I'm sure many mental related illnesses can be described this way though. We know a lot about the brain but not nearly enough to form a clear categorization.
Anyway, when it comes to health issues, the burden of proof rests on ethical issues. It's better to explore all these problems people seem to have. Years ago in biopsych we were shown that early age treatment was important for preventing much worse symptoms later in life. Unreversable but treateable.
If that IS the case, then there is a _great_ problem with people that make a big fuss over children not being treated.
But I'm not a neuroscientist or a doctor. The claims of "over-diagnosing" seem unfounded if there are treatable symptoms that we just happen to currently call ADHD. Comparing diagnostic rates to an earlier time is just silly.
Yes, but only as a description. Science requires testable, falsifiable explanations. If I claim that I can cure the common cold by shaking a dried gourd over the sufferer (which actually works), I have only described my miracle cure, I haven't explained it or considered alternative explanations for the result.
There is a huge literature in psychology that stops at description and increasingly offers drugs as treatment -- drugs that in most cases were created for some other purpose but are now being prescribed off-label, to treat ailments of questionable origin, with questionable results, to an unquestioning public.
> Anyway, when it comes to health issues, the burden of proof rests on ethical issues.
No, ethical issues are orthogonal to the scientific issues. If there is no scientific explanation for various mental illnesses, then there's no scientific substance to the field, at which point an ethical debate may begin about the consequences of treating illnesses we don't understand and that may not even exist in an objective sense.
> Years ago in biopsych we were shown that early age treatment was important for preventing much worse symptoms later in life.
This sort of thing is meaningless until we know what we're treating, otherwise we'll have any number of dried-gourd treatments masquerading as medicine. But wait, that's already true -- Asperger's was brought into existence, and then abandoned, based on votes, not evidence. So was homosexuality, which remained an official, listed mental illness until public opinion shifted away from this outlook.
> The claims of "over-diagnosing" seem unfounded if there are treatable symptoms that we just happen to currently call ADHD.
Not at all -- this won't be the first time psychology has created a new illness out of thin air, and then "treated" it -- see above. Depression is another example -- some argue that it's an illness that can be treated, others have found that "depressed" people are better at reality-testing and accurately assessing their circumstances than those not so diagnosed. This calls into question the very meaning of "mental illness".
