[jasonfarnon]

"The problem(s) mostly relies with the modern way of life and what is expected from the society at large."

I assumed not just ADHD but a number of other psychological conditions are more about reconciling some individuals to this particular society. It seems baked into a lot of their diagnostic criteria, like how well one "functions" at school or work. Surely ADHD would not be cognizable where people don't have to spend 8hrs/day through their youth sitting in one place.

[nxobject]

> Surely ADHD would not be cognizable where people don't have to spend 8hrs/day through their youth sitting in one place.

Or, for that matter, in a society where people regulated their days by cues like the sky and the body, rather than the carefully organized "rain or shine" clocked time needed by the Industrial Revolution.

(This thesis isn't mine: the historian EP Thompson wrote a classic article on how the transition from a rural to an industrial working class in Britain was accompanied with timetabling and "clock discipline".)

https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/38/1/56/14546...

https://academic.oup.com/past/pages/special_issue_3

[rcxdude]

The line is indeed, fuzzy. The basic definition of a disorder is very much dependent on context, because in general it requires that the behavior or thought pattern is causing distress or danger to the patient or those around them. There are many facets of the human mind which have a substantial variation among the population, where some range is adaptive to certain situations and some part becomes a problem, and where exactly that flips will depend on the individual and the context they are in. But I think it's unhelpful to claim that because this line is contextual, it means there isn't really a problem. It's a problem because that individual is in that context (and often it's preferable to address the behaviour or thought patterns than the context), and there are individuals where it would be a problem in basically any context.