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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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
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
