Scientific American puts forward an argument for renaming the neurological, psychological, something-ological condition that we currently call ADHD:
The classificatory terms we use all refer to disorders that cause symptoms, and therefore suggest that we understand the causes of the problems. Which we do not. At the very least, the term disorder suggests a common causal structure, which goes against all our current knowledge on causal heterogeneity in psychiatry. Moreover, these classifications are applied to individuals and therefore suggest that causes lie mainly with the affected individual.
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When we say that someone has an attention deficit, we are inclined to look for the cause of the problem. But when we say someone has an attention deficit disorder, we might wrongly assume we have already found the cause. Or, in a milder version, assume the cause to be located somewhere in the (brain of the) individual.
On the surface, this may seem like a silly, innocent mistake. However, social scientists have shown time and again that this systematically places the problem with the individual and diverts our focus away from the context (e.g. family/school/work) where traits lead to problems.
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In any case, ADHD does not cause attention problems any more than low socioeconomic status causes poverty. Attention problems are just that, problems that are part of the definition of ADHD.
We propose a very basic modification to our current system of psychiatric classification that has the potential to bring the strength of descriptive classifications into balance with the pitfalls of falsely assuming a known and common cause. Our modification is as simple as it is effective: drop the term disorder from all classifications. Just drop it.