Everyone has ADHD because we made it up

A PhD researcher who studies ADHD through individual-differences testing argues that ADHD is a useful clinical category built from continuous cognitive traits rather than a discrete natural kind. Genetic risk for attention, impulsivity and activity is polygenic and normally distributed, so behaviors associated with ADHD exist across the population. Diagnostic symptoms are descriptions of observed behaviors, not independent causes, and assigning a cutoff score reifies the label: people don’t acquire a new brain at the diagnostic threshold. The clinical distinction rests on degree, persistence and impairment, not on novel phenomena, so the category is a pragmatic boundary rather than a fundamental split between two types of people.

That heterogeneity - diverse symptom combinations and environments - means subtyping won’t fully solve the problem. The researcher promotes symptom-focused, network psychometrics approaches that model symptoms as interacting nodes instead of manifestations of a hidden disorder, and uses trait scores in non-clinical samples to correlate behavior with cognitive measures. Popular social-media examples that frame ordinary lapses as ADHD spurred this work; the takeaway is to investigate what each person actually struggles with beneath the diagnostic label and target interventions to symptom patterns and impairment rather than broad categories.