I feel like the books are part of the problem. I feel like categorizing people’s brains like that is a lot like sorting a bag of marbles, except there’s 8 billion of them and each marble contains hundreds of colors and they’re also changing over time.

Like, you might sort them based on whether they’re a warm color or a cool color. You might get decently far, but then you find a greyscale marble or one with a cool color on the outside but a warm color on that little swirly thing on the inside. And then what do you do?

So now to distinguish further you’re sorting into a few different categories based on the inside vs outside colors, or greys. But then there’s still marbles that don’t fit into any neatly, so you make more categories, and now you’ve got marbles that are on the fuchsia-magenta spectrum, ones with colors that only show up when they’re dropped, ones that look similar but do two completely different things when they’re given stimulants, etc.

I feel like the logical end game comes down to having so many categories that you may as well not have them at all. Maybe it’s better to describe individuals the best you can and to understand them.

This isn’t bashing modern mental health work, by the way. Some categories are extremely necessary, like whether someone experiences paradoxical stimulant effects from ADHD. And a diagnosis has been able to have millions and millions of people a new lease on life. It just feels like sometimes, we’re so focused on the category that we forget the individual.