Marginalium

We’re wrong about ADHD. Use a paywall buster:

some scientists have begun to argue that the traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an unchanging, essential fact about you — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. According to Sonuga-Barke, the British researcher, the traditional notion that there is a natural category of “people with A.D.H.D.” that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.”

We’ve known for a while that diagnosis is a bit helter-skelter, and self-diagnosing online is making it much harder to tell true cases from people who are learning how to meet diagnosable criteria (because ADHD is now trendy). But this is new and exciting—that ADHD might not be permanent. It might be environmental, and the lasting effects come from the effects of stimulants in making people feel a connection to their work. For people who are truly worried about ADHD, this is interesting to explore.