[lepton]

It's certainly not bipolar deppression. I don't recall ever seeing this person depressed. The variation was clearly a measure of focus. Driving for this person was an adventure, as after a few months they'd begin to get lost on the way to work, apparently daydreaming.

In this persons case, the lateness to meetings was resolved with meeting software (they would always remember that there was supposed to be a meeting and when, but not in a timely manner). The variation in performance was resolved by constantly changing their tasks. Any task you gave this person would be mastered within months, and would begin to decline soon thereafter, until they'd get lost staring blankly at the screen.

Management decision: Set them to learn new (widely varied) tasks, train others to do them and take them over, and go onto new tasks. Worked fine.

Now...why would this only show up relatively recently? Well, for starters, we were designed to go chase bunnies, not to sit at a desk for years, performing repetitive functions, operating on a schedule. Lots of ADD traits would not be notable, or would be actually helpful in other environments.

[paulsy]

About why it wasn't "found" until recently. In addition to the obvious push from drug companies for profit reasons, you wrote: "...we were designed to go chase bunnies, not to sit at a desk for years, performing repetitive functions, operating on a schedule. Lots of ADD traits would not be notable, or would be actually helpful in other environments."

We've also more recently been able to establish a nexus between classes of behavior/symptoms and differences in brain chemistry, with the more sophisticated and revealing imaging diagnostics.