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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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
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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Yup. In adulthood, I find I, still, either *really, really” dive into something, or have to slog through it like mud.
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Find me a kid who has ADHD symptoms that make it difficult for him to play on his own terms. I suspect the search will take you through many diagnosed kids who do just fine with complex multi-step tasks they've chosen to do on their own, though you prob will eventually find one
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Yes. If a kid were to have trouble focusing at school because she wasn't eating enough, we'd figure out how to change her situation so she could get enough food. We would not put her on appetite-suppressing medication.
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While US kids of course are disastrously overmedicalised, in theory I do support naming things and then finding widely accepted - "received" - ways of dealing with them. Otherwise adults might deal with them *individually* - and do more harm:
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like my ailing grandmother who was made to look after overly active, talkative and curious little-me and gave me adult sleeping pills
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The assumption here is that to relentlessly punish a kid for “bad behavior” is actually a valid thing when it’s not. Other than that I completely agree with you.
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