No, nothing has been "proven" about ADHD or other sorts of mental illness. We only have clusterings of symptoms, but know nothing about root causes. Certain che

No, nothing has been "proven" about ADHD or other sorts of mental illness. We only have clusterings of symptoms, but know nothing about root causes. Certain chemicals seem to interact well with the symptoms, but again there is no known mechanism that fully explains the mechanism of action. There have been hypotheses that e.g. schizophrenia is explained by dopamine and depression by serotonin, but these have all proven to be too simplistic, because in many patients the levels of these neurotransmitters do change after taking medication, but the symptoms stay. I should say I'm not at all anti-pharma. I just think that the marketing should be honest. It should be "this addresses some of the symptoms", and not "this corrects your imbalances" because the scientific hypotheses about those imbalances have long been disproven. My hunch is that the structure of neural connections also has to play a big role. This would explain why simply changing levels of chemicals does not immediately fix things.