Re:A neuroscientist who believes addiction is not a disease
by wpietri on Sunday August 30, 2015 @08:59PM
(#10144940)
Having been diagnosed with it in college, and knowing many similar people, I agree that it isn't all puppies and flowers. However, if that's how all humans were, it wouldn't be defined as a disease, it would just be human nature.
It's also about human performance in very specific environments, that being certain industrial and early-post-industrial environments. And I'll add that most humans have inadequate attentional mechanisms for those environments, which is why 80% of adult Americans consume attention-enhancing stimulants every day, and why it is extremely rare to find an office environment without ready caffeine.
One caveat: there are a variety of things that get lumped under the term ADD, like organophosphate pesticide poisoning [1]. There are people with severe attentional issues who do indeed suffer, and would even in historical human environments. Here I'm speaking only of the 5-10% of the population with the standard sort of ADD that appears to be genetic, and wouldn't have been recognized as a disease until recently.
It's also about human performance in very specific environments, that being certain industrial and early-post-industrial environments. And I'll add that most humans have inadequate attentional mechanisms for those environments, which is why 80% of adult Americans consume attention-enhancing stimulants every day, and why it is extremely rare to find an office environment without ready caffeine.
One caveat: there are a variety of things that get lumped under the term ADD, like organophosphate pesticide poisoning [1]. There are people with severe attentional issues who do indeed suffer, and would even in historical human environments. Here I'm speaking only of the 5-10% of the population with the standard sort of ADD that appears to be genetic, and wouldn't have been recognized as a disease until recently.
[1] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/06/there_is_no_link_betw...