by andoando | 2025-08-18 15:05:58+00:00
I hold the same criticism for other psychatrist disorders, I am only talking about ADHD because its the one I personally identify with and spent the most time thinking about.

I am not disputing that it's possible to group populations on behavioral traits, long standing emotional states, etc. If you want to say "there are people who feel unmotivated, inattentive in their life and we call that ADHD", fine. However identifying a distinctive cause as a scientific fact is an entirely different matter. I.e, your behavior categorizes you as ADHD by the DSM, we found taking amphetamines often helps people with these complaints is a very different statement than something like "you lose things often BECAUSE you have ADHD"

>but in providing an objective measure of things like attention lapses and impulse control that can supplement the subjective reports.

Stick in me an abstract math class and all my neurons will be firing, put me in accounting and ill fall asleep. How is a simplified messure of attention in a single artificial scenario interesting? These labs are for profit companies trying to make a buck.

>Again, standardized test scoring DOES have the effect of giving a "definition" to the term "Often",

I dont see how this follows. You at best merely have some distribution of how often people feel like they lose things. You have no way of either knowing how often it is people actually lose things or how inattentive they are in conversations, and certainly less so that the patient in front of you is so. I urge you to think about this little more deeply.

Lets take inattentive in conversations for a second. How many conversations does the patient have, with whom? What are the patient's interests versus the type of conversations they have? Are they shy, awkward, or likewise the people around them? How long of not paying attention is considered inattentive? What is the objectively measured norm for all these behaviors? And if you can admit its way too hard to measure, all youre doing is basing your decision on your own and your patients feelings. As a psychiatrist, you have to ask yourself, are you really trying to understand the cause of this patient's inattenttion in conversations, or are you merely looking enough evidence to fit them into a bucket that you already understand? Id have a million questions before I can even answer this question intuitively, nevermind objectively.

And this is besides my greater point here. Per the DSM, it is possible for you to have ADHD and not be found to be inattentive in conversations but often be losing your keys, and for me, vice versa. So were admitting these things can have other factors. For example, I may be losing things simply because my mom never had me clean up after myself and I keep dirty place with too many visual distractions. Maybe I have a job or friends or whatever circumstances that make my life more chaotic. Perhaps going out anywhere makes me nervous so I don't think clearly about grabbing the things I need on the way out. Perhaps Im not as bothered by being inconvenienced so I dont care as much to meticulously think about the things I need.

And you will say "true, but ADHD isnt just losing your keys, its a pattern of related behaviors", and I say what is the belief that these different behaviors aren't independent?

Categorizations can be useful, but by definition are a loss of information. We have learned nothing by attaching a name, except perhaps a feeling that we have something simple we can understand.