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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

Nerve pain is a fictional illness and SSRI/morphine/fentanyl is not medicine.

Depression is a fictional illness and antidepressants are not medicine.

Cancer is a fictional illness and chemo is not medicine.

You catch my drift? I am obviously not being serious. You are not the one who decides what is and isn't an illness. It is researchers, scientists and physicians. You have no idea what you are talking about.

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Except ADHD is not even a fictional illness because it’s not an illness at all, it’s a disorder, it’s right there in the name.

To be the devils advocate, there have been plenty of researchers and psychotherapists in the recent decades lamenting ADHD as too broad a diagnosis, and it has indeed been scrutinized on multiple occasions as a convenient way to sell prescriptions.

As someone diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and nerve pain, I’d take ADHD and depression over nerve pain any day, they’re not even in the same camp, and clearly not even in the same camp as cancer.

A disorder is a type of illness, in the same way scotch or bourbon are types of whiskey.

Sure, but we don’t go around calling people with ADHD mentally ill, cough. The same way we don’t go around calling guns “mass drivers”, even though that’s exactly what they are.

I'm diagnosed with ADHD, I self-describe it as a mental retardation. Mentally ill seems accurate, too. I don't have a learning disability, per se, whereas most forms of mental retardation involve a learning disability. Perhaps that's why people aren't so fast to call ADHD a mental illness or mental retardation.

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