Everyone has ADHD because we made it up

I wasn't sure how I felt about this article but I think the author sums it up really nicely.

> What actually separates “I lost my keys” from “I have ADHD” was never the presence of the behaviour. It’s the degree of impairment — how much it’s costing you, how often, for how long, etc.

ADHD can be a real dichotomy. On the one hand, yes you can be successful and holding down a good job. But you may be doing so by existing on the edge of burnout and questioning when everyone else figures out you are faking the competence they see in you.

But people often don't see the frustration, despair or how much work finding systems to work with or around your brain has gone into it too.

Sometimes, the most helpful part of diagnosis is that you can name the experience. Otherwise you end up concluding you're worse than everyone else.

I agree that "is the category real or not" is not as important as "are people helped by this."

And I'm increasingly of the opinion that on balance, people are not helped; I feel like concepts like ADHD, "neurodivergence," -- and even autism are terms whose present looseness cause more problems than they solve.

But does it matter?

We probably all agree that it is bad to give kids pills to make them more quiet.

If you however have a young person that is honestly suffering from what they themself perceive as a “condition” and there is a stimulant that helps, why not apply this as a treatment?

We could stop calling it a Syndrom and just declare the people who benefit from the medication as lucky ones.

I get the sentiment, but the examples are bad. There is no "magical bar" that decides whether you have ADHD or not and it always needs to be cross checked with the wellbeing of the actual person. And much of the article is about bashing psychology which... I do resonate with, but I'd rather have more substance rather than reading accusations alone.

I know people with actual ADHD and some medication has helped them to function again and endure social exposure and even enjoy it. That doesn't change my impression that a vast amount of people see to identify with ADHD because it's currently a trend (remember the time when everybody thought they had OCD?).

Other than that, the field of psychology is constantly evolving.

Yeah. The South Park treatment could've solved most cases.

> But Substack is for sharing my bad ideas, not my good ones, so I’m not going to disclose the central theme of my whole ass PhD for free online.

stingy

After watching for 20 or more years an explosion of the diagnosis, I’m not convinced it’s real because we can’t measure it in any meaningful way.

> Everyone gets distracted, forgets things, procrastinates, and loses their keys; what matters clinically is the severity, persistence, combination, and impairment associated with those experiences. Everyone pisses, too. But if you’re doing it 45 times a day, I’d probably go see a doctor.

OR. Here’s a controversial idea. We have a cultural problem in that if you have an issue it MUST be health related instead of you not having matured enough yet or built the experiences required to handle a situation.

Everyone has a disorder? Or do people just need to learn skills that genuinely take time to develop as a part of a life that requires a lot from you?

> The antidote to heterogeneity isn’t more categories, you freak. What this categorical approach misses is the potentially vibrant inner world of each person’s specific bio-psycho-social phenomenological cocktail of experience. If we actually want to tackle heterogeneity, we should look at what symptoms people are experiencing and meet them where they’re at.

yes indeed. humans do not fit categories. categories are crudely fit to humans.

What a sick attention economy to have to package arguments into a certain shape to acquire currency to pay to live

Title is inaccurate because some people have terribly debilitating executive dysfunction and some people just don't. It doesn't matter what the real difference is between these people, some of them have a problem that the others do not.

The article argues that it's unfair to draw a hard, strict line somewhere that separates ADHD and non-ADHD. I argue that doesn't fucking matter because if you're anywhere near "potentially not having ADHD" then it's not nearly as important to get it diagnosed in the first place.