3 ms·

The rosy, noble rebellious picture you paint of ADD isn't really what the disease looks like in people who are suffering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyDliT

• wpietri 11y ago
  Having been diagnosed with it in college, and knowing many similar people, I agree that it isn't all puppies and flowers. However, if that's how all humans were, it wouldn't be defined as a disease, it would just be human nature. It's also about human performance in very specific environments, that being certain industrial and early-post-industrial environments. And I'll add that most humans have inadequate attentional mechanisms for those environments, which is why 80% of adult Americans consume attention-enhancing stimulants every day, and why it is extremely rare to find an office environment without ready caffeine. One caveat: there are a variety of things that get lumped under the term ADD, like organophosphate pesticide poisoning [1]. There are people with severe attentional issues who do indeed suffer, and would even in historical human environments. Here I'm speaking only of the 5-10% of the population with the standard sort of ADD that appears to be genetic, and wouldn't have been recognized as a disease until recently. [1] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/06/there_is_no_link_between_adhd.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/06/there_is_no_link_betw...