There is a phrase that keeps resurfacing with increasing certainty: “everyone has ADHD these days.”

It tends to appear in casual conversation, often with mild irritation and a sense that something has gone wrong. The implication is that a once-specific clinical diagnosis has somehow leaked into everyday life, becoming a catch-all explanation for distraction, procrastination and mental overload.

Behind it sits a bigger question that psychiatry has never fully escaped: how much of mental illness is something biological and fixed in the brain, and how much of it is shaped by the society in which that brain is trying to function?

It is not a clean question. It never has been.

Mental illness is real. That much is not in dispute in any serious clinical sense. Severe depression, psychosis, bipolar disorder, and significant ADHD can be profoundly disabling, persistent, and biologically rooted. These are not cultural inventions or lifestyle labels.

But the way we define, recognise, and draw boundaries around mental illness is not fixed. It shifts over time, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. And those shifts tend to say as much about society as they do about the mind.

A useful way to see this is to look at what counts as “disordered” in the first place.

No diagnosis exists in isolation from expectations. To call something a disorder is to say it causes significant impairment in functioning. But functioning depends on context. What counts as impairment in one era or environment may not in another.

This is where ADHD becomes especially revealing.

ADHD is often described in terms of attention regulation, impulsivity, and executive functioning. At a biological level, there is strong evidence that these traits cluster in meaningful ways, are heritable, and relate to identifiable differences in brain systems involved in reward and control.

Yet the lived experience of ADHD does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in schools, offices, homes, and digital environments that increasingly demand a very specific kind of attention: sustained, linear, uninterrupted focus on tasks that are often not inherently engaging.

At the same time, those same environments are saturated with interruptions. Notifications, messages, emails, feeds, switching between platforms, constant availability. The modern attention economy is not neutral. It actively fragments focus.

So when people say “everyone has ADHD now”, they are often noticing something real, even if the conclusion is wrong. Many people are experiencing more difficulty with attention, organisation and mental clarity than in previous decades. But that does not mean they all have the same neurodevelopmental condition.

It raises a different possibility: that the environment has shifted in ways that amplify attentional strain across the population.

In that sense, mental illness is partly socially constructed, not in the sense of being invented, but in the sense that its boundaries depend on social conditions.

Consider what happens when expectations change. A person who struggles with sustained attention in a highly structured, deadline-driven, digital work environment may find themselves impaired in ways that were less visible in earlier contexts. The same traits, placed in a different setting, may have caused far less disruption.

This does not mean ADHD is not real. It means impairment is relational. It depends on the interaction between individual cognitive style and environmental demand.

That interaction is often forgotten in public debate, which tends to split into two unsatisfying camps.

One side treats ADHD as overdiagnosed, a product of modern self-diagnosis culture, or a convenient label for ordinary distraction. The other side treats it as an almost universal explanation for any difficulty with focus or motivation.

Both positions flatten something more complex.

Clinical ADHD is not simply “being distracted more than average”. It is a persistent pattern that appears across contexts, begins early in life, and significantly impairs functioning in multiple domains. Many people who struggle with attention problems do not meet this threshold. Their difficulties may be real, but differently rooted: stress, sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression, burnout, or simply environmental overload.

The rise in ADHD identification reflects both improved recognition and expanded interpretation. People who were previously missed by diagnostic systems are now being identified more accurately. At the same time, the language of ADHD has become a general framework for making sense of a wide range of attentional struggles.

That expansion is not surprising. Diagnostic categories are not static scientific objects. They are social tools. Once a concept enters public discourse, it begins to shape how people interpret their own experience. People recognise patterns in themselves, sometimes correctly, sometimes loosely, and sometimes in ways that blur important distinctions between clinical disorder and everyday difficulty.

This is where the idea of social construction becomes useful again.

To say something is socially constructed is not to say it is imaginary. It is to say that the boundary between what is considered normal and what is considered disordered is not determined by biology alone. It is negotiated through cultural expectations, economic structures, institutional systems and available language.

Mental illness sits precisely at that intersection. Biology provides constraints and vulnerabilities. Environment shapes expression and severity. Society defines thresholds and categories.

ADHD makes this visible because it exists in a particularly sensitive zone: attention. Attention is not just a neurological function. It is also a resource that modern society demands, fragments, and monetises at scale.

The result is a growing tension between human cognitive limits and environmental expectations. Some people are affected more severely than others, and for some, ADHD is the correct and necessary explanation. For others, the issue is not a neurodevelopmental disorder but a mismatch between human cognition and contemporary conditions.

The difficulty is that both realities can coexist without cancelling each other out.

Mental illness is not simply inside the brain or outside in society. It is produced in the space between them. That is why debates about ADHD so often feel unresolved. They are not just arguments about diagnosis. They are arguments about what kind of demands society is allowed to place on attention in the first place.

And underneath the phrase “everyone has ADHD these days” sits a quieter question that is harder to answer: whether the problem is that more people are disordered, or that the world they are trying to focus in has become harder to live in without feeling that way.