High school teacher (grade 9) one of my best students got diagnosed with "muh ADHD" this week. Here's what he told me.
The doctor (a GP) gave him a list of ten questions. It went something like this:
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Do you sometimes struggle to finish tasks?
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Do you sometimes have problems paying attention in class?
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Do you sometimes get bored?
Who the F is going to say no to any of this? Anyway, he got diagnosed with muh ADHD and now he's on pills, probably for life. The pills he gets are amphetamines by the way. Yes, really.
I'm a fucking teacher and I get bored by my class sometimes. Guess I need speed too.
This is 90%+ student by the way. Imagine diagnosing a complex mental condition (if it even exists) in five minutes, tops, and then being put on pills for life.
Absolutely disgusting.
THANK YOU! So many people here jump straight from "doctors are not properly diagnosing people which leads to more people being diagnosed with a mental illness than there actually are and are over prescribing drugs to people who don't need it" to "all forms of mental illness are complete bullshit, don't exist at all, and are just a side effect of trauma or drugs". Mental illnesses absolutely exist and ADHD is one of them. Yes, far less people actually have it than are diagnosed with it but that doesn't change the fact that it is a real thing.
Unfortunately people have a tendency to jump to very "absolute", wide blanket conclusions.
One solution fits all kinds of assumptions, assumptions that just because a tool/treatment might not work for some then it must mean it's totally tainted and completely unsafe or unusable. And assuming that just because a lot of apples (doctors) are rotten that not only is the whole barrel bad, it "must" mean that the entire apple industry is totally wrong about every possible thing and is "surely" just rotten to the core.