[gosub100]

I think your situation (especially with your child) outlines one of the insidious challenges we face in our modern society: breaking through the confusion and understanding the nuance of an issue (in this case, ADHD).

We've all heard the misinformation tropes "Back in my day, a kid was hyper because he wanted to play, nowadays $BOGEYMAN says those kids need to be medicated so they can get a 4.0", and they sound so alluring to large groups of people, so they write off ADHD altogether. Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them. Tell me how that kid can possibly learn anything if he doesn't even know that he vacated a conversation.

This is a parallel to George Carlin's "It's called shell-shock" spiel, or used by people to deny the existence of depression. It's very difficult to both convey nuance, and get people to accept it, even though it (the nuance) abuts life-threatening issues.

[bitwize]

For people my age it was "Back in my day, people applied good old fashioned discipline. That's all ADHD is, a lack of discipline." Often discipline came via the strap or similar.

[slipperlobster]

> Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them.

I have some variant of this - I'm constantly, subconsciously cutting in during someone else's sentence just to blurt out what immediately came to my brain, because I usually forget it by the time they are done. It's something I'm really working on, but it gets better day-by-day.