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Comment by pasta | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely don't want to be rude, but the 'inventor' of ADHD (Eisenberg), when he died, said that ADHD is a pharmaceutical dease and the cause is social. Wrong food, bad sleeping habits, wrong teaching methods all influence the way we get stimulated. Studies agree with this.

I am not saying you don't have a problem, because I also feel like someone who has ADHD and feel a lot like the author of the article.

But I also think that, just like the author, you can change your 'ADHD' by changing your behaviour.

Again: I dont want to put anyone down that is labelled with ADHD, but I think this culture is on it's way to create an ADHDer of everyone.

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> Wrong food, bad sleeping habits, wrong teaching methods all influence the way we get stimulated. Studies agree with this.

This part is severely misunderstood. If I don't sleep, eat, and exercise reasonably I completely lose focus. Taking adderall will help, but it treating the symptom rather than the cause. This looks like ADHD, but isn't.

If my children lack sleep and are overburden (thanks modern school system), it looks like ADHD, but it isn't.

Now, some people, children and adults, do have ADHD no matter how well they sleep, meditate, eat, and exercise. With our current understanding, their best bet is medication. But for the vast majority, they simply need to slow down.

You may both be right. There is an increasing amount of scientific evidence that screens (TV in particular) and junk food (sugar and saturated fat in particular) are severely impairing brain development in children, leading among other issues to difficulty to focus and ADHD. So yes, keeping children off screens as much as possible (+ healthy food + sport) looks like a good advice.

However, when you have this condition as an adult... well, there is some level of plasticity in the brain, but it looks harder than just "change your behavior", it may be required to also treat the symptoms.

The same argument can be made about user's of cholesterol and blood pressure medicine, as well.

Exercise more, eat 'better'.

> I absolutely don't want to be rude, but the 'inventor' of ADHD (Eisenberg), when he died, said that ADHD is a pharmaceutical dease and the cause is social. Wrong food, bad sleeping habits, wrong teaching methods all influence the way we get stimulated. Studies agree with this.

Do you know anyone with ADHD? When you talk with them and something happens, like a phone rings, their minds completely zoom out and they instead become focused on something else. It is not possible to continue the original conversation because they have forgot everything about it. It can be incredibly frustrating because it is like talking to a human gold fish. Although they can't do anything about it because it is just the way they are.

My point is that it is incredibly obviously a clinical condition and not something "behavior change" can fix.

It is very likely to be a combination of innate predisposition and behavioral effects. Like almost all diseases that are not caused by external bodies, or extremely hereditary. So ADHD is not really a condition, rather, it is an axis on which you can fit somewhere. In extreme cases, I can imagine it's very hard to manage without pills. In most cases, one can probably work through it without pills.

FMRI Brain scans tell a different story. If Dr. Eisenberg really believed that in the end, he was wrong.

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