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Scientists are starting to understand how autism and ADHD can overlap
(www.nationalgeographic.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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my point is that psychiatry is not special but just the thing we've only started working on more recently, and that the rest of medicine was in a similar state just five or six decades ago. the brain connects all those endocrining into the rest of your body so anywhere within your body is a reflection of all you experience. i have a lot of hope that like the rest of medicine, this will get better with time and be more objective as you also hope for.
again, i'm saying that is a very valid and popular option that does exist and treatment is only for those who want to be "normal". and more people need to know all the pain associated with attempting to become "normal", and then make the best decision for themselves on which paradigm to choose. i don't think we disagree on this.
In addition to being a young field, though, psychiatry is fundamentally wrong-headed. It puts the brain at the center of phenomenon and not the person and their context.
For instance, let's say that instead of treating depression, you wanted low communication. Let's say you live in a very talkative society and people who don't talk a lot are suspect and considered ill.
Reasonable approaches to this social problem might be to investigate the context people are raised in, and the context in which they live. Maybe they had a father who actively discouraged them from talking, or they're in a minority that was bullied and staying silent was a survival strategy, or maybe they're embarassed by an accent.
But what would the "psychiatric" approach be?
Psychiatry's approach would be to examine the brains of people who do talk a lot and people who talk less. Then they would prescribe a medication that theoretically gets the brains of people who talk less to be more like the brains of people who talk more.
That's really missing the most important parts of the picture--the social and personal contexts. It's treating people like they are just the results of their brains, and not their brains being a result of their environment.
Now there is value in looking at the brain in isolation. In this hypothetical, it would be hugely helpful to know about autism! The problem is that psychiatry has an outsized authority that it really doesn't deserve, an authority society is happy to give it in exchange for not having to address what are much more likely to be social problems.
Looking at the DSM I don't see any item that's analogous to your talkativity example. I agree that would be wrong but I disagree that we see it in current psychiatry.
I don't think anyone denies that. That neuroplasticity exists is very well known.