ADHD is real.
The struggles are real.
The suffering is real.
What’s questionable is our insistence
that the endpoint explains itself.
If this is happening at scale,
it isn’t just a story about brains.
It’s a story about bodies,
load, inflammation, sleep,
stress, schooling, screens
and what we’ve normalised
ADHD diagnoses are climbing,
as anxiety disorders follow suit.
Obesity and type 2 diabetes also surge onward.
Different organs, different labels
yet their curves rise in harmony,
progressing too swiftly for genetics alone to explain.
Whether the curve reflects true incidence
or improved recognition,
the lived burden is rising —
and rising burden, at population scale,
always points back to conditions.
When multiple regulatory systems
destabilise at once,
it’s rarely a coincidence.
The comfort of the genetic story
The familiar tale unfolds:
ADHD, etched in our genes;
at last, acknowledgement dawns;
medication mends a neurochemical imbalance.
In its gentle truth, it offers grace
no blame is cast.
Parents do not “cause” it.
Children are not failures.
Medication may help.
But needing medication
to participate in ordinary life
is a sign that something is
wrong with ordinary life.
Comforting explanations
are not always complete
especially when environments transform
more swiftly than biology can adapt.
Emergence: biology without destiny
We require a classification more profound
than merely ‘genetic versus environmental.’
The right category is emergent determinism.
An emergent-deterministic trait is entirely
biological and measurable,
yet it is not dictated by a blueprint.
Genes set constraints and sensitivities;
development builds the substrate;
conditions select which outcome stabilises.
The “determinism” arrives after emergence:
once a system settles into a stable configuration,
it behaves predictably
and we mistake that predictability
for something that must have been…