More free play is not exclusive with school. More free play does not solve ADHD. ADHD kid I know have hours of free play every day and he still have trouble to behave in school - while other kids don't have such problem. He has good days and bad days and that is not correlated to type of work. And when he has bad day, the other kids in class essentially sit bored waiting, because all teachers attention necessary goes toward that one out of control kid (he is too disruptive to be just ignore when he has that). When he has good day, he is fine boy trying to please those around. He is trying to not have bad day I think, he seems unable to.

Also, while there are some shitty schools with "forcing small children to sit and focus on unmotivated externally assigned busywork while being passively monitored by a stressed out and outnumbered authority figure", ADHD happen in non shitty ones.

When kids universally hate the school and there are problems with everyone then it is one thing. When there are few kids who behave differently then other kids, then we maybe should accept that there is something different about them. Because that is the thing - many many kids like to go to school at that age. Or are indifferent to school. Or don't like it, but don't have problem to sit while class is going on. And some kids have problem to control their behavior regardless of whether they like the school, teacher and other kids.

> Also, while there are some shitty schools with "forcing small children to sit and focus on unmotivated externally assigned busywork while being passively monitored by a stressed out and outnumbered authority figure", ADHD happen in non shitty ones.

Op wasn't describing shitty schools. He was just describing schools.

> For whatever it is worth: I am 32, and have undiagnosed ADHD, probably more extreme than yours.

If you think that it's significantly affecting your quality of life and none of your existing coping strategies are helping - which is the actual definition of "severity", by the way, not anything about how much you think your brain sucks - you should talk to a competent doctor and/or counselor or therapist. Medical professionals have access to far better ways to address real neurological problems than you can get hold of, ranging from referrals to specialists that work 8-hour days helping people test coping strategies to medication that will directly address the underlying cause to simply being able to approach the problem with a calibrated idea of what "normal" is and deal with it with a brain that isn't affected by the problem. They can probably help you keep your job or your marriage or whatever else it is that's continuously at risk of being derailed and collapsing around you.

Yes, I know that it's hard to do. It's hard to remember to make phone calls while businesses are open. It's hard to remember when you have appointments. I know that paperwork is terrifying. It sucks. It gets better if you do it and get help. Get a good friend to sit down and help you do it. Seriously, not having gone to the doctor in years because you couldn't pull together the functional executive capacity to deal with analysis paralysis when you search for "primary care providers $mycity" is unhealthy in a ton of ways. Just call one at random. At worst you'll pick a terrible doctor and have to try again. Get friends to help. They're not crippled like you are.

(Though, if I'm going to be honest, I will say that someone self-diagnosing severe ADHD in a thread about overdiagnosis of ADHD is hilariously ironic. Nothing says that the office lifestyle is any better for adults than it is for children, after all. Go read Dilbert or watch The Office or something, we're just as bad at handling it in cubicles as we are at our assigned seats in history class! Get some fresh air, go hiking on the weekends, get your macros right and lose 20 pounds. /s)

> You think it would have made your life significantly better if teachers had started medicating you at age 6 and forced you to spend more time memorizing spelling lists or whatever?

I did perfectly well on spelling tests and homework and projects during school. In fact, I barely needed to "study" anything at all. Maintained a high A all the way through to the end of my undergraduate. It just turned out that the month-long and semester-long projects sharply limited the scope of the careless mistakes I'd make that would, on real-life-sized projects, cascade into crippling architectural issues. So I just figured I needed to work harder (because "smart people don't work hard") and take better notes and pay more attention to the big picture. And I burned out catastrophically. Those problems all went away overnight when I finally managed to talk to a doctor about it. It was magical. I have so far not been able to identify any side effects rising above the noise floor.

So, based on the side effects and benefits of medication so far, yes, I actually really would have liked to have had it earlier. At least ten years earlier. I'd have spent exactly as much time studying - i.e. none - gotten back the 10% of my grade that I usually spent misreading the fucking question, been able to handle personal projects big enough that I'd have been able to get real practice with project management and software architecture, and gotten papers out of the research projects I was involved with during my undergraduate. I'd have been able to go to the doctor reliably and avoid the stress and wasted time I spent dealing with carelessly fucked-up paperwork. And that all would have compounded on itself to improve my life exactly the way the failures compounded the way it actually happened. If I'd had this shit ten years ago I'd probably have my fucking PhD right now and be working on getting tenure, which is what people were expecting when I was in second grade.

> It just turned out that the month-long and semester-long projects sharply limited the scope of the careless mistakes I'd make that would, on real-life-sized projects, cascade into crippling architectural issues.

Beyond any difficulties with controlling attention, I think this has a lot to do with lack of practice with large (and “real”) projects, ramping up in scope and scale slowly over the course of years. This is a big problem with the school curriculum/pedagogy, IMO.

Many people I know working in creative jobs (computer programming and otherwise) have various problems with large-scale project management, long-term problem solving strategies, etc., plenty of which have nothing to do with ADHD.