[matheusmoreira]

Completely agree. People with ADHD are simply incompatible with many facets of mormal life.

Take school for example. If someone doesn't fit into the mass education model, they say they have attention deficit. That same person might then go home and hyperfocus on computer programming for 12 hours straight like a machine. It makes no sense.

The mass education model where hundreds of people sit on a chair listening to lectures for hours on end just isn't right for people with ADHD. Medications are just there to help cope with an imperfect reality which refuses to change for our sake.

[onoesworkacct]

ADHD isn't a personality quirk and also, it is fundamentally a disorder of regulation not attention. The education system (for all its drawbacks and inflexibility) works for most because they're able to regulate the urge to get up and climb random shit when they can't figure out how to start writing the answer to Q1 on the worksheet..

I also think its cope to take a disorder where a specific part of the brain tasked with very specific functions is physically less dense and performs than other people and go "ADHD isnt real he's just quirky!1"

[nathan_compton]

I guess its tempting to take like MRI/ECG style studies and draw fundamental conclusions from them about the distinction between "personality" and "disorder" but I think its good to bear in mind at least three things:

1. a lot of these studies suck. Brain imaging is very hard, the interpretation and analysis of the results involves lots of degrees of freedom, the study sizes are typically not as big as you'd like, and most of the results are only really visible in aggregate. I do not give much credence to them, as a scientist. One way to think of this is that if someone separates two groups of people into "ADHD" and "NOT ADHD" and you average their MRIs you might detect a difference in the two groups. But one person's MRI would be almost useless to assign them to one of the two groups. You could certainly try it, but it would not be very effective.

2. Literally every difference in behavior between two people or between a person and themselves at a different time is necessarily reflected in a difference in brain behavior, at least if you buy the materialist paradigm that brain -> mind or at least brain == mind. Thus, you would expect differences in personality to show up in MRI scans as well as differences which rise to the level of "disorder."

3. The brain isn't made up of "specific parts with specific functions." While its certainly true that we can roughly map different areas to different functions, its really not separable in any way that (for example) a human designed machine might be. We cannot remove and replace your "attention center" and it doesn't really mean anything to talk about it without all the rest of your brain. The part/whole relation is bullshit in all contexts (in my opinion as a mereological nihilist) but especially in neuroscience.

I guess its sort of a useful rhetorical frame to point to physical differences between brains as some kind of determination of the distinction between "mere" personality differences and "disorders" but I just don't think it makes sense in a fundamental way.

I'm a person with ADHD and Autism diagnoses and I think they are handy things to use from time to time, I think of them as entirely relational descriptions pertaining to my position with respect to the world, not fundamental ontological categories. On the other hand, I think of essentially everything as relational and I don't really believe in fundamental ontological categories so maybe I'm the fucked up one.

[matheusmoreira]

Nowhere did I claim ADHD was a personality quirk. Nowhere did I claim ADHD wasn't real. I'm not disputing the neurodevelopmental pathophysiology of ADHD. I'm questioning the labels society applies to people with such a disorder.

I claimed it's not the "attention deficit" people think it is. People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them. That's a huge contradiction. The truth is probably that school is way too boring for them.

I think signal to noise ratio is a good analogy. People with ADHD are easily distracted by noisy stimuli and need disproportionally high signal to focus. Society consistently fails to provide high enough SNR then labels neurodivergent people as problematic.

ADHD discussions always remind me of this article:

https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

I think the bipolar diagnosis is off the mark. Substitute bipolar with ADHD though and the profile fits quite well.

[alphydan]

> People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them

"interesting enough" is not a sufficient condition. You may be super interested, very motivated, and yet completely unable to start. That is one of the most frustrating parts of ADHD to me. When and how hyperfocus kicks in seems to be mostly outside of your control.

[dingnuts]

it's just poorly named; it's an executive function disorder. The hyper focus you described is just as uncontrolled and pathological as lack of attention. I used to hyper focus on StumbleUpon. You think that's evidence I _don't_ have an attention disorder?

Stop spreading medical misinformation. You're extremely uninformed.

Here are some lectures, go educate yourself: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKF2Eq0eYbbrNLoJjFpWG_U...

[matheusmoreira]

> it's just poorly named; it's an executive function disorder.

That's my point. Labeling people as having "attention deficit" leads to unnecessary stigma and marginalization.

> The hyper focus you described is just as uncontrolled and pathological as lack of attention.

I didn't say it was controlled or healthy. I said it was evidence that people with so called attention deficit were, in fact, capable of paying attention. And it is.

> You think that's evidence I _don't_ have an attention disorder?

Nobody claimed that.

> Stop spreading medical misinformation. You're extremely uninformed.

> Here are some lectures

Refer to lecture "Why is ADHD considered a disorder?".

When does it become a disorder? When it starts causing harm, adverse consequences, for the individual. When the environment starts kicking back.

In other words, if you can adapt the environment so that it doesn't kick back at the patient, harm is mitigated.

In other words, ADHD patients might adapt reasonably well to certain environments and not others, and we can reduce impairment by putting patients in an environment that is stimulating for them.

This logic is not even unique to ADHD. Numerous diseases have adaptation of the environmental as a vital part of the non-pharmacological treatment. For example, adapting the environment is vital for preventing falls in elderly patients.

So I don't see where the lectures disagree with me. I shadowed a neurologist who specialized in ADHD patients, he combined pharmacological treatment with this environmental approach and it was very successful. Schools labeling kids as problematic was a huge problem for us.