> 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.
> 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.