Re:Overselling A.D.H.D.
by Kenji on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @05:07PM
(#12347645)
It's funny that you compare ADHD to cancer. You can see a cancerous growth. You can feel it. There are tests for it.
Criteria for ADHD are completely symptom-based. There is no infecting agent, no parasite, no detectable chemical poisoning or imbalance, no irregular growth, nothing! There is no standardized physiological test. You just observe how a person behaves and then say they have ADHD - a disease whose criteria humans defined completely arbitrarily. What qualifies as a mental health disorder says a lot about a society. Call me an ADHD-denier but I remain skeptical. I think ADHD is mostly an issue of searching the problem within the brain when it's everywhere in our society except the brain.
Criteria for ADHD are completely symptom-based. There is no infecting agent, no parasite, no detectable chemical poisoning or imbalance, no irregular growth, nothing! There is no standardized physiological test. You just observe how a person behaves and then say they have ADHD - a disease whose criteria humans defined completely arbitrarily. What qualifies as a mental health disorder says a lot about a society. Call me an ADHD-denier but I remain skeptical. I think ADHD is mostly an issue of searching the problem within the brain when it's everywhere in our society except the brain.