Yes, but that doesn't make the pain any less real. In psychiatry, like the rest of medicine, doctors are supposed to first diagnose a disorder and then treat it. However, the specific psychiatric diagnostic categories for children become less clear in real life situations, and the effects of various medications are neither particularly specific nor reserved for particular diagnoses. ADHD blurs with oppositional defiant disorder, the category used to describe young angry, disobedient children. Ritalin helps treat both.
Anxiety disorders merge with depression.
Calling Prozac an antidepressant belies its use for obsessive-compulsive disorder or anorexia. And the lack of objective biological or psychological diagnostic markers, such as blood tests or brain scans, leaves psychiatric diagnosis very much within the eye of the beholder. In the real world, prescription practices are symptom-driven, with doctors trying to use the safest medications with the fewest side effects first and changing or adding medications when old symptoms persist or new ones arise, sometimes from the other medications themselves. He is likely first to receive a stimulant like Ritalin, Dexedrine or Adderall. He is only slightly less impulsive and continues arguing at home, so clonidine or Tenex may be added.