Also it's worth pointing out that if 1 in 5 boys have it, it's not a disorder. It's part of the normal range.
The grandparent post does make a point. If such a large proportion of the population has a 'condition' is it really a condition or perhaps just how we (as a species) are? Especially in the case of something that's psychiatric/psychological.
For example, I've heard estimates that around 10% of the population is homosexual and for many years people wanted to 'fix' them. Around 10%-12% of people are left-handed and (I believe) that historically this was also something that people tried to 'fix'. I doubt many of us think twice about these anymore.
To a sibling comment that suggested what if 1 in 5 boys were born deaf, I'd say that the world would be a vastly different place. So different that we may not even entertain such a question. If, instead, 1/5th of boys were beginning to be born deaf, there would be a medical emergency. Unfortunately, in the case of things like ADHD it's difficult to know if we've always been this way or if there's really been a change.
It does if everyone else is telling you that you're abnormal (and need to be 'fixed'). That was the point of using those examples.
Not being able to concentrate on anything does.
Only if society has defined as valuable the ability to do only one thing, without distraction, for whatever period of time. Therefore, anyone who cannot do this must be 'broken' somehow.
So even if it were part of the normal range we should work on fixing it, like we do for myopia.
The first part of your sentence doesn't make sense. If it's 'normal' then by definition it isn't broken (and therefore doesn't require fixing). For the myopia example, most people 'fix' it by wearing glasses or contacts, which are non-permanent and do not mess with brain chemistry. Indeed, some people I know with myopia only bother with glasses when driving and cope just fine without for the rest of the time. Of course, measuring the degree of myopia is very easy so drawing a line between 'has some difficulty' vs 'severely impaired' is a lot more clear cut. In one case, we can consider glasses as an augmentation to something that is normal, whereas in the other we've fixing something that's broken.
I'm not suggesting that ADHD isn't a problem. Merely that we should exercise some caution before we label some things (people?) as broken, when perhaps they are not.
That's why I used the word 'inherently'. People telling you you're abnormal is not inherent to those conditions.
Only if society has defined as valuable the ability to do only one thing, without distraction, for whatever period of time. Therefore, anyone who cannot do this must be 'broken' somehow.
ADHD doesn't interfere with your life because other people are making fun of the fact you can't sit still. It interferes with your life because it's very difficult to be productive in any way if you can't concentrate for whatever period of time and being productive is what's valuable to society.
I have mild myopia and I don't feel any resentment to my optometrist for labeling me broken. I'm just happy he augmented/fixed me so I can read signs at a distance. And unless/until we have proof that prescribing Adderall is so dangerous that it's not worth the gains, then I don't see a problem treating it the same as contact lenses.
I'm not suggesting that ADHD isn't a problem. Merely that we should exercise some caution before we label some things (people?) as broken, when perhaps they are not.
Well, clearly they thought they were broken somehow when they went to the doctor with concerns about their attention spans, no?
By this reasoning, anything that reduces productivity as currently valued by schools acting a proxy for employers is a candidate for treatment.
Examples include: questioning authority, emotion, and passion for things whose value has not yet become apparent.
Other problems include the notion that schools today have the ability to judge what kind of people we will need to be in the future.
Not being able to hold onto a thought for more than 3 minutes, or having to deal with potentially being distracted by every little thing that happens around me does not feel like the normal state of affairs. Trivial tasks can take me hours instead of minutes in some situations.
Unfortunately I'm currently in a country that doesn't allow me to get medication for this (and previously I was in a country that believes that ADD/ADHD magically disappears when you turn 18), but I still have good memories of how much it helped me get through middle school and high school (I went from almost never finishing my math homework to being able to finish everything in class in only half the allotted time).
If drugs are the only way someone like you can lead a happy life, then you should be able to use them.
Normal vision could be interpreted as a range much larger than our arbitrary standard of "perfect", 20/20 vision.
Have boys changed, or has society?
What effort is being made to determine whether the etiology of ADHD is primarily biochemical (chemical/genetic), or primarily psychological (environmental/human-interaction)? Drugging to counteract ADHD symptoms makes sense only if it's the former.
There's no good evidence that ADHD is not the result of psychological conditioning. For that matter, even if you measured abnormal neurotransmitter activity or brain scans in suspected ADHD patients before diagnosing them, if you looked at animal psychology studies where pathological behavior has been induced by conditioning, I'd be surprised if there weren't abnormal brain scans and neurotransmitter activity there, too. The neurochemical/neurophysical measurements that might provide "evidence" of a non-psychological etiology are invalid if those physical aspects of the brain are themselves affected/modulated by neurological conditioning/development.
If your solution to any problematic "neurobiological" symptom that responds well to a certain drug is to prescribe that drug, because if it responds to a drug it must be a chemical/genetic problem, then everyone will be on a drug eventually. Probably several.
Is there similar literature for ADHD?
1) You don't need to speculate what neurobiological means using phonetics, it's a real word with a definition you can just look up if your actual interest is in the facts. Neurobiological actually means related to the nervous system of the body. ALS is also neurobiological, and I'm guessing you wouldn't say it "sounds" psychological.
2)If you'd bothered to look, you'd find there is actually quite a bit of study of D2 and D4 availability correlated with ADHD symptoms. Like virtually all medical diagnoses both psychological and physiological, differential diagnosis is done by combining probabilities with presented symptoms, and not with exhaustive testing. Your requirement of diagnosing ADHD with a brain MRI is the equivalent of requiring endoscopy to diagnose an ulcer.
So what you say is factually incorrect, there's plenty of evidence. That's why the scientific body of many countries including the US has classified it as neurobiological (not psychological) for years, and the bulk of the scientific community believes pharmaceutical treatment is necessary in the same way that a broken arm needs to actually be set instead of telling the patient not to be lazy.
If you want to use scare quotes and insist on unfalsifiable assertions "prove the negative 'not' the result of psychological conditioning" then you are placing your argument in the same category as climate change deniers and anti-vaccers - anti-science, anti-rigor, pro-scare quotes.
Secondly, even if you are convinced that these correlates are causal, if you do not actually test for them, then you have to show that the diagnosis method correlates strongly with the biology. I have bothered to look. I can't find such data. Are you saying you have?
The last part of what you are saying seems to be combination of an appeal to authority and affirming the consequent: "Because the scientific community currently recommends pharmaceutical treatment, the problem must have an organic cause."
Having worked closely with psychiatrists, I can assure you that recommending a pharmaceutical treatment is rarely done because they understand the mechanism of action. It is rarely even done because they think the cause is organic rather than environmental. It is done because it is the only effective option available to them.
Psychiatrists don't have the power to change schools or parenting, but they can prescribe drugs which may improve the outcome, and so have a duty to do so. This doesn't mean that the problem is a lack of medication, or even that the cause is biological. It's that doctors can't change the environment.
Consider PTSD - which can be treated using drugs and therapy, and clearly has neurobiological correlates. The cause is war and violence, not the lack of drugs.
To my understanding, they are not, which makes ADHD a psychological condition.