Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder all produce or are associated with executive function impairments that are more severe than ADHD, and across various forms of EF. ADHD is the only one of those with its specific pattern of attentional and reward-related abnormalities, but broad EF deficits are common across forms of psychopathology.
If executive dysfunction is your primary issue, that is not indicative of ADHD. ADHD is driven by reward processing dysfunction and slower information processing:
It's a disorder in our society, because it require you to do task you've been ask to do, but if you would just live your life I don't think you would call it a disorder, more like a different way of processing tasks
(edit) I'm not saying that changing your environment would resolve the problem, since I'm under medication I can clearly do more things on my free/personal time than before. Hmmm yeah, I kinda lost the track of my thoughts now, can discard as it's an edit. stop.
Well, in the wild, if you couldn't concentrate on one thing long enough to hunt/gather/fish, then you wouldn't eat, and would weed yourself out of the gene pool.
It's the other way around - ADHD exists because there's a bunch of cool stuff worth noticing in nature. Not everyone in the tribe needed to concentrate on fishing.
It's the same with colorblind people. Just one colorblind person is at a disadvantage, but while hunting they might notice the animal camouflaged for normal color vision. In a tribe, the different perspective is helpful.
Russell Barkley, the worlds leading expert on ADHD (as far as I can tell) has a video where he shows that this is not likely to be true.
Rather, the continued presence of ADHD in our gene pool has to do with how many factors genetic factors can cause it, and basically the mutation rate causing ADHD is now balanced with the rate that we die off without reproducing.
Lol, I responded to your message, and then went to look for the links to add. But my meds hadn't kicked in yet, and I got distracted.
These 2 videos are him discussing this topic, be warned, they're 20 and 15 minutes.
Personally I find his delivery and information engaging enough to watch, but only somtimes.
I saw a notification and read half your comment, but then you deleted it.
Did you end up watching the vid and changing your mind? It’s been a minute since I watched it, and also only caught part of your comment, so I don’t know if your concerns were addressed.
If he’s not an evolutionary biologist with specific focus on gene groups that cause ADHD (herein lies your first problem, as at best we know that “there’s a hereditary factor present”), all his musings on the topic are moot.
ADHD is present in the population, because there was no sufficient evolutionary pressure to eliminate the possibility of developing it. Its wide proliferation might be indicative of a link to other traits that are either beneficial or simply old.
It’s not sexy, but it is what it is. Evolution, ultimately, is a survival of not inadequate enough. Just like my eye color, my occasional inability to remember why the hell I unlocked my phone, is a case of “meh, it still fucked in the end”.
Except we would be the ones hyperfocusing on making that fucking fire that Steve gave up onto after 2h of trying, or we would stay up late to keep the tribe safe when everyone else starts to fall asleep. A lot of the disfunction is just an incompatibility with our current lifestyle.
if you would just live your life I don't think you would call it a disorder, more like a different way of processing tasks
The more I learn about ADHD, the less I see it as a disorder. I see it more as a personality trait. Unfortunately most of our society is based on people not having that personality trait, making it harder to fit in.
On the other hand, if you're lucky enough to find a lifestyle that fits your personality type, that personality type is actually very helpful, the opposite of a disorder.