> It’s not a real disease like other diseases, it’s a collection of symptoms.
Any disease with "syndrome" in its name is just a collection of symptoms. That's literally what syndrome means.
Your information about ADHD is offensively wrong, and its underdiagnosis and undertreatment due to misinformation ruins far more lives than than there are people with anxiety being mistakenly prescribed stimulants.
It's not a useful truth, at least not in the way you've characterized it. The way you characterize it says more about a misunderstanding of scientific knowledge in general, but especially medical science.
Age 10 is roughly when children begin to realize that their parents, and adults in general, can be as fallible and ignorant as children. It can be a shocking revelation, but eventually you move past it. But some people's response is to develop a deep cynicism about what maturity means, which can stunt their own maturity. (Notably, we all tend to feel like it's a deeply personal revelation that gives us unique insight--like we're more mature than others for having the revelation. But it's a whole different revelation to realize and appreciate that everybody goes through this phase.)
It can also be a shocking revelation when you learn that in science in general, but especially in medical science, the things we don't know are unfathomably more numerous than the things we [believe we] know with certainty. But just because we don't fully comprehend a phenomenon doesn't mean we can't develop useful knowledge about the phenomenon, and to develop reliable treatments (medicine) or processes (chemistry, engineering). Were it otherwise progress would be impossible. Science is a process, not a product.
Of course, just like adults who became cynical at age 10, there are professionals in all domains who harbor cynicism stemming from their educational revelations. It's not healthy.
The extreme ones may say things like, "it's all a lie", but the lie is on them.
When people go to a medical professional for help, they don't need to know the messy details. Some people might benefit, but others might react poorly. What they expect (knowingly or not) is to be given medical advice that already incorporates the unknowns; that already takes into account the fact that something is not well understood. The same is true for every other profession.
FWIW, the term Downs Syndrome comes from before the cause was known. Today people often use the term trisomy 21, perhaps because of the cultural baggage related to the older term, but also because strictly speaking it's no longer a syndrome. There are other trisomies, like trisomy 18.
It's not a useful truth, at least not in the way you've characterized it.
It think it is much more useful to think of things as they are rather than as what they are not.
In this example:
I think it is more useful to think "what is causing my ADHD behaviour?" Rather than using the explanatory model "I am behaving like this because of ADHD."
The former can lead to finding models that allows one to mitigate ADHD behaviour. The later leads to the same thing over and over.
Are you hinting that I stoped developing as a ten year old?
I get that people expect that. Don't see why it matters in this context.
I guessed that was the case when I wrote about downs syndrome. Lets hope we find good causal models for ADHD to.
> I think it is more useful to think "what is causing my ADHD behaviour?" Rather than using the explanatory model "I am behaving like this because of ADHD."
> The former can lead to finding models that allows one to mitigate ADHD behaviour. The later leads to the same thing over and over.
If you don't have ADHD or a similar disability, then in the best possible way, what you think is useful doesn't really matter. What causes my behaviour is that my brain is literally retarded - it thinks in a different way from the neurotypical one. Knowing that that is the source of behaviours is extremely liberating and useful for developing a good mindset for coping with them, as is explained in the article we're commenting on. Asking "what is causing it?" is the dead end.
My son was diagnosed with severe ADHD by one neuropsychologist. Medication was strongly recommended. He was then brought to a psychiatrist, the best in my area to the point where he is well-known, and he said that my son actually has General Anxiety Disorder. His ADHD-like behavior is caused because of severe anxiety.
If we had treated him as severe ADHD, he would have gone on medication. The medication would have exacerbated his anxiety and caused worse behavior and we would have increased the dose. The entire thing would have ruined his childhood from the misdiagnosis.
So you are very wrong. The cause of the ADHD behavior is required. There are many children who would benefit from medication. But many children would have their lives ruined by the medication as well if misdiagnosed.
That’s why I was saying it’s a collection of symptoms and because it’s up to individual therapists to diagnose, it gets misdiagnosed very very often.
> If we had treated him as severe ADHD, he would have gone on medication. The medication would have exacerbated his anxiety and caused worse behavior and we would have increased the dose. The entire thing would have ruined his childhood from the misdiagnosis.
You've imagined a situation. You're catastrophising. Increasing the dose when symptoms get worse would be profoundly stupid on your part and that of the psychiatrist: that's the part where they'd reassess the diagnosis. You have the gall to call me "deadly wrong" about my lived experience of ADHD based on an imagined situation?
What causes my behaviour is that my brain is literally retarded
That is a very infectious way of modelling the world.
Asking "what is causing it?" is the dead end.
It certainly is not. If I have problems geting the information from a book in to my brain. The cause can be said to be that I am trying to read it. Solution: Get it as an audiobook instead.
I do have an ADHD diagnosis but I don't think that justifies my thoughts in any way.
> The cause can be said to be that I am trying to read it.
No it can't, because most other people can get the information from reading it just fine. The cause is that you're reading it with ADHD.
But we're talking at odds here - I'm not talking about finding coping strategies, but looking for the root cause of ADHD. For the current state of medical science, the latter doesn't really help with the former.
> Are you hinting that I stoped developing as a ten year old?
No, definitely not. I was just trying to analogize the "dirty little secret" bit to another dirty little secret we all directly experience. They're not really dirty little secrets; they're life, and there's nothing substantive that can be gleaned from stating these facts alone.
Similar to the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia, though in our own private and professional lives we understand reality is complex and ignorance reigns, notwithstanding the polite fictions we maintain, somehow when we discover hints of this reality in other fields we think it's a noteworthy insight and something to criticize.
Perhaps not, but there are discernible differences in the brain in people with severe ADHD symptoms.
And the (current) lack of a causal model doesn't stop it from being real, nor does it stop the current treatments from helping people operate at a closer-to-normal level.
It would be shoking if there were no differences in the brains of people with ADHD behaviour.
Your brain regulates your behaviour.
No one here is saying that ADHD is not real, well I am certainly not. What is being said is that ADHD is not the cause of behaviour, it is the behaviour.
"It’s not a real disease like other diseases" is not a truth. Not being "a single thing" doesn't make it not a real disease; there are plenty of physical diseases that present as syndromes with no known cause.
Any disease with "syndrome" in its name is just a collection of symptoms. That's literally what syndrome means. Your information about ADHD is offensively wrong, and its underdiagnosis and undertreatment due to misinformation ruins far more lives than than there are people with anxiety being mistakenly prescribed stimulants.