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Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

You left out some qualifiers, though:

- "Persisting for at least 6 months to a degree that is maladaptive and immature..."

- "The disorder impairs school, social or occupational functioning."

While all kids are going to exhibit many/most of the items on the list, most don't do so in a maladaptive way that's immature relative to their peers and that impairs their function. So while I'm certain there are inappropriate diagnoses of ADHD (perhaps disproportionately many, I don't know), I don't find the list you posted to be an indictment of the DSM-IV criteria.

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After you start to hit many items on that list, though, some people box you in and hear impairment without objective evidence of it. I was seen by a counselor a few times for a witches brew of issues, mostly synonymous with being shy. She gave me the usual battery and picked up on my pervasive disorganization -- loses pencils, check, routinely avoids doing homework, check, not looking intimidating counselor in eye, check. She became convinced, quote, I would have no academic success without addressing my ADD. My mother explained that I had had straight As for my entire life and she wrote that off to "unusually good coping skills for his ADD"

I have one or two friends whose lives were very improved by medication, but the use of this diagnosis to label and crowd control scares me. And once you get it, that is the scarlet A. God bless my mother for keeping it out of my record. Otherwise, every paper I delivered late would have been because I was ADD. Bored in pre algebra because I had already solved systems of equations in two variables? ADD. Prefer reading books to group work? ADD.

In the old days, naughty kids would get a spanking, and shy kids would be lectured by parents. These days, society has decided to go "Clockwork Orange" on such crimes instead, and the seed of nonconformity is chemically suppressed in the brain.

> - "Persisting for at least 6 months to a degree that is maladaptive and immature..."

> - "The disorder impairs school, social or occupational functioning."

Which is pretty much the definition of typical little boys until recently. Read "The Ransom of Red Chief" http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/RanRed.shtm... for what was once considered typical. Today, that kid would be drugged into submission.

Which is pretty much the definition of typical little boys until recently.

No, it's not. Typical members of an age group are by definition not immature relative to the average member of their age group. Thus they can't be maladaptively impaired in their functioning due to immaturity.

> Typical members of an age group are by definition not immature relative to the average member of their age group.

I think the argument is: "what happens to the average of a distribution when you throw out one tail?"

Yes, so - how does this make a difference? These qualifiers are subjective and add nothing on top of the diagnosis criteria above.

"persists for 6 months" - so you don't get Ritalin for the first tree you climb. Good.

"maladaptive and immature" = the "out-of-lockstep" factor I mentioned in my comment

"The disorder impairs school, social or occupational functioning" = you keep doing these things even though teachers and parents get annoyed at you.

It's hard to be "guilty" of doing the things in the list repeatedly, without also fulfilling the qualifiers.

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