Re:ADHD Is Different for Women (2013)
by mattlutze on Wednesday October 14, 2015 @03:58AM
(#10385456)
Brain stuff is influenced by genetic makeup as much as any other health condition. Many health conditions present with different effect or prevalence in different racial sub-populations or between the sexes.
It's meaningful to include race if it was a factor, because she's saying it was a predominant trait in the study populations on which the diagnostic criteria were originally built.
If you don't study an effect in different populations to determine the universality of your criteria, you could very well be under- or over-diagnosing persons from those groups.
Disruptive behaviour in nonwhite kids is much more likely to be interpreted as criminal tendency rather than an unfortunate medical condition.
Hyperactive black boys were taken to prison instead, I suspect.
I don't really get what lines like this are supposed to be getting at. Why is race mentioned here at all? I'm now left wondering if there is also some effect of race on ADHD symptoms, in which case I feel like the quote was not really used honestly (used partly out of context- how much of this is due to gender and how much to race?) or whoever said the quote spoke incorrectly because they felt that the young boys also being white would drive home their point more.