ADHD Is Not a Superpower

silverFork

It is a superpower for those that claim that they can diagnose it and pharmas just like pain medication was... makes a lot of money for the adhd ecosystem.

OhMeadhbh

The article could have used an abstract, you have to read a third into it before the text starts relating to the title. But... It does a decent job of pointing out diagnoses in various DSMs describe sets of symptoms and not etiologies. Which is to say, a "disorder" in the DSM doesn't give a biochemical explanation for the origin of a behaviour, it just describes the behaviours (often using self-reported observations of one's own emotions.) Given the way English-speaking humans use language, I would argue that "superpower" is something more akin to an innate ability. It's not //just// a description of behaviours. Superman is superman not simply because he leaps tall buildings with a single bound or because he races faster than a speeding bullet. The state of being called "Superman" is dependent on Kal-El / Clark Kent's path through phenomenal existence. (I'm obviously using Superman as the exemplar of entities who possess super-powers.) If the nature of having a super-power is innate to the individual and the underlying hypostasis of an ADHD diagnosis is dependent on descriptions of behaviour independent of any biochemical cause then yes, "superpower" and "ADHD" are not in the same class. However... Gods of Catachresis forgive me... Language is complex and those damn'd humans often use it imprecisely. From context, I think we can infer that "ADHD is a Super-Power" means that the behaviours described by ADHD in the DSM-X are associated with iteologies which confer benefits to the individual. Still. I enjoyed reading the article.

lazystar

In corporate environments where every task is written down in a ticket, and work each day is determined by story points, success is determined more by organizational skills than by intelligence/subject matter expertise. ADHD in these environments is a weakness.