09/22/2026
The word “deficit.”
The more I think about the words we use in psychology, the more this one makes me raise an eyebrow because a deficit doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It’s always a deficit compared to something, and that “something” is usually whatever we’ve decided a person is supposed to be able to do.
Being “normal” isn’t some universal law of nature. It’s a standard we created based on how the majority of people tend to function... and then we built schools, workplaces, schedules, social expectations, and pretty much everything else around that standard.
So when someone functions differently, we don’t usually say the environment doesn’t work for their brain. We say their brain has a deficit.
Convenient. 👀
Take ADHD. We call it an attention deficit, but... compared to what exactly? A universal human capacity for attention, or the specific kind of attention our society expects people to maintain at school and at work?
Cause... if curiosity, quick connections, spontaneous creativity, and the ability to become completely absorbed in something interesting were valued more than sitting still and focusing on whatever someone else decided should matter for eight hours, we might describe ADHD very differently.
And I know someone is going to say that ADHD can create real difficulties and seriously affect our quality of life.
Yes. Absolutely.
I’m not trying to make the disability disappear by playing word games. The difficulties are real, the support needs are real, and some of those difficulties would still exist even in a much more accommodating world. I just think the word “deficit” already carries an assumption that there’s one correct way for a brain to work, and anything too far away from it must be missing something.
We could just as easily say that some neurotypical people have a “curiosity deficit” compared to some ADHDers. But since our society gives more value to sustained attention than curiosity, we rarely turn their supposed lack of curiosity into a clinical problem.
