Why, all of a sudden, are so many people being diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder)? My reporting led me to an idea I hadn’t quite expected: maybe it should not be a diagnosis at all.
What, then, is it? Medically, it is a collection of symptoms grouped—somewhat arbitrarily—under a diagnostic label. But neuroscientists can’t find anything on scans that looks like brain dysfunction. And the symptoms ebb and flow depending on how schools, jobs and relationships deal with the different patterns of attention and energy seen in ADHD. Quite often, such things make symptoms subside below the diagnostic threshold. That, I thought, lays bare the problem: ADHD “diagnosis” is often created by societal norms about how to learn, think and work rather than a response to a biological fault.
Roughly 10-15% of children have some form of neurodiversity: they are often a little bit ADHD-ish, a little bit autistic and a little bit dyslexic. To parents and teachers, they look different from other children in worrisome ways. But the science suggests that their differences may be simply part of normal human diversity.
-- Slavea Chankova, "The Economist"
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