"Many of the downsides of ADD would be less troublesome for everyone, if our world was a little more accepting of difference, a little more willing to accommoda

"Many of the downsides of ADD would be less troublesome for everyone, if our world was a little more accepting of difference, a little more willing to accommodate people who were stamped in a slightly different shape that the other cogs in the machine" I think this is true. We're working and learning in institutions that are incredibly restrictive for people who operate a little bit differently, and it's telling how common ADD is as a colloquialism and not just as a diagnosis. Foucault used to compare schools to prisons, and joke that the former is the only institution in democratic societies where someone still tells you when you can use the toilet. It's not always so easy to tell with ADD like behavior if the person is pathological or the environment, because you can actually make a pretty decent case for the latter, unlike for some other mental illnesses. Without playing down the need to help people who do suffer from mental illness, not prematurely pathologizing people and framing them as aberrant is important. In particular with the inflation of ADD diagnoses of young children going hand in hand with a change in culture that seems to have largely robbed children of any opportunity to actually live like kids.