> meaning that people with ADHD qualify as neurodiverse
Now this is a really big tangent, but the term "neurodiverse" annoys me. One of the reasons is, there is actually a great deal of genuine neural diversity among so-called "neurotypical" people. For example, while most right-handed people activate left hemisphere perisylvian regions in language processing, a small minority of right-handed people activate right hemisphere perisylvian regions instead. So that small minority are "neurodiverse" in a genuine physical sense, yet absent some clinically significant dysfunction (and this example of neurodiversity has no known clinical significance), nobody will call them that. (I owe this example to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28130875/ who in turn cite it to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10611122/ )
In reality, "neurotypical"-vs-"neurodiverse" is a clinical distinction, not a neuroscience one. People with (certain kinds of) clinically significant dysfunctions get the second label, people without those dysfunctions get the first. Very rarely does anyone actually look at what is going on in the brain (eg via MRI) before applying these labels. (There are studies claiming to find differences in the brain between the "neurotypical" group and various subsets of the "neurodiverse" group, but those studies tend to contradict each other, have problems with reproducibility, and only claim to find group differences not individual ones – there may be a statistically significant difference between the mean of some property in two groups, but the ranges of that property in the two groups will be overlapping.)
Quite possibly because the distinction between ADHD and ASD (among other disorders) is biologically dubious. See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-019-0631-2
> meaning that people with ADHD qualify as neurodiverse
Now this is a really big tangent, but the term "neurodiverse" annoys me. One of the reasons is, there is actually a great deal of genuine neural diversity among so-called "neurotypical" people. For example, while most right-handed people activate left hemisphere perisylvian regions in language processing, a small minority of right-handed people activate right hemisphere perisylvian regions instead. So that small minority are "neurodiverse" in a genuine physical sense, yet absent some clinically significant dysfunction (and this example of neurodiversity has no known clinical significance), nobody will call them that. (I owe this example to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28130875/ who in turn cite it to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10611122/ )
In reality, "neurotypical"-vs-"neurodiverse" is a clinical distinction, not a neuroscience one. People with (certain kinds of) clinically significant dysfunctions get the second label, people without those dysfunctions get the first. Very rarely does anyone actually look at what is going on in the brain (eg via MRI) before applying these labels. (There are studies claiming to find differences in the brain between the "neurotypical" group and various subsets of the "neurodiverse" group, but those studies tend to contradict each other, have problems with reproducibility, and only claim to find group differences not individual ones – there may be a statistically significant difference between the mean of some property in two groups, but the ranges of that property in the two groups will be overlapping.)