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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   31983 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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I mean, on the one hand, I'm with you 100% about the school system treating young boys like defective girls. But if the problem is a fundamentally matriarchal school system that doesn't understand boys needs for physical activity, hands on learning, and stern discipline, I'm not sure more matriarchal bureaucracy is the answer.

IIRC from my deep dive into ADHD skepticism-

  • some cases of ADHD diagnosis are actually hearing or vision related issues that will resolve themselves, and these are very common in elementary school aged boys. Experienced elementary teachers tend to have lower rates of ADHD diagnoses in their classes because they deal with these by adjusting the seating chart first, and that’s usually enough to route around the problem.

  • ADHD diagnoses are much higher in boys born just after the age cutoff than in boys born just before it- that is, cases are concentrated among the youngest boys in a given class.

  • ADHD as a thing that the system worries about is globally correlated with treating elementary school in a seriously academic way, with grades, homework, etc. The US is a global outlier in both respects.

  • The medications in use improve focus and make behavior easier at the cost of side effects regardless of ADHD; teachers are strongly incentivized to get kids on them to make their jobs easier, and they deliver higher grades anyways, so parents usually don’t complain. Doctors who always make the diagnosis and write the scrip are known to the school systems and sometimes recommended by them.

  • Countries which don’t think ADHD is real are doing fine academically.

The TDLR is that there’s a lot of things going into the ADHD overdiagnosis issue beyond ‘why don’t I have a classroom full of girls’ moaning by teachers.

Do you have more info on countries that don't diagnose ADHD? This seems like the kind of thing that is very culture bound in a fascinating way.

I can remember that France was one, I think, but this is all memories from a deep dive several years ago. I concluded that while ADHD probably is real, most cases are some other issue being misdiagnosed and it shouldn’t be considered a possibility before high school. Oh, and I remembered that the diagnosis patterns by ethnicity don’t match any of the usual patterns- blacks get the least but Asians don’t have an elevated rate, it’s a whites and Indians(both kinds) thing.

I mean I'm just here to say it works SOMETIMES.

I suspect that part of the problem is the refusal to give up on anybody leaving everyone behind, as is common elsewhere.

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