniel turns up on time. Half of these creators are selling you a cure for a condition they can't spell, which is bold, when you think about it. It's like being diagnosed with dyslexia by your horoscope.

Is it real, or just a Tuesday?

So here is the question everyone's actually asking down the pub: is the thing even real, or is it just a ragtag of ordinary problem behaviours that fifty years ago we'd have called quirky, dreamy, or a bit odd, and left well alone? And the honest answer — the one that satisfies neither the deniers nor the zealots — is both. The biology is real. ADHD is among the most heritable conditions in all of psychiatry, roughly as heritable as your height, with replicable differences in the brain's dopamine wiring and a specific, dose-dependent response to medication. You do not get that signal from a fashion. But — and this is the bit the campaigners hate — it is not a thing you simply have or haven't, like a broken femur. It is the far end of a trait that runs, on a smooth curve, through the entire population. The "diagnosis" is a line drawn on that curve at the point where the traits start wrecking a life. And where you draw the line is a judgement, not a law of nature.

The cleanest way to see it — forgive me, I am a spreadsheet man — is blood pressure. Hypertension is real, measurable and lethal, and also a threshold somebody picked on a continuum. Nudge the cutoff a few points and you reclassify millions overnight without a single artery changing. Nobody screams that high blood pressure is a myth because the line is negotiable. ADHD is the same shape of problem: real underlying variable, movable line.

The lad who'd have been fine on a farm

Which is exactly why the man of 1975 matters. The trait existed then; the label didn't, and so two very different people both got filed under "odd." Some genuinely had it and paid a brutal, silent price — the bright boy written off as bone idle who never fulfilled his promise. But plenty of the others weren't disordered at all. They were simply at the lively end of normal, in a world that asked far less of them. A restless, distractible lad on a Yorkshire farm in 1975 was just a good worker with ants in his pants. Bolt the identical nervous system into an open-plan office with a smartphone, a Slack channel and eleven browser tabs, and the very same traits now read as a medical impairment. The boy didn't change. The environment raised the bar, then handed him a diagnosis for failing to clear it.

The one thing the NHS can't discharge

And that points at the thing that really nags. If a great deal of this is behaviour — drilled in by a world of infinite scroll and instant everything — then behaviour, by definition, can be unlearned. Habits break. People retrain. And yet, for all the diagnosing and the psychological input the state can muster, the one thing government treatment never produces is a cure. You may be labelled. You may be medicated, possibly for life. But you will not, under any circumstances, be discharged. There is a five-year queue to be told you have it and no queue whatsoever to be told you're better, because "better" is not a box on the form. Obviously. A cured patient is a closed case; a diagnosed one is a customer. It's a subscription. Turns out the NHS has finally found something it can't discharge — and it's you.

The people stuck at the back of the queue

And here — because I promised, and unlike some items on the list I occasionally follow through — is what matters. For the people at the genuine far end of that curve, this is not "ooh, a bit scatty." It is a life quietly taken apart: the sackings, the debts, the brown envelopes breeding in a drawer, the decades of being called lazy by everyone including the voice in their own head. They deserve, urgently, to be seen. And they are the ones stuck at the very back of the seven-year queue, behind a quarter of the country who lost their keys once and fancied an explanation. Someone was always going to pay for our national self-diagnosis. It was never going to be us.

So no, we do not all have ADHD, and no, it isn't a myth either. It is a real thing with a wobbly edge, laid over a culture that would rather have a diagnosis than an early night and a state that can label but never cure. Point a broad enough definition at ordinary life and ordinary life comes back positive. Everything looks like a nail when your only tool is a checklist and a phone.

I'd write more, but I've lost my glasses again. They're on my head. I can feel you already knew that.