ADD and ADHD are bullshit

[surviva316]

I believe that the subjectivity surrounding psychopathology is a byproduct of its immaturity as a discipline, and that eventually everything will be quantifiable.

I don't just mean subjective as wishy washy or open to conjecture. I mean it very literally; as in many pathologies are, in their essence, contingent. As in, not all pathologies are absolute.

Even if you perfect the testing criteria for the DSM, let's say, you would would only be able to determine the exact level of each -ism or -itis or whatever in each patient. What it wouldn't be able to determine is what level qualifies them for being deviant or dysfunctional. From what I understand about Asperger's, if Asperger's were the norm, then Asperger's wouldn't be a disorder; you and I would be the one who can't properly relate in society. So getting a DSM result that reads, "This guy is Aspergered as fuck" wouldn't in itself prove they have a disorder.

Of course, a society run by people with Aspergers is an extreme example. I only mean to say that any pathological field that defines itself in terms of how much it affects people's relation with their world is going to be, by definition, subjective (as in, it will only produce contingent truths).

Of course, there could--in theory--be some sort of joint psychological/sociological field that could perfectly evaluate someone's mental makeup, while also (god knows how) perfectly evaluating their social ecosystem--the culture they're in, the economic system, the patient's family, the people they're likely to meet, the education system, and on and on and on--to set a baseline for what degrees of different -isms are going to make them dysfunctional in that context, but again, this is a different scientific field than curing cancer.