This is SO insane. I wonder in my case how something could have been done sooner. The suffering has been going on undiagnosed and untreated for at least 35 years.
One thing that would have helped is if either a teacher or my parent who is a teacher would have been like: Ok, maybe 5 % chance of attention disorder, check it out please.
Sometimes, I suspect that a teacher got it and reported it to my parents, who angrily rejected it. There was a weird conflict between them and a teacher that made no sense, because I got along with that teacher, and what little I got was him "talking shit", yet he was the most thoughtful and scientific of them.
Another option: Just do a "full checkup" on people starting early in life, even for things where no indication has been reported. The vicious cycle of doctor visits: Patient comes, reports symptom -> questions -> tests -> whatever going on in their minds -> diagnosis. It doesn't work, at all. I feel like overall, a lot of money would be saved in the global economy (nobody cares for saved suffering anyway) if the procedure for things were: Doctor attempts treatment if it seems simple just once, if it fails, go full Doctor House. Might overall save money. All the negative findings from this would be a goldmine of information, and saved money, for 1 or 2 decades of doctor visits.
For ADHD, why doesn't everybody do a multiple choice test, not wasting any trained professional's time if it is clearly very negative? Further steps only if it is not very clearly negative.
And at some point, after decades of this, they pick up on what it caused, rather than the ADHD itself. The result of other people and yourself telling you that you are just an assclown who can't handle your own household, appointments, education, job.
In hindsight, the earliest that I presented something to a doctor that should have lead to ADHD, if investigated with full force, were gut / digestion problems in the 90s. 2000s, I came to a doctor for a sick note as things at a crappy workplace got "too much", got benzos, which helped through the worst. I often used the "too much" phrase over the next 2 decades, usually met with benzos or "can't really do anything with that phrase".
They study so long, shouldn't there be question techniques that get to the bottom of things? Even with a psychiatrist, when I said really clearly what was going on from my perspective, they were like: Wow, that doesn't help at all, can't do anything with that information. The way things are, you have to self-diagnose, then find out how to nudge them in the right direction by saying the right things.
How similar the life stories are. Maybe your depression diagnosis is just wrong, result of a line of questioning that caught problems caused by ADHD.
Different for me is that I had some good years where one aspect worked out great, e. g. 4 great years of education around 30 out of nowhere, after so many previous attempts failed. A few years of healthy relationships and even marriage, before it all fell apart again. I am still able to draw a lot from skills learnt during those 4 years.
Still no clue where those "good years" come from and where they went, just hoping that now, with treatment, it's all going to be good years, at least in terms of ADHD.