comment: >
  
  I don't necessarily disagree with everything you said. But having a disability, imo, is more than just about society's expectations. It's also how a disability changes how we function in the world and how it may hinder (or improve) our day-to-day lives and the things we want to do.
  To use your example, ADHD can make communication, focus, timeliness (ect.) more difficult. If it's important to me to be able to pay 100% attention to reading a book for an extended period of time, ADHD will, at least in my case, make it a lot more difficult or even impossible to do this. It hinders what I want to do personally; it "disables" my ability to fulfill that goal.
  Say someone loves to listen to music but for some reason suddenly become deaf. Now this person is effectively unable to pursue a part of their life that was enjoyable/fulfilling to them. On the other hand, if a second person doesn't enjoy listening to music, they may consider their deafness to be less disabling than the first person. That's not exactly a great example, but I hope you get what I'm saying.
  I guess my point is that what we desire to do is often not the same as what society expects of us as people, able-bodied and disabled alike. It's all relative.
context: The problem with this analysis is that it doesn't engage with a theory of causality. Just because society is involved in the definition of "disability" or in the categorization of things as disabilities, doesn't mean that those disabilities are caused by society.
  By analogy, which things are called "blue" is determined by society. That doesn't mean that the sky being blue is caused by society. >
  
  Society defines what a mental disability is, therefore if you meet that definition then you are considered mentally disabled. However, the extent that societies definition CAUSES your disability is limited to that of a label, there is no physical manifestation of that.
  Psychologists look at the broad range of human behavior and defines what is typical, if you fall outside that typical range then they have conjured up some labels to help categorize.
  So, human behaviors never changed, it's just that we have built complex ways of sorting them.
  I suspect the same is true of physical disability. >
  
  I think you are conflating a kind of moral stance with semantics.
  If the social model makes certain things disabilities by society's expectations then you are arguing that means society creates all disabilities. But this means that if a woman was walking down the street and had acid thrown in her face, damaging her eyes to the point of not being able to see, you are saying that society made her disabled. The person who threw the acid blinded her but society made her disabled by expecting people to be able to see and labeling blindness a disability.
  That can be an internally consistent way of talking about it but it isn't what most people mean when they read or say that phrasing, and I don't know how useful that terminology is. In the case of rolling the tongue sure, it is only an issue because society expects it from people. But there are some capabilities that are intrinsic to being a human, independent of social expectations. If you are a quadraplegic you have a lack of ability which is important regardless of what society expects from the common man.
  Similarly if you can't concentrate to the point of being incapable of basic daily tasks then regardless of society labeling it a disability the problem exists, and society didn't create it. You might as well say that the English language is responsible for all disabilities because without the word they wouldn't be "disabled". >
  
  
  if you can't concentrate to the point of being incapable of basic daily tasks
  
  The problem, even with your definition, is that society determines what constitutes a “basic daily task.” Concentrating on schoolwork while a smartphone exists in your pocket is now considered a basic daily task for most students. Even 20 years ago, that wasn’t a basic daily task.
  If you could go back in time and give a classroom of 1990s students smartphones and tell them “you still need to pay attention or else you have a disability. This is now one of your basic daily tasks,” I think you’d immediately see an increase in ADHD. They didn’t have ADHD prior to that. They had the full ability to focus on their basic daily tasks as defined in the 1990s.
  
  it isn't what most people mean when they read or say that phrasing
  
  Certainly if someone’s body changed and society’s expectations of sight remained constant, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who claims society’s expectations caused the disability.
  But what I think happened with ADHD is the reverse of that. Brains stayed the same, and society’s expectations of the base level of entertaining distractions changed. In that case, I think you do see people talking this way. People say things like “all these smart phones are giving kids ADHD.” My position is that maybe that’s not a crazy way of looking at it. >
  
  I have ADHD. Something that people don't understand about ADHD, especially people who don't want to think it's real, is how all-encompassing it is. They see it as a set of negative personality traits correlated to brain differences, and basically think that the diagnosis is the pathologization of normal variations between humans.
  What they don't see is that each and every day is a constant struggle of having to compensate for a literal deficit in my brain. For every time I go off on a tangent in a conversation, there are untold multitudes of times that I have to consciously fight against that impulse. It's the same for everything else; I have a persistent, constant feeling that I'm forgetting something, and usually I'm right, but even when I'm not, I have to double, triple check everything I do if it's at all important. I have no intuitive understanding of prioritization or time management, and constantly struggle to balance the importance of a task with how long I have before it becomes immediately pressing.
  I say all of this to show that, fully distinctly from social structures, I would always perceive this as a deficit. There is no social structure that could make me feel like it is good, in any way, because this is something that hampers my ability to achieve my goals, no matter what they are, and harms my personal relationships.
  The reason that previous societies didn't have an ADHD diagnosis has nothing to do with the condition not being a detriment in those societies. It's more that, up until like 50 years ago, when children would act in a way we didn't like, we would hit them with sticks. There weren't even studies on child abuse until the 1970s. This caused people with ADHD to mask more, so that they wouldn't be abused, and is also indicative of how society generally approached problems, especially ones that are not physically visible and are easily taken to be the expression of negative personality traits. If hitting the children with sticks didn't cause them to stop expressing these traits, we just hit them harder, or came up with other cruel, physically painful, but also horribly ineffective methods of punishment (at least in terms of outcomes for the victim). 
  While this sounds dramatic, I'm not actually exaggerating, and if you don't fully understand just how horrible the past is, you should look into it, specifically the historical treatment of women and children, which doesn't get talked about enough in school. I think that it is safe to say that the vast majority of children throughout human history endured a childhood that would today be considered sufficiently abusive for CPS removal, and that this was and still somewhat is part of a cycle of trauma that cannot be meaningfully separated from the social systems of past eras. It was part of how they maintained a society with fundamental, internal contradictions, based on unjustified and incorrect beliefs, that oppressed the vast majority of the population.
  The reason that there is an ADHD diagnosis now is that, for the first time in history, sufficient numbers of people don't think that violence is the answer to actually be a socially dominant force, and as a result, society is willing and able to solve these problems instead of just beating the absolute shit out of anyone violating social norms. >
  
  With the child abuse, you brought up a really interesting possible explanation that I hadn’t thought of, and I think this is the closest I have come to changing my view on this particular issue
  If I could challenge you for a second though, if you look at the statistics of left-handed people over the past century, you see a rise that starts around 1900 and eventually plateaus in the 1960s, from which it has remained relatively constant ever since. The common explanation is that people stopped literally beating children for using their left hand. That was a common practice in the 19th century and earlier, which caused a significant number of people to “mask” by using their right hand.
  My position would be that the people who masked should be considered right-handed. To the extent that left-handedness means something, I don’t think it should be used to describe people who literally use their right hand.
  Would your position be that the people who masked and used their right hand were nonetheless left-handed? Like is that what the term “left-handed” would mean to you? And it’s not necessarily dependent on which hand someone actually ends up using? >
  
  I don’t think modern society is causing ADHD, but rather, exaggerating the effect it does have for the people who already have it. Social media, TikTok, etc, is putting salt in an already nasty wound.
  Short attention spans are a trademark ADHD symptom, but that’s not all it is, and as modern society has certainly shown, you don’t need ADHD to have a short attention span.
  ADHD stems from a genetic imbalance in the core functions of your brain. Attention span is a symptom of that, but so is memory, the ability to process through thoughts, decision making, impulse control, and others. 
  At worse, someone might be able to develop minor symptoms of it, but I don’t think it’s permanent damage to the brain like ADHD (I might be wrong on that). Once the habit is broken, then the effects will eventually be reversed. >
  
  Adhd is not caused by any form of damage, it’s a permanent state. 
  Also, what most people don’t know (in my experience, living with the diagnosis since 12 years back) is that the symptoms themselves are only indicators. Symptoms are overall problematic since it’s based on an outside perspective. Even psychiatrists tend to be surprised when you tell them about what it’s like from your own pov. They learn how to observe and sometimes I wonder how much thought is put into actually understanding as well. >
  
  “Damage” wasn’t the right word for it. You put it better than I could have >
  
  It's obviously an interplay between society and the individual.  If you can't roll your tongue and that's a disability, your disability is both due to your inability and the structure of society.
  
  I posit that the social model of disability indicates that the correct explanation is a lot closer to the first.
  
  It only indicates that's a possibility.  It's an empirical question to what extent society has different demands and to what extent human abilities are changing.  One that hasn't been answered satisfactorily yet. >
  
  You can't extrapolate entire theories of disability from one or two examples because disability is incredibly diverse in manifestation. ADHD is one of the few disorders that is a true spectrum, meaning the "cutoff point" at which symptoms impact daily functioning to qualify as a "disorder" is influenced heavily by culture. 
  Other mental illness and disabilities are not "true spectra" but follow different diagnostic patterns. For instance, psychosis (seeing and hearing things that aren't there) is a binary diagnostic. You either experience psychosis or you don't. There are different levels of severity and typology of presentations, but it does not occur in a "normal curve/distribution" like other human attributes like height or executive functioning. The same is true for genetic disorders. You either have a genetic marker for a specific disorder or you don't, regardless of culture.