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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

I was diagnosed with ADHD because I scored in the 10th percentile for some totally normal use cases of the human brain. You know, normal “being human” stuff. Evidently I can’t do normal human stuff.

I think getting ADHD isn’t special or interesting at the population level—when you aren’t face to face with it—but it certainly matters to individuals. I wanted to believe I was just being a human, but the reality is that I don’t have a typical human experience. I have a lot of overlap with everyone I know, but most people I meet genuinely can’t understand the experience at all. However, they are often confident that they get it. Meanwhile, they would not qualify as disabled on cognitive assessments.

To me that’s the big difference. People with ADHD often carry around legitimate, often hidden disabilities. Usually more than one.

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is tenth percentile for some measures really that bad? hard to say, but i don't think that if double-digit percentages of people have some attribute that it should be labeled a disease or exceptional.

i have been diagnosed as having ADHD multiple times, both as a kid as well as an adult. my parents decided not to put me on drugs, and as an adult, i have found behavioral interventions to be the most useful. i have not found perceiving it as a disability to be very helpful.

It's estimated that 11.6% of the US population has diabetes. Is that not a disease?

Type 1 diabetes is a disease. Type 2 diabetes may or may not be a disease. It could as well be a symptom/condition created by lifestyle.

50 years ago there were not that many people with type 2 diabetes because people ate less and moved more (at work and at home).

Ah, so anything that people could have given themselves is not a disease? Heart disease can be caused by lifestyle, so it's not a disease? And you can't give yourself ADHD so it is a disease? Or is your point and the point I was responding totally unrelated?

For what it's worth, I was using the tenth as a category of 0–10. I actually scored lower (3rd and 7th). Kind of giving myself a nominal leg up here, haha. My brain is running on half a cylinder sometimes, I guess.

A couple scores were still quite low at the 15th and 22nd. Those are clearly issues for me as well, though nowhere near as much. I don't know, I think this stuff makes a meaningful difference. For the cognitive attributes I scored far higher in (high 90s in some cases), it's abundantly clear what a disadvantage many people are at in that regard. Even someone scoring closer to the 50th.

You could say it all balances out, but it doesn't seem to. The high scores I get are all undermined significantly outside of test settings. Major deficits have a serious toll on you. I'm not complaining at all, though. To me it's a fact of life, something to accept and address (with behavioural interventions as you mentioned), and try to find strategies to move forward. You get what life gives you. Generally speaking, it could be a lot worse. I'm very grateful for the parts of my brain that work well.

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