The Architecture of Loneliness: A Unified Neurocognitive and Evolutionary Model of ADHD

ADHD is classified as a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by deficits in attention and executive function. Fifty years of research have been conducted under this classification. The evidence produced does not support it. The same cognitive profile constitutes 31.6% of surgical trainees while being eleven times more likely to leave its bearer in neither work nor education. Its depression is fully mediated by loneliness. Its cardiovascular risk is entirely comorbidity-mediated. Its violence perpetration disappears after comorbidity control. Every adverse outcome depends on environmental conditions — none requires the architecture. The standard test the field uses to confirm disorder classification has never been applied to ADHD — this monograph applies it. The human population genetics are without parallel in the literature: assortative pair-bonding within the architecture runs at 13 times baseline, the architecture returns the only positive fertility ratio identified in any heritable condition tested (FR ≈ 1.13), and has persisted despite continuous negative selection for forty-five thousand years. Four original contributions are advanced: a unified two-parameter neurocognitive model that deductively generates the full DSM-5 criterion set; a three-stage pipeline failure presenting clinically as affective impermanence, formally defined and mechanistically grounded here for the first time; characterisation of the cognitive profile as an Exploratory-Salience Collective Architecture — obligate-social, optimised for collective coordination at the cost of individual regulatory capacity, evolved for conditions that no longer exist at population scale; and reframing of the field's piecemeal nutritional findings as metabolic consequences of elevated catecholamine throughput operating on a post-agricultural nutritional supply. Thirty-six falsifiable predictions follow.Stimulant medication remains the most effective first-line treatment for ADHD. The reasoning for the prescription changes here; the efficacy does not.