It's simultaneously true that mental illness is a real thing AND that disorders as defined by the DSM are just collections of thought or behavior patterns that tend to cluster and produce distress *or* difficulty functioning in everyday life. They're necessarily context-dependent
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We can look back now and say that it's a travesty that homosexuality was ever a diagnosable mental disorder — and indeed it is — but the DSM will always reflect the culture, because it will always reflect cultural factors that create distress and/or difficulty functioning
Highly curious children who are put in environments they find boring & can't usually override their desire to do something else do not "function" as expected & may be "distressed" by the way they're treated. That's sufficient to lump them in with kids with more pervasive problems
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In some ways, this is a kindness, because it's at least considered inappropriate to relentlessly punish a kid for symptoms of a mental illness vs. "bad behavior." Yet it's another means of stressing that the kid (and not the environment or kid-environment mismatch) is the issue
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I read a book once that described ADHD kids as canaries in the coal mine of the American educational system.
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