About ADHD is best understood as a cultural construct

Yue Kar Chan
ASA 2 Section A02
Blog #4

In the paper "ADHD is best understood as a cultural construct," by Sami Timimi and Eric Taylor, we come across two very interesting arguments for and against ADHD as a cultural construct. Sami Timimi argues for ADHD being a social construct because of the lack of specific ways to detect and treat ADHD and lack of standardization between diagnoses. Timimi believes that ADHD "offers a decontexualized and simplistic idea that leads to all of us...disengaging from our social responsibility to raise well-behaved children." In other words, he thinks that ADHD is some business scheme set up to drug up children who don't even have a real medical problem. Eric Taylor argues that ADHD isn't a social construct but is rather some condition directly linked to social factors. He believes that thinking it is a social construction is what keeps proper treatment from being found. While I can agree with how labeling children with ADHD can help people shirk from responsibility of properly disciplining a child, I believe that ADHD is indeed a condition, but because very few people have a proper understanding of what it really is, it has become a social construct. And because they can't visibly see the disability, they believe it may be something made up. Those who have ADHD severe enough to effect their work or education deserve to get treatment and not be treated as a scam.

Question: How do ADHD levels vary in other countries and how would that help us to better understand it as a treatable condition?