I've yet to meet someone with ADHD or ADHS that doesn't consume too much. Most children I know from kindergarden or school (as a parent) bragged about their gaming consoles, gaming mobiles and consumption of drinks full of sugar and caffeine. And their parents are dumb enough to talk down everybody else who sees excessive gaming critical. No joke: some of them choose "gaming" as a project topic and the teachers failed to dismiss it because they're happy those kids are interested in anything at all.

It's not black and white. Maybe those kids would have issues even without overconsumption. But I don't see anyone trying a proper approach (remove or at least restrict the distraction first). Instead those diagnoses seem to have become a cheap excuse for free wheeling.

whats wrong with gaming? if they dont go out and get zero exercise thats a big problem but a lot of kids are "excessive" gamers and play football after school.

and even with the real problematic cases the solution is working with them to find something thats even more fun to get them off the console. but thats hard when parents are scared to leave their kids alone with their friends even if theres a trusted adult nearby because they feel like cant trust anyone out of the family. i think a lot of "lazy" kids just want an escape from their controlling parents, and if their family dont let them do it outside they just dont go.

honestly sometimes i think adhd is not a bad thing at all. it can protect you from drug addictions (stimulants dont get you high), push you to constantly try new things, let our culture break free from depression novels and classical music. and it might be the death of useless office jobs that contribute nothing to society, because a lot of people with adhd would take manual labor or food service over something that feels boring even if it pays more.

doom scrolling comes from being broke and stuck at home with nothing better to do. the moment something better appears (more social, more exciting) most people get off their phones and only use them to record the moment. and thats not a bad thing either.

I believe that you are inverting cause and effect. These behaviors manifest at my worst, when I am tired. Under medication, some disappeared completely.

(tl;dr you are confusing symptoms of a disorder with its root cause. See evidence below.)

I don't understand, are you suggesting that overconsumption / overstimulation behavior is / could be the cause of ADHD?

Because they certainly are effects and symptoms (not root cause) of ADHD, this is a well established fact, kind of core part of ADHD literature and research, actually... (I mean: dysregulation of dopamine; impulse control (lack thereof); higher substance abuse risk (esp. when unmedicated)).

While excessive screen time or poor diet can exacerbate executive dysfunction or poor sleep in any human (esp. child), they do not create the neurodevelopmental deficits that define ADHD. Taking away a video game does not repair a child's dopamine transporters.

I feel there is enough literature to substantiate this. I'm interested in this because I have a clinical diagnosis of ADHD which I got only in adulthood, but better later than never; getting the diagnosis has absolutely helped me in life, in various respects.

By the way: I recognize that in certain countries, ADHD may be overdiagnosed (idk, though); medications overprescribed (again, idk, but acknowledging the risk here; not here in Baltics (LT) though, I think);

AND - what ruffles my jimmies PARTICULARLY - prevalent overuse of ADHD term and culture of (over)self-diagnosis of ADHD in social media and elsewhere (general culture, too; I hate that so much, I believe it contributes to such one-sided unscientific docs as well as not-scientifically-grounded viewpoints).

Those over-self-diagnosing people really do not help the rest of us, to put it mildly.

As for canonical evidence and studies:

1. The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-based conclusions about the disorder (Faraone et al., 2021) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33549739/

2. Dr. Nora Volkow's dopamine research (e.g. JAMA, 2009) - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/184547

3. Dr. Russell Barkley's Theory of Behavioral Inhibition (see e.g. his long talk directed towards parents of ADHD children, if curious; on youtube)