Because this is a technical article with nonstandard jargon, I'm going to state the most important piece of tacit knowledge that I know psychology professionals have but do not communicate to laymen (I personally came across it somewhere when reading the complete works of Eric Berne, but I can't recall exactly where).
Any apparent disorder in a person or persons has to be decomposed into the innate parts that existed prior to birth and the environmental experiences that happened afterwards as a prerequisite for any kind of theorising to give useful results instead of noise. They call this the diathesis-stress model and it's easily overlooked.
The environmental values of the living hood of where the child is to be born in to; is an element I would add to how I intercept it.
Those who are to be born in to an abusive environment may be more prone to continuing the traits of abuse than those who come from reasonable families.
Not necessarily. Diathesis is a broader term that includes congenital aspects, maternal stressors and various toxin exposures, among other things.
For example, restricting the range of discourse to the purely congenital excludes things like fetal alcohol syndrome, the ages of both parent's gametes and pre-natal exposure to endocrine disruptors. However, in everyday usage, the diathesis refers primarily to those of the symptoms in the physiology, psychology and behavior of the subject that aren't attributable to life experiences (good and bad) rather than the microbiology specifics that act as carriers for any specific cause.
What's important above all else for the psychiatric practice is effective decomposition of any disease into parts that are amenable to study and treatment, rather than comparison to the hypothetical of what kind of "peak" may be achievable for a specific genotype if everything else went well.
Disorders are not diseases.
Also, there has been identified genetical component for people with disorders, so the course here is to dismiss any congenital factors that people so far jump on assumption to cause these and it seems that you have the same direction of thinking.
I have read some books about Darwin evolution and to me the new fact was that some fish while are being recognized as the same species are actually acting like different species diverged based on their diet and behaviour - those fishes that had mainly carnivorous behaviour diverged from rest of those that had more plant based food. And they are on a path of becoming species.
Microbiology and other things with chemistry simply would not help with anything here, as the main object of their differences is in the way how their brains are working - why with equally equipped "tools" they behave differently and that eventually lead to their evolution to different species. This is applicable to neurodivergent people - we are diverging into different species, though because we still have sex with each other that affects whole humanity. Nothing to do with environment effects, that you are offering as a cause - I do eat the same products, but I look on world differently, apparently more wiser than average human, but that comes at the cost of making social connections, because essentially as a new species we are aliens among humans, but eventually there will be further adaptions, that will make us better at connections and who knows maybe even better than how humans are able to connect with each other. It is just how human evolution works.
Each begets the other. Trauma and abuse is in many ways (socially) hereditary but often enhanced by neurodivergence. In a brain with sensory sensitivities outside the norm, connection can be difficult (even between ND people), and from that disconnection often arises the sorts of overwhelms in both caregiver and child that make for neglect out of overwhelm or explosive situations.
Couple that with just plain generational trauma - physical punishment that ND people are more sensitive to, the high prevalence of CSA, and a world that doesn’t even try to make any accommodations and you find it more rare to find neurodivergent people who are untraumatized.
One factor not mentioned here is the capacity of dissociation. Many people in this cohort also find they have the ability to structurally dissociate as a coping mechanism of last resort - an outsized percentage of people diagnosed with OSDD, DID, and DDNOS are neurodivergent, and among social groups of neurodivergent people often dissociative people will tend to attract - it’s nearly to the point that “capacity to dissociate” could itself be a neurotype. Anyway it’s a fascinating line of study, and if I didn’t have folks w dissociative disorders in my life I might doubt their existence.
Disassociation can be a useful thing to be able to do, sometimes. Under certain circumstances you can be better at dealing with dangerous, stressful situations, for example.
It's generally maladaptive but there's a reason the brain does it.
There's quite a few definitions of dissociation including mundane "forget details of your daily commute" to "blanking out to a wall" - I'm talking about structural dissociation which is more that the mind heavily compartmentalizes into parts to adapt to vastly different situations like war, random violence, trauma, or overwhelming situations
Obligatory PSA that "the theory of structural dissociation" (as published by did-research.org) is not very accurate in many respects, even though the concept of "structure dissociation" itself (as in the brain compartmentalizating/partitioning itself to separate incompatible information) is still a true thing. (I hate when phonies repurpose the names of true concepts to pass off a bunch of fake ones.)
I'm mainly talking about stuff like: the maximum age supposedly being 6–9, the strict separation into "ANPs"/"EPs"/etc, and stuff like that, being unsupported at best. I do think disorganized attachment itself is one of the more plausible theories for how structural dissociation happens, but I generalize it more to any incompatible information instead.
I fully agree - ANPs/EPs especially really don't hold up in practice. It seems capacity to dissociate might be correlated to the trait of suggestibility, and that's how I personally think about it mechanistically. Personal experience and all, but I keep a lower profile here!
I have a dissociative disorder (DID) and it is definitely maladaptive sometimes. Sometimes I can be the only one not completely panicking in a situation and bring it under control. But other times I don't pay enough attention to things I need to fix quickly because I just put it away and forget about it. It's probably not just dissociation that does this, but dissociation does somewhat enable it.
> A diagnosis of
ADHD or autism in adulthood often leads to incredible relief and
grief in processing all the moments of being blamed and shamed for
what was assumed to be a lack of effort, laziness and/or defiance.
This is definitely a factor for me when I tried to get diagnosed (which failed lol), because my parents whom caused my trauma would obviously refuse to blame themselves for my emotionally stunted development
I find this fascinating. "Relief and grief", but one way or another, you were always in trouble or being blamed for being "you".
The thing we call ADHD is just one phenotype amongst thousands. Every behaviour has a cause, and anyone out there who has been through a childhood with traumatic experiences and feelings of guilt and inadequacy need to understand that they don't need to be told that they have the currently-fashionable condition in order to forgive themselves.
This sounds flippant, but I don't mean it to be: What if I said that this happened because you had Mercury in Taurus? The point is here that nothing is your fault. Conversely, everything is; this mirrors the free-will vs predestination paradox.
> you were always in trouble or being blamed for being "you".
And the solution in the article is: how do best make them conform, and “do a bunch of work on themselves” so they are not like themselves, but more like the average.
Exact same thing happened to me, and yet it was never cracked open. I am pretty much the only person that knows the truth, that I don't have this constellation of diagnoses but that they were a coverup for the abuse foisted upon me by my own family.
Sadly it is still (and probably will be) too easy to deflect responsibility and have everyone believe their side. They will probably pass on with nobody realizing what they've done to me. It took me long enough for me to realize my own situation, was how severe it was. I hope more people wake up to the fact that people like me are out there.
The false diagnosis is a perfect distraction for you to continue to blame yourself for all your faults while they get away with everything, for decades. That lost time will never come back.
I was diagnosed as an adult a little over a decade ago. I am still waiting on that "relief" part to come. Most days, I wish I never went through the diagnostic process in the first place.
> This rise in interest and, at times, conviction, is challenging clinicians
and resources.
There you go. Seems like the academics are either pressured to gaslight people managing ADHD and autism or jump on bandwagon hoping a department notices and perhaps provide funding or other jolly.
They should get fucked with this harmful "research".
> A diagnosis of ADHD or autism in adulthood often leads to incredible relief and grief in processing all the moments of being blamed and shamed for what was assumed to be a lack of effort, laziness and/or defiance.
I never understood this sentiment. It's just who I am and always have been. And I learned to deal with the circumstances. I don't understand why it makes people feel better to have a diagnosis they can blame.
Perhaps it's a generational thing? I know as a manager it's pretty common for reports to cite them having ADHD as why they can't do this or that. Meanwhile I mentally roll my eyes thinking, "no shit, me too, but I manage to get this done"
Yes, and that wasn't my point. Except for one case who was definitely abusing the situation, I never once revealed that my inner monologue was pointing out that I have the same issues they do but I don't use it as an excuse for not getting my work done.
I sincerely suggest that you try to be understanding of your reports instead of being mildly inconvenienced by their problems and labeling them negatively as you have suggested here.
People leave jobs because of bad management. Be better.
No, it’s why I commented: you have authority over people, and you don’t seem to be seeking understanding, because of your own experience with the disorder.
In some areas and circumstances, your response can be problematic. You didn’t say what you do besides mentally rolling your eyes, but as an example: management ignoring an employee sharing a recognized disorder and requesting reasonable accommodation is the basic premise for a lawsuit.
I’m not saying this is happening here, but this is the kind of scenario management needs to be aware of and prepared for, specifically.
More generally, I would hope managers would be empathetic, but I also understand that this is rarely to never on the job description.
Edit: I see in another part of the thread that you seem to know all this, so nevermind. But I’ll leave this for others to understand that there is a responsibility, here.
Some people were abused in various ways in an “attempt” to get them to stop presenting those traits. Calling friends parents, teachers, etc about thing that really should have been private (if not in fact grounds for CPS interventions), physical abuse to try to “break habits”, physically breaking objects associated with the child's special interests, etc.
Learning that you were not, in fact, a horrible and wicked child that your parents had to endure is life changing.
This is what makes me doubt a lot of diagnoses today. The people who really have these issues/conditions seem to notice themselves in childhood before they even know what they are or what they're called. Leaving the reaction for the diagnosed to be mostly nothing in that they already know.
I'm sure it's very fun for everyone abusing adderall to get a doctor to believe their story (after all, they barely understand these conditions themselves), but it's a difficult life to have these conditions. Lot of what I hear described by the people self diagnosed or have a more "modern" (I'll just put it this way) diagnosis just sound like garden variety trauma due to less than tactful parents.
> The people who really have these issues/conditions seem to notice themselves in childhood before they even know what they are or what they're called
Yes. But when you don't know what it is you may start to believe that it's just you being lazy, stupid, slow, difficult, etc. Especially when everyone around you including teachers use these labels and you literally have no other information to base your views on. A mix of living with that for decades and being unable to know how life feels for other people can make you gaslight yourself very thoroughly.
A diagnosis is an acknowledgment of an authority on the subject that you are in fact not crazy and don't have to blame everything that happened on yourself.
> Leaving the reaction for the diagnosed to be mostly nothing in that they already know
I am glad for everyone who experienced it like that, but that's not a reason to diminish the significant effect for many others.
Imagine some people have been calling you "crazy" all your life, in a bad way, and then, at 40 years old, you do something that you expect the other person to think is crazy and they just say instead: "ah, don't worry, that's normal to do if you have adhd", and then it suddenly clicks that you are NOT crazy and have never been your entire life, you just had a condition you didn't know about and people were ignorant, and acting like this is completely normal given the condition.
It's like being forced to write with your left hand the entire life, and suddenly you realize that you are right handed, and it's ok to be right handed too...
You saw the part where I said I dealt with the same thing, right? I don't have to imagine. And I still don't understand why people feel relieved. It doesn't change the fact of the matter of my situation, and I still have to deal with it the same as I always have. And no, I never use it as an explanation or an excuse to other people, it's just something I need to deal with.
The inability to understand or empathise with others is indeed a neurodivergent trait. Some people get comfort from it, some don't. People are different and have different outputs for the same input.
> I still have to deal with it the same as I always have.
For me it was very different. Once I considered possible audhd, and knew what my triggers are and what is expected or not, my life is a lot easier and happier. I don't have to pretend anymore, and I no longer feel bad for being myself.
I am ok sitting in a corner in a crowded social environment and not feel weird about it. Even more, I meet more people who feel the same, so it leads to better relationships and more easy-going conversations, instead of forcing myself to be social for example.
The whole ADHD and trauma link is very interesting. I'm not a scientist, but from personal experience every single person I've met with ADHD has had severe childhood trauma. So it really makes you wonder if that old theory is right about childhood trauma triggering an overload to a child's flight or fight response, which leads to ADHD.
Especially when the trauma involes a caretaker. Parents are like a child's image of god, and for one to turn against the child is devastating.
Too much heritability for trauma alone to be the whole story. It's likely genetics produce latency and environment triggers, if trauma is indeed a big part of the picture.
this is simply not true, and there's tons of scientific evidence of the contrary. ADHD makes you vulnerable to abuse because generally speaking people have a hard time dealing with the foibles of ADHD people. That makes you a target. We know that from science, there's no point in theorizing. ADHD is mostly genetic, highly hereditary and both under diagnosed and under treated. That's all there is to it.
I have some friends that had hard experiences growing up from their parents because of their ADHD. ADHD effects kids earlier in development and requires some extra attention from parents (who also may have ADHD). It might be more likely that kids with ADHD have trauma because of their parents reaction to it.
It does happen, and it happened to me. At the same time it doesn't mean you can blanket accuse parents whose children fail to thrive that it's their fault when in practice the truth of what really happened will only be known between the children and adults. Oftentimes before the child is wise enough to gather evidence of their mistreatment, so it is lost to time.
At the same time not having any definitive sign pointing to parents being the cause of behavioral issues later in life and reluctance to talk about family issues is a reason why the effects of this kind childhood trauma occur and nobody realizes or talks about it. That was certainly the case for me for far too long. I framed my issues myself in terms of medical disorders, not an upbringing that nobody should have to suffer through, largely because of the messages society gave me when I was younger and more impressionable. One is not always preventable, but there is no good reason the other should ever have to happen.
> I'm not a scientist, but from personal experience every single person I've met with ADHD has had severe childhood trauma
I have an ADHD diagnosis. The only particularly traumatic thing in my childhood was my parents getting divorced when I was a teenager because my mother had an affair. I already had some symptoms of it before that happened. Prior to that, my parents might not have been the best parents you could possibly have, but they didn’t do anything that would merit the label “severe childhood trauma”
"Trauma" is a very bad name because it sounds violent and extreme, so you can easily think it doesn't apply to you. In actual fact, it can be caused by something as routine as "sleep training" where infants are left to cry themselves to sleep, or being snapped at for expressing emotion, all before the age of 5. The years before 5 are foundational, but you usually no not have memories earlier than 5 so it's very hard to say definitely what happened especially when causes for trauma are relatively routine.
You need a trusted therapist to guide you into exposing what the subconscious mind is holding onto from infancy. It is subtle, deep, difficult, rewarding work. But I do think people discount trauma because it sounds scarier than "someone snapped at me in frustration as an infant for expressing some emotion and I learned to disconnect from myself."
The honest way to handle this, which hopefully your therapist does, is not to claim that you can magically retrieve perfect memories from before 5 because you thought about it hard. What matters is what your impression is of what happened and what messages your subconscious is sending you. Whether or not it literally happened isn't that important and it's impossible to know.
The therapeutic relief comes simply from listening to your gut/subconscious and feeling the emotions that that brings up. Being a loving friend and parent to that part of yourself. You can do that effectively without pretending that you can know if the impressions are literally true or if that message your getting is simply the best way for it to express the emotions it's holding onto.
Again, you can maintain your integrity while being empathic and loving and listening to the message.
You are advocating for some controversial positions in psychology, without naming them – something roughly along the lines of Gabor Maté, "inner child work", reparenting, etc
Many psychologists who belong to different schools of thought – e.g. CBT, positive psychology – don't agree those practices are helpful and don't agree with their theoretical underpinnings
There is a lack of high quality empirical evidence for both the safety and efficacy of the kinds of practices you advocate, and also for the theories which motivate them. By contrast, more mainstream approaches such as CBT have significantly better empirical support
For what it's worth I know people with ADHD who have no evidence of childhood trauma.
I'm saying this to offer an honest counterpoint to your anecdote. I don't think you meant to imply that ADHD is entirely due to trauma, but in fairness to parents it's probably worth entertaining the idea that some kids are just born that way.
I believe current research results indicate about 75-80% of ADHD can be attributed to genetics. In other words there are room for other factors but genetics clearly dominante in our current understanding of ADHD.
I know plenty of people with ADHD diagnosis and normal childhoods without any unusual trauma. Most of them also have comorbidities (stuff typical to autism spectrum, learning or motor function difficulties).
I think ADHD is something you are born with, but there are many other things that can cause similar difficulties, including trauma. And as the linked article mentions, neurodivergent children are more likely to have parents who suffer from similar difficulties, which may increase their chance of suffering some sort of childhood trauma.
Likewise, but also I've got boy-girl twins. They're 9 now, but we're pretty sure we could tell he had ADHD at six months old (on a waiting list to see if he's autistic too). She's never shown any sign of either. As twins, they've been raised together, I can't think that he suffered any more trauma than she did.
The instinctive behavior (on average) of girls seems to be more compatible with living in boxes and following ostensibly (from the child’s perspective) arbitrary rules.
The boy could have a very different experience from the girl by running into disproportionately more <behavioral correction>, and however healthy <behavioral correction> is in the family system (and wherever else they are exposed to) could determine whether the child more exposed to it has issues while the child less exposed to it wouldn’t, despite living in the same environment and being treated the same relative to their actual behaviors.
I’m not asserting that this has happened in your case, by the way, your account of the situation just doesn’t rule it out. I wonder if you’ve considered this?
I also thought I had a relatively normal childhood but it turns out those long episodes of terror and anxiety at home and school, later repressed through a slew of coping mechanisms, were -if perhaps "normal" enough- definitely not healthy :)
There have also been studies showing that ADHD and autistic individuals are more likely to develop PTSD from traumatic experiences than others. Not to mention the rate of comorbidity can be fairly high, hypothesized for a variety of reasons.
Almost no parent is ever going to admit their own behavior triggered their child's ADHD or depression. But if they did, then they did. It can still happen.
i don't understand the downvote. i'm printing this out and putting on our fridge. we have 4 kids all with ADHD autism but trying hard not to complex trauma them.
Hey, I didn't downvote you, but you may want to correct some spelling before you do that. A random paragraph: https://imgur.com/a/FXOZ3JZ
I kind of think, any scrapbook/sheet you may compile yourself would have a much bigger impact. The effort you put in give it importance for the children as well, this is how humans work :)
Did you even read it? Seriously, did you read it? Did you spend more than 30 seconds with your brain on throughout this entire process? Because it feels like you didn't, and that feels like utter disrespect.
I did read it, every glyph, and I'm absolutely furious that I had to read it. There went 10 minutes of my life that I will never get back. I really did try to understand what it might be trying to say. But I don't think you put in as much work in this entire process of generating and distributing the diagram as I just did in reading it.
I couldn't stop laughing because the text is so bad. I've seen a lot of terrible AI generated infographics and this is in the bottom half. It's not just the typos that make some parts incomprehensible. There's actual medical misinformation here, like about the medications. You don't know enough to know that though, which means you have no business generating medical infographics or deciding what is a good or bad medical infographic.
And you didn't even edit it. You didn't even clean up one thing. Just straight from ChatGPT onto the fridge. You could have spent 5 minutes in a bitmap editor removing some of the more blatant typos. If you cared. But as it comes across to me, you didn't care. You come across as caring only about bragging that this is so useful and important. But if it's so important, why not take 5 minutes to clean it up? Because AI means we don't care about quality anymore, apparently.
Assuming ADHD is to some extent a chemical thing (I.e. brain didn’t properly develop impulse control or attention span or whatever), we now live in a world that enables those exact things.
If you lived in a world where the principal media were written articles/books and long-form TV shows/movies, your brain was still trained to focus.
Most media is now basically an ADHD simulator, with constant context switching, intense stimuli etc. which only reinforces whatever ADHD traits one may have.
I would guess it’s somewhat similar to the interaction between smoking and asthma.
ADHD results in a dopamine imbalance which results in the sort of novelty seeking behaviors they tend to exhibit.
Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers. Which is why teenagers test boundaries constantly. They have to divorce from their parents incrementally, and on their own timeline, not the parents’. Your brain has reward systems to encourage that, but can also be hijacked by substances, which is why we pay special attention to substance abuse in children. But there are many reasons for children to fail to socialize, some of them environmental, and a biological drive to fill that with something (including The Internet and “engagement” in particular) if it can’t be filled with social safety. And once it has begun it can be a feedback loop of intentionally choosing one over the other.
There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.
> There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.
I totally agree with this. And I think this is the part that's easy to miss in the narrative around how trauma and ADHD connect. Wherever ADHD traits originate, someone's desire to change matters.
If you love your job, but inability to concentrate is hampering performance, you're much more likely to WANT to change than if your job is merely a nuisance required for economic sustenance.
> Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers.
Is it? That’s a theory, but for the vast majority of human history there was a very different pattern and I don’t think we’ve changed enough since then evolution-wise to have instincts for a completely different life pattern.
Like, in hunter gatherer bands, there aren’t really “parents” in the modern sense through a child’s development. And then they don’t start relying on their peers, they’ve been with a mixed age group of siblings and cousins since the age of 3 or so. And then they slowly transition into being a member of the adult male or female group.
I don’t really know how what you’re describing would map into instincts from that ancestral life pattern.
Yes, our modern world is perfected to provide as much distractions to ADHD brain as possible, while working life has become more mentally demanding. Lots of people who struggle now would have done okay 50, 100 years ago when there were less distractions, and larger share of population did physical jobs instead of knowledge work.
Exactly. Even if we assume the distribution of traits on the ADHD spectrum in human brains has been constant over the last 100 years, today's media and work enablements have massively increased the share of people (and part of the spectrum) for whom ADHD traits inhibit their way to live the way they'd like to.
It was a hard thought to articulate. I didn't mean to say that I don't have trouble controlling my attention, it's just that the overtly visually hyperactive and overstimulating games are not what I gravitate towards, as in they fall into a category of stuff that's just "fake" dopamine (like most Type A work related success) and for me to actually be focused I usually need to literally be in danger or something. Maybe I interpreted your original comment incorrectly though.
Most of my interactions with people who don't have ADHD assume it's a sort of scatterbrained constant switching no matter what, and that if I just got a calendar and a to-do list it would fix all my problems. Those people normally can't imagine not being dopamine rewarded by their boring-ass office work or being on time or earning money. I need something that isn't an artificial abtract construct in order to not be bored to the point where I'll lose my job.
But I absolutely accept that everyone's somewhere diferent on the spectrum.
ADHD comes with hyperfocus as well. Can be very beneficial and productive, which allows me to do other things when I am done with hyperfocused thing.
Also, TikTok is addictive, but not media that our brains consume.
To be fair, I have no problems with focusing at all, even with all the distractions, but the main problem is with mood, that is blocking me to want to do something and focus on it.
There’s a more money to be made with a pill for a thing called adhd than there is if such a thing doesn’t exist.
I’m not sure what people will even need the fucking adderral for now anyway now that the computer programs like a drugged out maniac now for us anyway.
You don’t have adhd. It was always insane to expect humans to program like a fucking machine. You’d have to take a drug to do shit like that and that’s the sad truth of the software industry.
The children are so broken that their parents and entire community give them status and money for actually doing this (taking drugs to make money in the world).
Your dealer (the pharmaceutical industry) will never make you feel bad about this (enter media planted articles), thus, here you go, feel good about doing the wrong thing because … uh, you are a victim.
The medicine isn’t bad for people who need it. Most parents are trying to do the best for their kids. They’re trying to find ways to help their kids. In many cases these medications are extremely helpful to people who need them.
This article is important to me and I need some help understanding it correctly. Am I correct in my understanding that it is basically saying that getting a proper adhd/autism diagnosis is helpful for people? Or that people with complex trauma should or shouldn’t be diagnosed with adhd or autism? I’m sorry, this is a bit confusing to me.
It's an article with no clear conclusion it's normal to feel confused.
My read of the article is balancing the fact that there's a lot of overlap between CPTSD/ADHD/ASD in the symptoms (emotional dysregulation, hyperarousal, etc) and in hereditary factors (undiagnosed parents causing trauma more often on average). Also that traumatic childhood experiences are more likely to stick around as CPTSD in adulthood if there's also neurodivergence.
The author says there can be incredible relief to be correctly diagnosed with ADHD/ASD, so obviously she says it's helpful.
But she also warns that wrong treatment can often happen (eg. Giving stimulants to perpetual fight or flight PTSD brains), or inneffective therapy.
Relief if correctly diagnosed, decades of wasted effort if incorrectly diagnosed. Especially if the underlying issue lies elsewhere, but is ignored in favor of the mistaken one.
It's rarely reminded that when dealing with professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.), it's important to get second opinions if you have any doubts.
- People with ADHD and Autism have higher probabilities of childhood trauma and abuse. They might seek a diagnose in adulthood and that can bring them relief and be helpful.
- People with non-ADHD/autism related childhood trauma are more likely to perceive themselves as being neuro divergent. They might have executive disfunctions, and try to find an ADHD diagnosis (that could probably get, as it matches their symptoms) but as of today seems like there isn't evidence that ADHD stimulant medication helps with non-ADHD executive disfunctions.
- Hence, is important for professionals to verify the history of the patient and make sure they had ADHD symptoms when they were children (that would confirm ADHD), and if not, maybe try to find different psychotherapeutic treatments that would be more helpful to their complex PTSD.
I think it says that psychologists/psychiatrists do not really know what to do when adhd/autism symptoms overlap with childhood-rooted complex ptsd/trauma in adult patients and more research is needed. That's how I read it mostly.
Although diagnosis relies on observations made while patients are awake, the prevalence of sleep disturbances in individuals with ADHD is reported to be in the range 25–55 % (Corkum et al. 1998; Hodgkins et al. 2013; Owens 2005; Sung et al. 2008). In a recent Australian study, 62 % of children with ADHD had moderate or severe sleep problems and 22 % took sleep medications during the 1-week observation period (Efron et al. 2014). Indeed, high nocturnal activity and disordered sleep were defining characteristics of ‘hyperkinetic reaction in childhood’ or ‘attention deficit disorder’ in earlier versions of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 1980; Barkley 1990; Sadeh et al. 2006; Spruyt and Gozal 2011).
My hot take is that *a ton* of ADHD cases is primarily lack of restorative sleep due to sleep disordered breathing, that is suffocating in sleep. Brain does not enjoy suffocating so people tend to wake up. Every couple minutes. Whole night. Without actually being aware that they do. They feel tired and brain fogged, lose concentration easily, have poor impulse control and so on. Even "mildly" disordered breathing in sleep causes frequent microarousals that fragment sleep and basically obliterate its restorative quality.
> My hot take is that a ton of ADHD cases is primarily lack of restorative sleep due to sleep disordered breathing
Uh huh. Explain the completely opposite reaction to Amphetamines and basically being impossible to become addicted to them. Explain the altered brain structure.
Everyone has a 'hot take,' it's amazing that they all lead to it not being a thing.
Now let me help you, the sleep disturbances are the hyperactivity of the brain not letting you go to sleep until you hit complete exhaustion and the dysregulation of the circadian rhythm.
UK, EU, America has different societal values. I never had an issue with ADHD growing up in Asia. Nobody friggin cares. It's only western people making a huge deal outta nothing.
I consider my ADHD as a weapon because I can take it down a notch with medicine when I need to focus, but for other things like gaming, I can use my aDHD for better perf.
ADHD is spectrum, just because it doesn't bother you so much doesn't mean there aren't those with more severe symptoms. Studies say that ADHD is way more prevalent among prison populations, for example. I would say ending up in prison, homeless or a drug addict due to untreated severe ADHD is a pretty big deal for those people.
I've no experience living in Asian countries but asian cultures seem to be workaholic / ambitious and obedient. At least in South Korea many children's childhoods are ruined by insane educational pressure, lack of recovery time and sleep. In Korean culture, a child's success is directly linked to the family's social status. And I can only imagine the level of suffering among those children, let alone neurodivergent ones.
Japan seems to have a similar problem, although a less extreme version.
Does anyone know of any good study linking ADHD to underlying physical condition, like chronic inflammation or coeliac?
My kid has some form of behavioral disorder but it doesn't really check all the boxes of any known condition. He doesn't have attention problems. He's very active, but not unmanageable. I don't think he's autistic, though he's socially awkward. He's very defiant with adults, so OCD does match (though that doesn't help much). Definitely very low self-esteem and all that. Mostly he's aggressive, low patience, disobedient AF, requires a ton of attention.
A particularly telling thing is that when we take long drives we often listen to children stories. He can listen for them for hours no problem. But when a story stops and until another one starts, he gets really nervous, makes a bunch of noise, annoys his brother, like he can't be canalised if he's not focused.
But what strikes me is that he seems to have a bunch of other conditions that doctors dismiss as benign. He has low teeth mineralization, often small skin bumps around his joints. He has a geographic tongue. He had digestive track pain when he was smaller. He had discoloration on his cheeks. He is quite skinny while he eats normally.
ChatGPT told us he could have coeliac, but we blood tested for coeliac and it came back negative. We tried a gluten free diet for a bit anyway, and that didn't seem to change anything at all.
We're like very puzzled. It's pretty clear that a psy test will find something behavioral, but no one is going to look at any kind of mineral deficiency, or anyhting like that.
Posting this here, Idk why, I'm kind of clueless about what to do at this stage.
Autism has so many possible symptoms and associated problems that it's unlikely someone affected checks all the boxes.
One of the first signs I noticed in my childhood was that I was asking myself why everyone treated me differently for no apparent reason, and I would say that is a pretty clear indicator for autism as it stems from neurotypical social interactions being more or less a foreign language, and both sides subconsciously recognize that.
> Mostly he's aggressive, low patience, disobedient AF, requires a ton of attention.
I happened to be friends with someone who'd fit that description, the way he behaved at home with his parents was genuinely crazy. But then turned out shockingly normal years later. Sometimes it really is just a phase I guess.
why are you assuming it's not simply psychological?
"gets really nervous, makes a bunch of noise, annoys his brother, like he can't be canalised if he's not focused." could be autism or ADHD.
btw, ADHD doesn't mean "attention problems", it is much more complex than that and it can manifest in many different ways.
e.g. assuming he would have it, the listening provides a baseline level of stimulation, but as soon as it stops, there must be something to provide that stimulation, thus all those things.
if there's more behavioral stuff that you can recall, that would offer more clues.
I want to explore all the options. Doctors are quick to dismiss a physiological origin, but it seems plausible, and if it exists, may be good to tend for.
Also another thing I forgot to mention is that his behavioral problems tend to come and go in waves. Could be that some things are stressful at times, but it doesn't really fit.
And yes, I find the ADHD diagnosis a little fuzzy to say the least. The fact that they merged ADD and HDD is very weird to me, since the 2 ends of the spectrum are wildly different. And the fact that it's "treated" with brain-altering drugs makes me want to triple check that there is no other cause
I've heard this term "trauma" a lot in the past few years, and often in context where I didn't initially think that word applied in the situation it was used. It's caused me to think about my own childhood and wonder, with that modern understanding of the word, did I experience "trauma"?
I wasn't sexually abused, I wasn't neglected, I wasn't wanting of love. I was however often scolded to a point where I felt horrible about myself. Scolded to a point where I didn't even feel like I could exist without disrupting the world. At times yes, physically scolded but nothing so extreme as to leave a mark.
To be fair to my parents I was a very high energy and "difficult" child. Big emotions. I was always the problem.
Obviously compared to some upbringings this was a walk in the park. But it really did have an impact on me and who I grew up to be. In some ways it was likely a good impact. I learned that my energy had no place in the world. I learned that my emotions would likely cause more problems than they would solve. I learned to shut up, and sit down, and follow the rules, even when every ounce of my inner being wanted to do the opposite.
I've had a myriad of mental health issues throughout my adult life, ranging from low severity to medium, and on some rare occasions high. Genetics? Upbringing? Modern life? All of the above?
Have you read the PDF? It is whichever of the choices explains your lack of success in the real world, and this then brings relief from blaming yourself for that.
Really, that's it. Read the PDF.
The article even acknowledges that psychiatrist answer is wrong, and that all of the above are on a spectrum and nobody is ADHD-free or 100%-autist. This is not a problem because the answer is not meant to be correct, but only to be helpful and to "alleviate shame to enable people
to achieve their fullest potential".
So there isn't even an answer.
Which, judging by your post, I'm guessing you will find a deeply unsatisfying way to look at the world, as you sound like someone with a positivist view (facts are correct and everything is true or false, you either have ADHD or not, and even on a spectrum there's a number. But there isn't)
My anecdotal observation, that also applies to me as well, is that people who see faults in other people are seeing their own faults in other people. You have not read paper carefully enough and went for a start and end, where usually best bits are, but in this case the best part is in the middle:
"My hypothesis is that that those who remain most affected by childhood trauma in
adulthood and seek treatment for it represent a population more
likely to have innate neurodiversity."
What you are describing is emotional neglect and a failure of parenting.
You were meant to learn to recognize and name that energy and emotionality, and then learn to sit with it and develop adaptive coping strategies as needed, not maladaptive ones like negative self-concept and emotional repression.
It can take quite a long time to realize all of this and unlearn the patterns, and unfortunately, first line therapies like CBT are possibly detrimental for these issues.
Edit: also, you need not be fair to your parents. They are meant to adapt to parenting you, even if you were legitimately overactive or overemotional. Instead, you adapted to them.
Maybe both parents had to work two jobs. Maybe they had their own life challenges.
Perfect parenting, if such a thing exists, certainly has an economic minimum price.
And likely has a previous generation upraising requirement as well. There's a reason maladaptive cycles continuing down through generations happens: parents are often defined by their parents ad infinitum.
What matters as a parent is being the best you can be, and striving to be better than your parents were.
All that matters is the outcome. The child has to live with it.
Offspring repeat maladaptive traits which were considered normal or effective. Any skills lacked will have to be self-taught or sought out once they become aware. The narrative of being the best we can be and putting in 100% effort as parents unfortunately only makes us feel better about our situation/security, personal life choices (including avoidance), and quality of connection. Many people have kids for the sake of it and to improve their own lives. This is one of the insidious roots of a potentially painful upbringing.
Shifting the thought framing to seeking "reasons" rather than "blame" for behaviors allowed me to see failures or betrayals for what they are. I could then grieve the times I was hurt despite the love and intentions. I processed anger and bitterness about this along with a host of unresolved traumas and associated emotions that I never had the chance to resolve internally at the time. What remains is a dull universal sadness at seeing the truth of all this - the obvious harms we are doing to ourselves and each other despite "best intentions". It's a small price to pay to finally be arriving at a sense of internal peace.
Effective or "good enough" parenting requires a range of skills including emotional intelligence and awareness of our flaws in order to reduce harm, and to treat the child as a separate individual. Everyone gets stressed and makes mistakes, but those skills determine whether it's an opportunity to teach children how to self-regulate and resolve conflict, or an internal clusterfuck that sets them up for a lifetime of interpersonal issues, poor self-regulation, and disappointment. Prioritizing emotional presence is critical.
Some people with deeper issues can cause problematic child development and attachment regardless of material conditions or physical presence. It's mainly whether the child has room to grow themselves or if they are stunted/controlled by the environment.
I believe we should look at ourselves deeply and honestly to work on our own state of mind before diving into commitments. The reward of internal peace is worth the price of realizing this reality. From here we can improve it for the next generations.
What a shitty, unsympathetic take. Parenting is hard, especially with difficult children. Most parents do the best they can but they end up unintentionally screwing up their children anyway. That's just life.
Actually it is hard to maintain perfect discipline and self control when parenting a child who frequently acts out. Perhaps you can do it. Most parents slip up occasionally.
Turning it into an all-or-nothing thing doesn't help. Nobody's perfect.
If you have the urge to use violence or verbal abuse, shouting etc. at a child - things that would be illegal to do to even an adult or would most certainly get you fired at work - you have emotional control issues, perhaps from your own upbringing.
Kids naturally want to please their parents and respond well in most settings, as they are totally and utterly dependent on parents for survival. It's not difficult to use this to discipline them in constructive ways. Unless something is medically wrong, their specific behavior reflects their environment and upbringing.
Parents need to react well about 30% of the time for a kid to form a secure attachment, so there’s a lot of wiggle room and slip ups do not effect the overall pattern.
It’s not all on the parents of course but often family systems push parents to have kids when they don’t know how much they’ve been neglected or have major attachment issues themselves. Theres a huge social hereditary thing.
You can recognize that a parent did a poor job, or even was physically or emotionally abusive while also being sympathetic. All people are fallible, and all people come up short in various ways in terms of emotional development.
Fundamentally, parents exist to model behavior. Some parents model maladaptive or outright horrid behaviors more than others. But that's still modeling, and for a child with sufficient emotional intelligence that can be just as useful information when learning how to interact with the world and understand one's own emotions. But you can't do that if you just try to sweep it away and forget, just like you can't learn from your own mistakes by immediately burying them and moving on. Moving on is important, but you have to at least know what you're moving on from.
What's problematic is an obsessive focus on blaming parents and nurturing feelings of resentment.
There is evidence that CBT is detrimental for several psychologies, including BPD, C-PTSD, OCD, autism spectrum.
It's my own experience that CBT was only helpful at recognizing distorted thinking, which didn't resolve any of my other problems, and worse, was effectively gaslighting me by claiming that if I feel bad, I must be distorting my thinking somehow. It effectively has the therapist invalidating the patient, which is often the patient's core injury (parental invalidation).
CBT also reinforces certain maladaptive coping strategies, like intellectualization, rationalization, emotional numbing, etc. Repressing your feelings and intellectualizing everything is mistaken for progress under CBT.
Lastly, I think that CBT being first-line and so widely available means that most people seeking therapy will probably get CBT first. The practitioners of CBT won't always be able to recognize that CBT is limited for this patient and refer to a specialist in another modality, like schema therapy, ACT, DBT, etc. So many people will go to therapy multiple times, get very little benefit, and come to believe that their situation is hopeless or that therapy doesn't work, when the problem is that they've been offered the wrong treatment.
For me, making a distinction between the big Trauma with a capital T and little trauma with a lowercase t has been helpful. Any experience that has a lasting negative impact on you could be considered a trauma, but only very extreme stuff - violence, sexual abuse - would count as Trauma.
A car accident is a car accident. Sometimes they are fatal, sometimes the paint gets scratched. People sometimes get long term health effects from a fender-bender.
I think there's a degree of some people being maybe genetically predisposed to having more serious adverse reactions to trauma as well. An obvious example is when it leads to psychosis. So the objective reality of what happened is not necessarily the only thing which factors into how it affects somebody's functioning.
I don't disagree with that at all, but I do think that line of thinking about ones own issues can lead to a sort of self-blame - thinking things like: if I were stronger I wouldn't have been hurt by that neglect or mistreatment. No question, who you are has a huge impact on how something effects you, but nobody reacts well to e.g. neglect or mistreatment. I might end up with depression, while my sibling ends up with anxiety. That's our predisposition interacting with the objective reality, but neither outcome shifts the blame for the neglect or mistreatment to us. I know that's probably not what you were trying to say, but I do think that idea is one possible place downstream of what you are saying.
> nobody reacts well to e.g. neglect or mistreatment
Maybe, but some people react by becoming stronger and some react by breaking down and failing. Regardless of other effects like depression, anxiety, paranoia etc., being stronger tends to sound better, even if it has other trade-offs, you know? If you ended up weaker then sometimes nothing can convince you that's what was best.
I don't think "weak" and "strong" are useful in this discussion without defining them carefully. The way most people seem to get through these things is by becoming more thoughtful and emotionally mature. This is what is generally meant by "weak" in these conversations. "Strong" leads to pills and bottles and painful deaths trying to fight the feelings down.
Consider two approaches: one is to spend hours ruminating on your experiences every day to form insights and approaches to tackle new problems and make new progress. The other is to panic at the slightest sign of anything, compartmentalize everything and get stuck in fruitless thought loops constantly, making very little progress to integrate information or have insights. Say both of those take the same immense amounts of energy, but maybe the former would have a better shot at fighting active abuse, you know? In my experience, calculated thought is far superior to fruitless panic. In this way one could be considered "stronger" than the other even though both are technically undesirable (because constant rumination over everything is actually terrible, for example).
Real example based on real self-doubt across multiple friends I know.
> being stronger tends to sound better, even if it has other trade-offs, you know?
That feels like a tautology. From context, you've defined stronger to mean better. So of course in that case stronger is better. But in reality stronger isn't always better. If you come to a chess match being able to bench more than your opponent, are you better at chess than them?
If there are tradeoffs, and there are always tradeoffs, then you can't actually say stronger is better. The neglect of your parents might make you more independent and you might find that helps with your work life, while at the same time it makes your personal relationships harder. In my experience, life always works out something like that. Benefits in one aspect always come with downsides in another.
> But you can't say something like: neglect is good because it makes people stronger. It could be true for your life and what you value, but it's not objectively true.
Oh neglect is terrible; simultaneously the worst and the least recognized type of abuse.
My point is that adaptations to abuse vary enough that some can be more "desirable" than others (in addition to being more fit for the environment / the world at large in some cases), and someone stuck in a "worse" one could end up longing for a "better" one. Though, sometimes I long for "worse" ones myself as someone who feels "better" than I should be, so maybe the grass is just always greener.
I almost feel like we need a different word that doesn’t have the confusing association. Like scratching your car (‘little t’ trauma) vs smashing the frame (big ‘T’ trauma).
If you come up with one, I'm happy to use it - but we're comfortable with a lot of big umbrella categories: "car accident", "job", "conversation", "computer", "app", "injury", to name a few.
One aspect of trauma is the helplessness of it: it's not just how severe the physical reality is, it's also about the inability to do anything about it (and the internalization of that inability).
The classic example is a child who drew a picture shortly after 9/11. The picture included people floating down the building on (I believe) balloons or umbrellas. Obviously unphysical; but the child imagining ways (however fantastical) that could have helped was a factor in reducing that child's trauma.
On a therapist can tell you whether you personally have trauma, but the lessons you took away from your experiences certainly sound like it to me.
Yeah so I think when most people these days say trauma, they simply mean "An ongoing emotional overreaction due to a past negative experience." I think that's a super useful concept.
In your case I'd just ask myself "Do I still feel like I'm a bother in situations where I know I'm not because of X?" And if so, it can be productive to see if you can change that directly or indirectly.
Sounds a lot like CPTSD, which is more about symptoms and responses you have now caused by the continuous situations like you describe. It’s older and there’s been progress on the definition since it came out but Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (and website) is a good resource for the differences between this type of effect form upbringing vs single event traumas.
Personally since reading it and working through my own responses I’ve grown in leaps and bounds where previously I would’ve described myself exactly how you did.
Your comment reads like a case study from "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving" by Pete Walker. Many of his studies focus on childhood experiences that are overall "happy" but fall short of "emotionally fulfilling".
This is utterly ridiculous. To be healthy we have to have an emotionally fulfilling, not just happy, childhood? How did we ever survive as a species?
How do you even decide the difference between happy and emotionally fulfilling?
In my honest opinion, no one wants to look at genetics because it scares the hell out of them. But it’s most likely it’s complex genetics, not complex PTSD.
> How do you even decide the difference between happy and emotionally fulfilling?
Happy is how you're feeling in the moment. Emotionally fulfilling is how you feel about the whole of your situation. Does it feel right? Fair? Or are you constantly "glad it's not worse"? Remove fault and justification from the equation -- wouldn't it be more emotionally fulfilling if parents didn't yell at you? If they didn't make such a big deal out of spending money on you? You can be happy a lot of the time despite those, but they tend to leave a hole in you anyway. Emotional fulfillment is the relative lack of those holes, compared to the good.
Scolding has been found to have pathways to some really bad things.
It doesn’t have to be the wrist experience to childhood to guarantee crippling adulthoods.
It’s not about little or big trauma, the focus on what any trauma did to the brain is what’s important because the fingerprint and footprint of trauma can be unique and underdeveloped the brain in certain areas regardless of source.
Very similar experience here. It was my mum doing the scolding and I learned 3 things as a child:
1) love is conditional on behaviour - pleasing mum was the primary goal above everything else.
2) when I had been “bad”, only the most extreme contrition on my part unlocked the love I needed (as a highly precocious and literate child I’d write little suicide notes for her to find apologising for being so useless. I was single-digit age).
3) The dissonance between the private incessant scolding and the public display of praise led me to develop a rich, secretive inner life, and become adept at hiding maladaptive behaviour. I became a skilled liar and dissembler.
Suffice to say that this did not do me any favours in life. For the longest time I was able to “fake” being a successful, functioning, and sensitive person. But in reality I was throwing mental landmines into my own future that I eventually stepped on, resulting in addiction, depression, anxiety, almost constant suicidal ideation, a painful divorce (due to my own behaviour), and the estrangement of my adult children. I broke down a couple of years ago, landed in a psychiatric clinic, and started unraveling the effects of a lifetime of living with this baggage. I’m now 61 and have had two of the hardest, most challenging, most heartbreaking, yet also most happy and serene period of growth ever. I feel I’m finally coming into my own and the power my childhood trauma has held over me is broken.
For what it's worth I was a similar kind of child. My problems entirely went away with about 10 (or more) hours of exercise a week. This required a hobby I cared about and the right kind of friends, but since then things have been smooth
I was however often scolded to a point where I felt horrible about myself.
I've come to wonder about this. Deal with a kid who doesn't have a care in the world. The kid in the past variously didn't believe their friends could smell a potty accident (and so there was no need to clean up), would rather mercilessly belittle their friends and brag, lie shamelessly - all kinds of mildly antisocial problems they were creating.
I would wind up explaining how the thing they were doing was not a good thing, and how their friends would be feeling. They would try to ignore me. I would press, "you have to understand this". Then when they finally accepted what I was trying to explain to them, they would suddenly get all depressed.
The guilty cynic in me can already see their future selves relating to their therapist how their parent found fault in everything they did, and would make them feel terrible about themselves. But I don't know how to get them to correct their behavior without them feeling some kind of embarrassment, remorse, or guilt about it in the process.
I'm skeptical of most claims of trauma. As a fan of premodern history, I have come to understand that 99%+ of all humans ever born experienced what would today be called severe childhood trauma, not to mention later adult trauma. And they carried on okay. So either you have to think that everyone in the history of the world had been operating with severe trauma that was causing terrible problems, or that the modern trauma dose/response curve is learned. And I just feel like the former is less likely.
Logged in to recommend a book called “What My Bones Know” if you haven’t already read it. I think you’d greatly benefit from hearing the author’s story.
ADHD/ND here, and I really agree with this one quote from this piece:
> those most affected by executive dysfunction require therapy to be more directive, specific and accountable; that is, processing of past trauma and relational approaches are not sufficient. What often does not seem like trauma therapy at all can lead to great strides forward if it allows individuals to obtain a greater sense of structure and mastery in day-to-day life tasks
I've spent so much time in therapy doing the whole "let's go through your childhood and your past" and it was just not effective in tackling what I really needed. It's remarkable how many licensed therapists just didn't know how to deal with this. I'm sure it's really helpful for some people, but outside of increasing some basic awareness about how my family of origin resulted in present-day behaviors, I definitely reached diminishing returns on that route.
As skeptical as I am of AI as an interventional tool for "reaching our most effective selves", I can't help but feel that if it can be wired up to do the appropriate "micro-interventions" that reflect OP's insight ("directive, specific and accountable ... to obtain a grater sense of structure"), we might see 'ADHD' become a thing of the past (at least for the people that share my phenotype of it). It's my hope at least...
Acceptance of the fact that I will always have executive function difficulties and there is nothing that can really improve it. It's not the realization I wanted to have, but it is one I wish I learned earlier.
Accountability, mostly. Either by gamification, for example a simple small whiteboard counting how often I did y (or not, that would be a strike). Couple with someone holding me accountable it works wonders, throw in a "punishment" or reward...
Or, if that doesn't fit, deadlines (which maybe is just another kind of accountability...). Both made me finish my degree in time and with a very good grade (A in Americano?).
How to translate this into the workplace, I'm not sure. You might have a supportive workplace and can be open about it, which is what I did.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I feel similarly
On a tangent, this makes me think about the explainability of ai models. In a way, discovering our childhood trauma and the way it affects us, is akin to searching for explainability
However, in practice, the best way to overcome whatever we want to overcome, might not be to first have an explanation of why/how it happened
> it was just not effective in tackling what I really needed.
That's how I would summarize my experiences with psychotherapy too. I think the only thing I have truly learned from therapy is what I feared most. There ain't much in this universe that can truly help with ADHD. Medications and other interventions barely move the needle for me. Seriously, I am at the point in my life where I am basically done fighting the condition. It's a Sisyphean effort that's mostly fueled by arbitrary societal expectations and my own egotistical desires and insecurities.
Unfortunately, but that is something I agree as well, as remembering traumatic events in past is paralyzing and affects more with age - maybe there is something to do with different chemical balance and lack of need to analyze past.
I have autism(high functioning version which is linked with ADHD) diagnosis and whenever someone is mentioning something from the past, I am adapting to it by mirroring it by remembering it and then dealing with it again. It just becomes a cycle of misery. It took me some time to realize, that it is best to not talk about your failures - there is nothing good from reliving them and it is much better to just concentrate on things you enjoy and love to do.
Any statistical case with story is anecdotal - it has additional value that it helps to understand cases. As no way specialists are able to figure this out without prior knowledge and experience and lacking those background stories and 100% failure from specialists in my case can be called as anecdotal, but that is a statistical fact that affects personally me.
Also, the story resonates with my observations that my parents had traumatic events, though I don't think that it is something that causes ADHD or neurodiversity, but rather stems from the fact, that people that are neurodiverse would experience harsher emotions and emotional trauma and give the same treatment to their children.
I am at the intersection of these three things. Which intersection? Well, it's hard to know, that's the point.
But I've found this particular new-ish lens extremely illuminating, and it hasn't yet entered common parlance, so I post here in the hopes its helpful for others. After many years of hearing "tropes" from all 3 categories and having them only ~kinda feel like they fit, this was the one that made my jaw hit the ground and go holy shit, this is me, this is the thing that, if you understood it about it me, makes all the convoluted fuckery in my life click elegantly into place:
Pathological Demand Avoidance, or the more modern "friendlier" backronym, Persistent Drive for Autonomy.
Both are accurate, I find the former more accurate, if notably "harsher".
Here are some random links I only skimmed, you can find sources that resonate with you in particular.
One example of a way this manifests in me personally, and how it relates to the intersection of the 3 things in the title:
I was massively stressed by a partner's attempts to get me to do things like clean out the garage, etc. I'd catastrophisize about the amount of time it would take, and spend the entire time in a sour mood, squirming for ways to get out of it. What ended up helping a great deal was explicitly setting time boxes at the outset, such as we will spend exactly three hours on this and stop at the three hour mark no matter what. Being able to "see the exit" in advance (and trust that it would be honored) pretty much completely resolved the issues.
* It has hints of helplessness/trappedness/persecution avoidance that feel like they could relate to growing up trapped in a house with a violently abusive father.
* It has high seeking for routine, predictability, and certainty that feel like they could be autism-coded.
* The "this genuinely feels in my body like the task will be forever" has time blindness, task-abandonment and followthrough issues that present like ADHD.
What is the actual balance of those 3 things in contributing? IDK, and it's probably different in various situations.
But for me, the PDA angle fits like a glove, and was the first thing felt like it succinctly encapsulated what was actually going on in my head.
ADHD and Autism here. The only thing that has worked for me, and I'm strictly speaking of the ADHD part, has been medication. Everything else has been a waste of time. As for trauma, I strongly believe the correct causal relation is ADHD exposes you to increased chances of trauma. Not the other way around.
A somewhat common sentiment I've heard among those with autism and ADHD is that an untraumatised autist or ADHDer doesn't exist. The literal statement obviously isn't true, but a lot of the downwind effects of it are.
Most people are diagnosed with autism or ADHD because they have problems due to trauma, or they have problems which gave them trauma, or them being having these problems made them more sensitive, which in turn traumatised them when it wouldn't have done the same to others. Many of the diagnostic criteria are trauma responses or otherwise external signals which have very little to do with the internal experience of actually having autism or ADHD.
What does a well-developed, untraumatised person with autism or ADHD even look like? We can make some broad statements based on assumptions, but many of those people won't even be diagnosed, since they've never had reason to. What made life work out for them isn't an active area of study, since finding that group of people is close to impossible.
I have schizophrenic disorder and OCD and most likely undiagnosed Asperger‘s because I’m an old fuck.
I continue to be traumatized by my disorder. In fact, I’m currently homeless living on disability with my mental illness and also connective tissue disorder.
You can’t have these disorders and not be traumatized, at least not at the level of disorder I have. I was a brilliant child and a brilliant college student, but had psychosis that made me drop out and having me change my major every other year. I still manage to graduate on the Dean’s list though it took me seven years.
So yeah, still traumatized by my family just not wanting to talk to him anymore because I remind them too much of my nephew who died by suicide. And that’s literally the truth. I didn’t do anything to them. I’ve never heard anyone in my life or even punch someone.
I was relentlessly bullied in junior high through high school not only by fellow students but also by my brothers all older than me. Mostly due to the fact that they had mood disorders as well.
But I know trauma isn’t the cause of my disorder. I know it cause I see it in my genetics. I’m a genetic freak and I can’t get anyone to care about it. And that further is a trauma. The sense of being alone and ignored even though you’re highly intelligent. I mean, I taught myself genetics and have conversations pretending I’m a scientist all the time with people who write all these studies it only falls apart when they ask me what school I went to, and I finally tell them the truth. Then they just stopped talking to me. That’s crazy right? That’s trauma. Anyway, just venting.
I think it’s a miracle that you’re still alive. I can relate to a certain extent.
It was during the last year of my education as a Systems Engineer, where I was hospitalized into a mental institution due to a failed suicide attempt. I was 19 at that time. There I got my first diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia (ICD-10, F20.0). Due to my persistent depressive mood and suicidal ambivalence (as I understood) it was revised to schizoaffective disorder (ICD-10, F25.1). Several antidepressants, mood stabalizers and antipsychotics were tried like: Escitalopram, Duloxetine, Sertraline, Lithium, Quetiapine, Haloperidol, Clozapine and Olanzapine (as far as I can remember) and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
By a coincidence, I was assessed for autism spectrum disorder, because my behavior couldn't still really be explained (myself was also unable). My parents also got interviewed. It has become apparent that my father is also on the spectrum. Autism spectrum disorder (Asperger syndrome ICD-10, F84.5) and with recurrent depressive disorder with psychotic symptoms (ICD-10, F33.3) were the diagnoses when I was transferred to a locked care facility after more than a year.
In the facility I had weekly therapy with my psychiatrist. He confirmed the autism diagnosis and additionally diagnosed a PTSD (ICD-10, F43.1), after I told him about situations in my early childhood and my time in high school. The psychiatrist told me that, people in the spectrum are often victim of abuse, because of a certain vulnerability malicious people (like NPD) make use of.
Today, 9 years later I am still living in the facility.
I'm sorry for your troubles and I hope you find some peace. But don't focus too much on ICD-10 codes. Those were designed for classification purposes and — especially for mental health conditions — don't necessarily align to any specific underlying cause or provide useful guidance toward effective treatment.
Yes, you are absolutely right. However I mentioned the exact diagnosis with the ICD-10 code intentionally. It helps me to describe how I feel. I wanted to make it as unambiguous as possible between the systems DSM-5 and ICD-10 (I only know ICD-10 and I am not an expert at all) so on an international board we can refer to the same.
> provide treatment
Yes, they can force you to stay in an isolation room for weeks or longer and inject medication. Sounds like a trauma, but it is sometimes necessary.
> effective treatment
Something like that is always desirable. However, reality can look different.
Hey BGPestablished, Yes, kind of a miracle I am alive, as with you. Mental Illness is the worst disease to have. I gave up on most medications, now take Klonopin just to keep me down when I need it. Through self education I came a long way but no one cares and no one believes me.
It does sound like we are similar, and frankly I wish I could be institutionalized as well. I have twice attempted suicide but managed to avoid ECT. I think scizoaffective is another name for complex Asperger's.
what country are you in? Just curious because I believe my illness comes from my mothers side, Finnish/Sami heritage.
Before ASD was established there was(I think it is still alive) an idea for spectrum, that included also schizophrenic and other neurodivergents as they overlap.
@Telaneo
>>>What does a well-developed, untraumatised person with autism or ADHD even look like? We can make some broad statements based on assumptions, but many of those people won't even be diagnosed, since they've never had reason to. What made life work out for them isn't an active area of study, since finding that group of people is close to impossible.
I was diagnosed ASD quite late, but only because of circumstances, where I was sliding even further down. Before that I was surviving, sometimes struggling, but I did not thought it as something to blame others or even life circumstances, including traumatic events(like death of my dad, when I was small), but simply because I was different, but clearly that attitude can only last as long. So, yeah - it really depends on how you look at it - if you think that you have a trauma, then you can find it, especially when dealing with traumatic events in later life. But if you ignore trauma and as long as you ignore it - you can be trauma free. It is rather contradictory, but mind works that way - and even now only my mind is the wall, that stops me from going further, while before I was able to circumnavigate that wall. The "wall" in my case right now is understanding that there is lack of helpful people around, that I can call my own. No real friends, and loss of those that were thought to be friends and no means to bond with people to make friendship, especially when getting older.
I have dozens of peoples of genetics from 23andMe.
There is no way anyone can tell me there is not a large genetic risk factor in developing ADHD and autism. Because I see it in the genetics of people who have ADHD and autism. The most frequent polymorphisms I found in ADHD belong in a gene called DDC or dopamine decarboxylase.
Does trauma play a role? Probably. But genetics amplifies the risk that trauma will initiate these disorders..
I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type and OCD and I see those in my genetics as well. And my childhood was traumatic as all get out. But that’s also because my disorder is genetic, and my mother and brothers were also mentally ill.
It’s not nature or nurture, it is always nature and nurture.
What dramatically increases my executive function during work is listening to Jason Lewis - instrumental multi-hour sessions in high enough rhythm as not to be boring.
Attention deficit is a symptom that is caused by almost any mental and somatic disease. ADHD is a diagnosis after any other disease is thoroughly excluded and therefore is much less common than the symptom.
Any mental issue, symptom or disease lie on a spectrum, in terms of quality and severity. Psychiatric diagnoses are overlapping in more than 50% often making a single diagnosis incomplete.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadAny apparent disorder in a person or persons has to be decomposed into the innate parts that existed prior to birth and the environmental experiences that happened afterwards as a prerequisite for any kind of theorising to give useful results instead of noise. They call this the diathesis-stress model and it's easily overlooked.
What does this mean? Do you mean the congenital aspects of a disorder?
Those who are to be born in to an abusive environment may be more prone to continuing the traits of abuse than those who come from reasonable families.
For example, restricting the range of discourse to the purely congenital excludes things like fetal alcohol syndrome, the ages of both parent's gametes and pre-natal exposure to endocrine disruptors. However, in everyday usage, the diathesis refers primarily to those of the symptoms in the physiology, psychology and behavior of the subject that aren't attributable to life experiences (good and bad) rather than the microbiology specifics that act as carriers for any specific cause.
What's important above all else for the psychiatric practice is effective decomposition of any disease into parts that are amenable to study and treatment, rather than comparison to the hypothetical of what kind of "peak" may be achievable for a specific genotype if everything else went well.
This may be useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diathesis-stress_model
I have read some books about Darwin evolution and to me the new fact was that some fish while are being recognized as the same species are actually acting like different species diverged based on their diet and behaviour - those fishes that had mainly carnivorous behaviour diverged from rest of those that had more plant based food. And they are on a path of becoming species. Microbiology and other things with chemistry simply would not help with anything here, as the main object of their differences is in the way how their brains are working - why with equally equipped "tools" they behave differently and that eventually lead to their evolution to different species. This is applicable to neurodivergent people - we are diverging into different species, though because we still have sex with each other that affects whole humanity. Nothing to do with environment effects, that you are offering as a cause - I do eat the same products, but I look on world differently, apparently more wiser than average human, but that comes at the cost of making social connections, because essentially as a new species we are aliens among humans, but eventually there will be further adaptions, that will make us better at connections and who knows maybe even better than how humans are able to connect with each other. It is just how human evolution works.
Couple that with just plain generational trauma - physical punishment that ND people are more sensitive to, the high prevalence of CSA, and a world that doesn’t even try to make any accommodations and you find it more rare to find neurodivergent people who are untraumatized.
One factor not mentioned here is the capacity of dissociation. Many people in this cohort also find they have the ability to structurally dissociate as a coping mechanism of last resort - an outsized percentage of people diagnosed with OSDD, DID, and DDNOS are neurodivergent, and among social groups of neurodivergent people often dissociative people will tend to attract - it’s nearly to the point that “capacity to dissociate” could itself be a neurotype. Anyway it’s a fascinating line of study, and if I didn’t have folks w dissociative disorders in my life I might doubt their existence.
It's generally maladaptive but there's a reason the brain does it.
I'm mainly talking about stuff like: the maximum age supposedly being 6–9, the strict separation into "ANPs"/"EPs"/etc, and stuff like that, being unsupported at best. I do think disorganized attachment itself is one of the more plausible theories for how structural dissociation happens, but I generalize it more to any incompatible information instead.
This is definitely a factor for me when I tried to get diagnosed (which failed lol), because my parents whom caused my trauma would obviously refuse to blame themselves for my emotionally stunted development
The thing we call ADHD is just one phenotype amongst thousands. Every behaviour has a cause, and anyone out there who has been through a childhood with traumatic experiences and feelings of guilt and inadequacy need to understand that they don't need to be told that they have the currently-fashionable condition in order to forgive themselves.
This sounds flippant, but I don't mean it to be: What if I said that this happened because you had Mercury in Taurus? The point is here that nothing is your fault. Conversely, everything is; this mirrors the free-will vs predestination paradox.
And the solution in the article is: how do best make them conform, and “do a bunch of work on themselves” so they are not like themselves, but more like the average.
Sadly it is still (and probably will be) too easy to deflect responsibility and have everyone believe their side. They will probably pass on with nobody realizing what they've done to me. It took me long enough for me to realize my own situation, was how severe it was. I hope more people wake up to the fact that people like me are out there.
The false diagnosis is a perfect distraction for you to continue to blame yourself for all your faults while they get away with everything, for decades. That lost time will never come back.
There you go. Seems like the academics are either pressured to gaslight people managing ADHD and autism or jump on bandwagon hoping a department notices and perhaps provide funding or other jolly.
They should get fucked with this harmful "research".
I never understood this sentiment. It's just who I am and always have been. And I learned to deal with the circumstances. I don't understand why it makes people feel better to have a diagnosis they can blame.
Perhaps it's a generational thing? I know as a manager it's pretty common for reports to cite them having ADHD as why they can't do this or that. Meanwhile I mentally roll my eyes thinking, "no shit, me too, but I manage to get this done"
This worries me.
Also, what's so noble about hiding own struggles?
And also, why shouldn't I be relieved when I understand a big factor in my struggles?
This is a very confusing comment.
Would a valid example of this be the ADHD tag on twitch streamer channels?
ADHD is often an executive function disorder. As a manager, have you offered them an accommodation?
Lots of “I” statements from you and not a whole lot of understanding.
Yes, and that wasn't my point. Except for one case who was definitely abusing the situation, I never once revealed that my inner monologue was pointing out that I have the same issues they do but I don't use it as an excuse for not getting my work done.
I sincerely suggest that you try to be understanding of your reports instead of being mildly inconvenienced by their problems and labeling them negatively as you have suggested here.
People leave jobs because of bad management. Be better.
In some areas and circumstances, your response can be problematic. You didn’t say what you do besides mentally rolling your eyes, but as an example: management ignoring an employee sharing a recognized disorder and requesting reasonable accommodation is the basic premise for a lawsuit.
I’m not saying this is happening here, but this is the kind of scenario management needs to be aware of and prepared for, specifically.
More generally, I would hope managers would be empathetic, but I also understand that this is rarely to never on the job description.
Edit: I see in another part of the thread that you seem to know all this, so nevermind. But I’ll leave this for others to understand that there is a responsibility, here.
Learning that you were not, in fact, a horrible and wicked child that your parents had to endure is life changing.
I'm sure it's very fun for everyone abusing adderall to get a doctor to believe their story (after all, they barely understand these conditions themselves), but it's a difficult life to have these conditions. Lot of what I hear described by the people self diagnosed or have a more "modern" (I'll just put it this way) diagnosis just sound like garden variety trauma due to less than tactful parents.
Yes. But when you don't know what it is you may start to believe that it's just you being lazy, stupid, slow, difficult, etc. Especially when everyone around you including teachers use these labels and you literally have no other information to base your views on. A mix of living with that for decades and being unable to know how life feels for other people can make you gaslight yourself very thoroughly.
A diagnosis is an acknowledgment of an authority on the subject that you are in fact not crazy and don't have to blame everything that happened on yourself.
> Leaving the reaction for the diagnosed to be mostly nothing in that they already know
I am glad for everyone who experienced it like that, but that's not a reason to diminish the significant effect for many others.
It's like being forced to write with your left hand the entire life, and suddenly you realize that you are right handed, and it's ok to be right handed too...
For me it was very different. Once I considered possible audhd, and knew what my triggers are and what is expected or not, my life is a lot easier and happier. I don't have to pretend anymore, and I no longer feel bad for being myself.
I am ok sitting in a corner in a crowded social environment and not feel weird about it. Even more, I meet more people who feel the same, so it leads to better relationships and more easy-going conversations, instead of forcing myself to be social for example.
Especially when the trauma involes a caretaker. Parents are like a child's image of god, and for one to turn against the child is devastating.
At the same time not having any definitive sign pointing to parents being the cause of behavioral issues later in life and reluctance to talk about family issues is a reason why the effects of this kind childhood trauma occur and nobody realizes or talks about it. That was certainly the case for me for far too long. I framed my issues myself in terms of medical disorders, not an upbringing that nobody should have to suffer through, largely because of the messages society gave me when I was younger and more impressionable. One is not always preventable, but there is no good reason the other should ever have to happen.
I have an ADHD diagnosis. The only particularly traumatic thing in my childhood was my parents getting divorced when I was a teenager because my mother had an affair. I already had some symptoms of it before that happened. Prior to that, my parents might not have been the best parents you could possibly have, but they didn’t do anything that would merit the label “severe childhood trauma”
You need a trusted therapist to guide you into exposing what the subconscious mind is holding onto from infancy. It is subtle, deep, difficult, rewarding work. But I do think people discount trauma because it sounds scarier than "someone snapped at me in frustration as an infant for expressing some emotion and I learned to disconnect from myself."
This sounds like a great way to implant false memories
The therapeutic relief comes simply from listening to your gut/subconscious and feeling the emotions that that brings up. Being a loving friend and parent to that part of yourself. You can do that effectively without pretending that you can know if the impressions are literally true or if that message your getting is simply the best way for it to express the emotions it's holding onto.
Again, you can maintain your integrity while being empathic and loving and listening to the message.
Many psychologists who belong to different schools of thought – e.g. CBT, positive psychology – don't agree those practices are helpful and don't agree with their theoretical underpinnings
There is a lack of high quality empirical evidence for both the safety and efficacy of the kinds of practices you advocate, and also for the theories which motivate them. By contrast, more mainstream approaches such as CBT have significantly better empirical support
tape your door latch “into” the door, or otherwise temporarily defeat the latch, and screw your door in safely! =P
Every person with headache I met had painkillers.
Therefore their pain is caused by painkillers.
Daft.
I'm saying this to offer an honest counterpoint to your anecdote. I don't think you meant to imply that ADHD is entirely due to trauma, but in fairness to parents it's probably worth entertaining the idea that some kids are just born that way.
I think ADHD is something you are born with, but there are many other things that can cause similar difficulties, including trauma. And as the linked article mentions, neurodivergent children are more likely to have parents who suffer from similar difficulties, which may increase their chance of suffering some sort of childhood trauma.
The instinctive behavior (on average) of girls seems to be more compatible with living in boxes and following ostensibly (from the child’s perspective) arbitrary rules.
The boy could have a very different experience from the girl by running into disproportionately more <behavioral correction>, and however healthy <behavioral correction> is in the family system (and wherever else they are exposed to) could determine whether the child more exposed to it has issues while the child less exposed to it wouldn’t, despite living in the same environment and being treated the same relative to their actual behaviors.
I’m not asserting that this has happened in your case, by the way, your account of the situation just doesn’t rule it out. I wonder if you’ve considered this?
I kind of think, any scrapbook/sheet you may compile yourself would have a much bigger impact. The effort you put in give it importance for the children as well, this is how humans work :)
Must be challenging, and I'm rooting for you.
I did read it, every glyph, and I'm absolutely furious that I had to read it. There went 10 minutes of my life that I will never get back. I really did try to understand what it might be trying to say. But I don't think you put in as much work in this entire process of generating and distributing the diagram as I just did in reading it.
I couldn't stop laughing because the text is so bad. I've seen a lot of terrible AI generated infographics and this is in the bottom half. It's not just the typos that make some parts incomprehensible. There's actual medical misinformation here, like about the medications. You don't know enough to know that though, which means you have no business generating medical infographics or deciding what is a good or bad medical infographic.
And you didn't even edit it. You didn't even clean up one thing. Just straight from ChatGPT onto the fridge. You could have spent 5 minutes in a bitmap editor removing some of the more blatant typos. If you cared. But as it comes across to me, you didn't care. You come across as caring only about bragging that this is so useful and important. But if it's so important, why not take 5 minutes to clean it up? Because AI means we don't care about quality anymore, apparently.
That's why I downvoted you.
Assuming ADHD is to some extent a chemical thing (I.e. brain didn’t properly develop impulse control or attention span or whatever), we now live in a world that enables those exact things.
If you lived in a world where the principal media were written articles/books and long-form TV shows/movies, your brain was still trained to focus.
Most media is now basically an ADHD simulator, with constant context switching, intense stimuli etc. which only reinforces whatever ADHD traits one may have.
I would guess it’s somewhat similar to the interaction between smoking and asthma.
Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers. Which is why teenagers test boundaries constantly. They have to divorce from their parents incrementally, and on their own timeline, not the parents’. Your brain has reward systems to encourage that, but can also be hijacked by substances, which is why we pay special attention to substance abuse in children. But there are many reasons for children to fail to socialize, some of them environmental, and a biological drive to fill that with something (including The Internet and “engagement” in particular) if it can’t be filled with social safety. And once it has begun it can be a feedback loop of intentionally choosing one over the other.
There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.
I totally agree with this. And I think this is the part that's easy to miss in the narrative around how trauma and ADHD connect. Wherever ADHD traits originate, someone's desire to change matters.
If you love your job, but inability to concentrate is hampering performance, you're much more likely to WANT to change than if your job is merely a nuisance required for economic sustenance.
Is it? That’s a theory, but for the vast majority of human history there was a very different pattern and I don’t think we’ve changed enough since then evolution-wise to have instincts for a completely different life pattern.
Like, in hunter gatherer bands, there aren’t really “parents” in the modern sense through a child’s development. And then they don’t start relying on their peers, they’ve been with a mixed age group of siblings and cousins since the age of 3 or so. And then they slowly transition into being a member of the adult male or female group.
I don’t really know how what you’re describing would map into instincts from that ancestral life pattern.
What you describe sounds like you have the condition managed extremely well and perhaps don't tend too far into the hyperactive dimension of it.
Most of my interactions with people who don't have ADHD assume it's a sort of scatterbrained constant switching no matter what, and that if I just got a calendar and a to-do list it would fix all my problems. Those people normally can't imagine not being dopamine rewarded by their boring-ass office work or being on time or earning money. I need something that isn't an artificial abtract construct in order to not be bored to the point where I'll lose my job.
But I absolutely accept that everyone's somewhere diferent on the spectrum.
Also, TikTok is addictive, but not media that our brains consume.
To be fair, I have no problems with focusing at all, even with all the distractions, but the main problem is with mood, that is blocking me to want to do something and focus on it.
I’m not sure what people will even need the fucking adderral for now anyway now that the computer programs like a drugged out maniac now for us anyway.
You don’t have adhd. It was always insane to expect humans to program like a fucking machine. You’d have to take a drug to do shit like that and that’s the sad truth of the software industry.
The children are so broken that their parents and entire community give them status and money for actually doing this (taking drugs to make money in the world).
Your dealer (the pharmaceutical industry) will never make you feel bad about this (enter media planted articles), thus, here you go, feel good about doing the wrong thing because … uh, you are a victim.
My read of the article is balancing the fact that there's a lot of overlap between CPTSD/ADHD/ASD in the symptoms (emotional dysregulation, hyperarousal, etc) and in hereditary factors (undiagnosed parents causing trauma more often on average). Also that traumatic childhood experiences are more likely to stick around as CPTSD in adulthood if there's also neurodivergence.
The author says there can be incredible relief to be correctly diagnosed with ADHD/ASD, so obviously she says it's helpful.
But she also warns that wrong treatment can often happen (eg. Giving stimulants to perpetual fight or flight PTSD brains), or inneffective therapy.
- People with ADHD and Autism have higher probabilities of childhood trauma and abuse. They might seek a diagnose in adulthood and that can bring them relief and be helpful.
- People with non-ADHD/autism related childhood trauma are more likely to perceive themselves as being neuro divergent. They might have executive disfunctions, and try to find an ADHD diagnosis (that could probably get, as it matches their symptoms) but as of today seems like there isn't evidence that ADHD stimulant medication helps with non-ADHD executive disfunctions.
- Hence, is important for professionals to verify the history of the patient and make sure they had ADHD symptoms when they were children (that would confirm ADHD), and if not, maybe try to find different psychotherapeutic treatments that would be more helpful to their complex PTSD.
Although diagnosis relies on observations made while patients are awake, the prevalence of sleep disturbances in individuals with ADHD is reported to be in the range 25–55 % (Corkum et al. 1998; Hodgkins et al. 2013; Owens 2005; Sung et al. 2008). In a recent Australian study, 62 % of children with ADHD had moderate or severe sleep problems and 22 % took sleep medications during the 1-week observation period (Efron et al. 2014). Indeed, high nocturnal activity and disordered sleep were defining characteristics of ‘hyperkinetic reaction in childhood’ or ‘attention deficit disorder’ in earlier versions of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 1980; Barkley 1990; Sadeh et al. 2006; Spruyt and Gozal 2011).
My hot take is that *a ton* of ADHD cases is primarily lack of restorative sleep due to sleep disordered breathing, that is suffocating in sleep. Brain does not enjoy suffocating so people tend to wake up. Every couple minutes. Whole night. Without actually being aware that they do. They feel tired and brain fogged, lose concentration easily, have poor impulse control and so on. Even "mildly" disordered breathing in sleep causes frequent microarousals that fragment sleep and basically obliterate its restorative quality.
Uh huh. Explain the completely opposite reaction to Amphetamines and basically being impossible to become addicted to them. Explain the altered brain structure.
Everyone has a 'hot take,' it's amazing that they all lead to it not being a thing.
Now let me help you, the sleep disturbances are the hyperactivity of the brain not letting you go to sleep until you hit complete exhaustion and the dysregulation of the circadian rhythm.
UK, EU, America has different societal values. I never had an issue with ADHD growing up in Asia. Nobody friggin cares. It's only western people making a huge deal outta nothing.
I consider my ADHD as a weapon because I can take it down a notch with medicine when I need to focus, but for other things like gaming, I can use my aDHD for better perf.
Shit's nothing.
Interesting, I thought that Asian countries are the most hostile countries towards neurodivergent people.
Not black or white thus can't or can dis/agree with you on this.
I only shared my own person opinion there.
Japan seems to have a similar problem, although a less extreme version.
I did really well up to college, but without the routine of school I ended up completely collapsing for my early twenties.
Then I got better at managing it over time, and that was fine.
Then I had multiple kids and then some chronic illness. It was at that point that I really felt the condition impacting me.
So, it's dangerous to generalise too early guess.
My kid has some form of behavioral disorder but it doesn't really check all the boxes of any known condition. He doesn't have attention problems. He's very active, but not unmanageable. I don't think he's autistic, though he's socially awkward. He's very defiant with adults, so OCD does match (though that doesn't help much). Definitely very low self-esteem and all that. Mostly he's aggressive, low patience, disobedient AF, requires a ton of attention.
A particularly telling thing is that when we take long drives we often listen to children stories. He can listen for them for hours no problem. But when a story stops and until another one starts, he gets really nervous, makes a bunch of noise, annoys his brother, like he can't be canalised if he's not focused.
But what strikes me is that he seems to have a bunch of other conditions that doctors dismiss as benign. He has low teeth mineralization, often small skin bumps around his joints. He has a geographic tongue. He had digestive track pain when he was smaller. He had discoloration on his cheeks. He is quite skinny while he eats normally.
ChatGPT told us he could have coeliac, but we blood tested for coeliac and it came back negative. We tried a gluten free diet for a bit anyway, and that didn't seem to change anything at all.
We're like very puzzled. It's pretty clear that a psy test will find something behavioral, but no one is going to look at any kind of mineral deficiency, or anyhting like that.
Posting this here, Idk why, I'm kind of clueless about what to do at this stage.
One of the first signs I noticed in my childhood was that I was asking myself why everyone treated me differently for no apparent reason, and I would say that is a pretty clear indicator for autism as it stems from neurotypical social interactions being more or less a foreign language, and both sides subconsciously recognize that.
> Mostly he's aggressive, low patience, disobedient AF, requires a ton of attention.
I happened to be friends with someone who'd fit that description, the way he behaved at home with his parents was genuinely crazy. But then turned out shockingly normal years later. Sometimes it really is just a phase I guess.
I am still terrible at real-time conversations in person, having a weird speech impairment on top is not helpful either.
> Posting this here, Idk why, I'm kind of clueless about what to do at this stage.
It’s tough, but you already know what you need to do.
"gets really nervous, makes a bunch of noise, annoys his brother, like he can't be canalised if he's not focused." could be autism or ADHD.
btw, ADHD doesn't mean "attention problems", it is much more complex than that and it can manifest in many different ways.
e.g. assuming he would have it, the listening provides a baseline level of stimulation, but as soon as it stops, there must be something to provide that stimulation, thus all those things.
if there's more behavioral stuff that you can recall, that would offer more clues.
Also another thing I forgot to mention is that his behavioral problems tend to come and go in waves. Could be that some things are stressful at times, but it doesn't really fit.
And yes, I find the ADHD diagnosis a little fuzzy to say the least. The fact that they merged ADD and HDD is very weird to me, since the 2 ends of the spectrum are wildly different. And the fact that it's "treated" with brain-altering drugs makes me want to triple check that there is no other cause
The increased awareness genuinely helps to many others. I suspect there's widespread denial do be untangled, too.
I wasn't sexually abused, I wasn't neglected, I wasn't wanting of love. I was however often scolded to a point where I felt horrible about myself. Scolded to a point where I didn't even feel like I could exist without disrupting the world. At times yes, physically scolded but nothing so extreme as to leave a mark.
To be fair to my parents I was a very high energy and "difficult" child. Big emotions. I was always the problem.
Obviously compared to some upbringings this was a walk in the park. But it really did have an impact on me and who I grew up to be. In some ways it was likely a good impact. I learned that my energy had no place in the world. I learned that my emotions would likely cause more problems than they would solve. I learned to shut up, and sit down, and follow the rules, even when every ounce of my inner being wanted to do the opposite.
I've had a myriad of mental health issues throughout my adult life, ranging from low severity to medium, and on some rare occasions high. Genetics? Upbringing? Modern life? All of the above?
Really, that's it. Read the PDF.
The article even acknowledges that psychiatrist answer is wrong, and that all of the above are on a spectrum and nobody is ADHD-free or 100%-autist. This is not a problem because the answer is not meant to be correct, but only to be helpful and to "alleviate shame to enable people to achieve their fullest potential".
So there isn't even an answer.
Which, judging by your post, I'm guessing you will find a deeply unsatisfying way to look at the world, as you sound like someone with a positivist view (facts are correct and everything is true or false, you either have ADHD or not, and even on a spectrum there's a number. But there isn't)
"My hypothesis is that that those who remain most affected by childhood trauma in adulthood and seek treatment for it represent a population more likely to have innate neurodiversity."
You were meant to learn to recognize and name that energy and emotionality, and then learn to sit with it and develop adaptive coping strategies as needed, not maladaptive ones like negative self-concept and emotional repression.
It can take quite a long time to realize all of this and unlearn the patterns, and unfortunately, first line therapies like CBT are possibly detrimental for these issues.
Edit: also, you need not be fair to your parents. They are meant to adapt to parenting you, even if you were legitimately overactive or overemotional. Instead, you adapted to them.
That's just your own projection. Both sides adapt, and you haven't heard the other side yet.
Since children turn into adults, and not the other way around, I'd say that children adapt much more than parents.
Perfect parenting, if such a thing exists, certainly has an economic minimum price.
And likely has a previous generation upraising requirement as well. There's a reason maladaptive cycles continuing down through generations happens: parents are often defined by their parents ad infinitum.
What matters as a parent is being the best you can be, and striving to be better than your parents were.
Offspring repeat maladaptive traits which were considered normal or effective. Any skills lacked will have to be self-taught or sought out once they become aware. The narrative of being the best we can be and putting in 100% effort as parents unfortunately only makes us feel better about our situation/security, personal life choices (including avoidance), and quality of connection. Many people have kids for the sake of it and to improve their own lives. This is one of the insidious roots of a potentially painful upbringing.
Shifting the thought framing to seeking "reasons" rather than "blame" for behaviors allowed me to see failures or betrayals for what they are. I could then grieve the times I was hurt despite the love and intentions. I processed anger and bitterness about this along with a host of unresolved traumas and associated emotions that I never had the chance to resolve internally at the time. What remains is a dull universal sadness at seeing the truth of all this - the obvious harms we are doing to ourselves and each other despite "best intentions". It's a small price to pay to finally be arriving at a sense of internal peace.
Effective or "good enough" parenting requires a range of skills including emotional intelligence and awareness of our flaws in order to reduce harm, and to treat the child as a separate individual. Everyone gets stressed and makes mistakes, but those skills determine whether it's an opportunity to teach children how to self-regulate and resolve conflict, or an internal clusterfuck that sets them up for a lifetime of interpersonal issues, poor self-regulation, and disappointment. Prioritizing emotional presence is critical.
Some people with deeper issues can cause problematic child development and attachment regardless of material conditions or physical presence. It's mainly whether the child has room to grow themselves or if they are stunted/controlled by the environment.
I believe we should look at ourselves deeply and honestly to work on our own state of mind before diving into commitments. The reward of internal peace is worth the price of realizing this reality. From here we can improve it for the next generations.
If you have the urge to use violence or verbal abuse, shouting etc. at a child - things that would be illegal to do to even an adult or would most certainly get you fired at work - you have emotional control issues, perhaps from your own upbringing.
Kids naturally want to please their parents and respond well in most settings, as they are totally and utterly dependent on parents for survival. It's not difficult to use this to discipline them in constructive ways. Unless something is medically wrong, their specific behavior reflects their environment and upbringing.
It’s not all on the parents of course but often family systems push parents to have kids when they don’t know how much they’ve been neglected or have major attachment issues themselves. Theres a huge social hereditary thing.
Fundamentally, parents exist to model behavior. Some parents model maladaptive or outright horrid behaviors more than others. But that's still modeling, and for a child with sufficient emotional intelligence that can be just as useful information when learning how to interact with the world and understand one's own emotions. But you can't do that if you just try to sweep it away and forget, just like you can't learn from your own mistakes by immediately burying them and moving on. Moving on is important, but you have to at least know what you're moving on from.
What's problematic is an obsessive focus on blaming parents and nurturing feelings of resentment.
It's my own experience that CBT was only helpful at recognizing distorted thinking, which didn't resolve any of my other problems, and worse, was effectively gaslighting me by claiming that if I feel bad, I must be distorting my thinking somehow. It effectively has the therapist invalidating the patient, which is often the patient's core injury (parental invalidation).
CBT also reinforces certain maladaptive coping strategies, like intellectualization, rationalization, emotional numbing, etc. Repressing your feelings and intellectualizing everything is mistaken for progress under CBT.
Lastly, I think that CBT being first-line and so widely available means that most people seeking therapy will probably get CBT first. The practitioners of CBT won't always be able to recognize that CBT is limited for this patient and refer to a specialist in another modality, like schema therapy, ACT, DBT, etc. So many people will go to therapy multiple times, get very little benefit, and come to believe that their situation is hopeless or that therapy doesn't work, when the problem is that they've been offered the wrong treatment.
A car accident is a car accident. Sometimes they are fatal, sometimes the paint gets scratched. People sometimes get long term health effects from a fender-bender.
Maybe, but some people react by becoming stronger and some react by breaking down and failing. Regardless of other effects like depression, anxiety, paranoia etc., being stronger tends to sound better, even if it has other trade-offs, you know? If you ended up weaker then sometimes nothing can convince you that's what was best.
Real example based on real self-doubt across multiple friends I know.
That feels like a tautology. From context, you've defined stronger to mean better. So of course in that case stronger is better. But in reality stronger isn't always better. If you come to a chess match being able to bench more than your opponent, are you better at chess than them?
If there are tradeoffs, and there are always tradeoffs, then you can't actually say stronger is better. The neglect of your parents might make you more independent and you might find that helps with your work life, while at the same time it makes your personal relationships harder. In my experience, life always works out something like that. Benefits in one aspect always come with downsides in another.
Oh neglect is terrible; simultaneously the worst and the least recognized type of abuse.
My point is that adaptations to abuse vary enough that some can be more "desirable" than others (in addition to being more fit for the environment / the world at large in some cases), and someone stuck in a "worse" one could end up longing for a "better" one. Though, sometimes I long for "worse" ones myself as someone who feels "better" than I should be, so maybe the grass is just always greener.
The classic example is a child who drew a picture shortly after 9/11. The picture included people floating down the building on (I believe) balloons or umbrellas. Obviously unphysical; but the child imagining ways (however fantastical) that could have helped was a factor in reducing that child's trauma.
On a therapist can tell you whether you personally have trauma, but the lessons you took away from your experiences certainly sound like it to me.
In your case I'd just ask myself "Do I still feel like I'm a bother in situations where I know I'm not because of X?" And if so, it can be productive to see if you can change that directly or indirectly.
Personally since reading it and working through my own responses I’ve grown in leaps and bounds where previously I would’ve described myself exactly how you did.
How do you even decide the difference between happy and emotionally fulfilling?
In my honest opinion, no one wants to look at genetics because it scares the hell out of them. But it’s most likely it’s complex genetics, not complex PTSD.
> How do you even decide the difference between happy and emotionally fulfilling?
Happy is how you're feeling in the moment. Emotionally fulfilling is how you feel about the whole of your situation. Does it feel right? Fair? Or are you constantly "glad it's not worse"? Remove fault and justification from the equation -- wouldn't it be more emotionally fulfilling if parents didn't yell at you? If they didn't make such a big deal out of spending money on you? You can be happy a lot of the time despite those, but they tend to leave a hole in you anyway. Emotional fulfillment is the relative lack of those holes, compared to the good.
It doesn’t have to be the wrist experience to childhood to guarantee crippling adulthoods.
It’s not about little or big trauma, the focus on what any trauma did to the brain is what’s important because the fingerprint and footprint of trauma can be unique and underdeveloped the brain in certain areas regardless of source.
1) love is conditional on behaviour - pleasing mum was the primary goal above everything else.
2) when I had been “bad”, only the most extreme contrition on my part unlocked the love I needed (as a highly precocious and literate child I’d write little suicide notes for her to find apologising for being so useless. I was single-digit age).
3) The dissonance between the private incessant scolding and the public display of praise led me to develop a rich, secretive inner life, and become adept at hiding maladaptive behaviour. I became a skilled liar and dissembler.
Suffice to say that this did not do me any favours in life. For the longest time I was able to “fake” being a successful, functioning, and sensitive person. But in reality I was throwing mental landmines into my own future that I eventually stepped on, resulting in addiction, depression, anxiety, almost constant suicidal ideation, a painful divorce (due to my own behaviour), and the estrangement of my adult children. I broke down a couple of years ago, landed in a psychiatric clinic, and started unraveling the effects of a lifetime of living with this baggage. I’m now 61 and have had two of the hardest, most challenging, most heartbreaking, yet also most happy and serene period of growth ever. I feel I’m finally coming into my own and the power my childhood trauma has held over me is broken.
Formally diagnosed two years ago as ASD, ADHD.
I've come to wonder about this. Deal with a kid who doesn't have a care in the world. The kid in the past variously didn't believe their friends could smell a potty accident (and so there was no need to clean up), would rather mercilessly belittle their friends and brag, lie shamelessly - all kinds of mildly antisocial problems they were creating.
I would wind up explaining how the thing they were doing was not a good thing, and how their friends would be feeling. They would try to ignore me. I would press, "you have to understand this". Then when they finally accepted what I was trying to explain to them, they would suddenly get all depressed.
The guilty cynic in me can already see their future selves relating to their therapist how their parent found fault in everything they did, and would make them feel terrible about themselves. But I don't know how to get them to correct their behavior without them feeling some kind of embarrassment, remorse, or guilt about it in the process.
> those most affected by executive dysfunction require therapy to be more directive, specific and accountable; that is, processing of past trauma and relational approaches are not sufficient. What often does not seem like trauma therapy at all can lead to great strides forward if it allows individuals to obtain a greater sense of structure and mastery in day-to-day life tasks
I've spent so much time in therapy doing the whole "let's go through your childhood and your past" and it was just not effective in tackling what I really needed. It's remarkable how many licensed therapists just didn't know how to deal with this. I'm sure it's really helpful for some people, but outside of increasing some basic awareness about how my family of origin resulted in present-day behaviors, I definitely reached diminishing returns on that route.
As skeptical as I am of AI as an interventional tool for "reaching our most effective selves", I can't help but feel that if it can be wired up to do the appropriate "micro-interventions" that reflect OP's insight ("directive, specific and accountable ... to obtain a grater sense of structure"), we might see 'ADHD' become a thing of the past (at least for the people that share my phenotype of it). It's my hope at least...
If you can't help it anyway, would you rather have:
In both cases the dysfanction and the repercursions are constant.Accountability, mostly. Either by gamification, for example a simple small whiteboard counting how often I did y (or not, that would be a strike). Couple with someone holding me accountable it works wonders, throw in a "punishment" or reward... Or, if that doesn't fit, deadlines (which maybe is just another kind of accountability...). Both made me finish my degree in time and with a very good grade (A in Americano?).
How to translate this into the workplace, I'm not sure. You might have a supportive workplace and can be open about it, which is what I did.
Before psychology you had religion, even in the oldest form of Christianity, orthodoxy, you are not too dwell on the past, not to blaim others.
I doubt it really truly helps anyone to dig up the past
On a tangent, this makes me think about the explainability of ai models. In a way, discovering our childhood trauma and the way it affects us, is akin to searching for explainability
However, in practice, the best way to overcome whatever we want to overcome, might not be to first have an explanation of why/how it happened
> it was just not effective in tackling what I really needed.
That's how I would summarize my experiences with psychotherapy too. I think the only thing I have truly learned from therapy is what I feared most. There ain't much in this universe that can truly help with ADHD. Medications and other interventions barely move the needle for me. Seriously, I am at the point in my life where I am basically done fighting the condition. It's a Sisyphean effort that's mostly fueled by arbitrary societal expectations and my own egotistical desires and insecurities.
It’s not. There’s no evidence that it has any beneficial effects on anything other than the therapists wallet.
ADHD is an entirely made up diagnosis. There’s no evidence that any of this nonsense is real in any way shape or form.
It’s one thing: a lack of discipline.
I have autism(high functioning version which is linked with ADHD) diagnosis and whenever someone is mentioning something from the past, I am adapting to it by mirroring it by remembering it and then dealing with it again. It just becomes a cycle of misery. It took me some time to realize, that it is best to not talk about your failures - there is nothing good from reliving them and it is much better to just concentrate on things you enjoy and love to do.
Any statistical case with story is anecdotal - it has additional value that it helps to understand cases. As no way specialists are able to figure this out without prior knowledge and experience and lacking those background stories and 100% failure from specialists in my case can be called as anecdotal, but that is a statistical fact that affects personally me.
Also, the story resonates with my observations that my parents had traumatic events, though I don't think that it is something that causes ADHD or neurodiversity, but rather stems from the fact, that people that are neurodiverse would experience harsher emotions and emotional trauma and give the same treatment to their children.
But I've found this particular new-ish lens extremely illuminating, and it hasn't yet entered common parlance, so I post here in the hopes its helpful for others. After many years of hearing "tropes" from all 3 categories and having them only ~kinda feel like they fit, this was the one that made my jaw hit the ground and go holy shit, this is me, this is the thing that, if you understood it about it me, makes all the convoluted fuckery in my life click elegantly into place:
Pathological Demand Avoidance, or the more modern "friendlier" backronym, Persistent Drive for Autonomy.
Both are accurate, I find the former more accurate, if notably "harsher".
Here are some random links I only skimmed, you can find sources that resonate with you in particular.
https://childmind.org/article/pathological-demand-avoidance-...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4820467/
One example of a way this manifests in me personally, and how it relates to the intersection of the 3 things in the title:
I was massively stressed by a partner's attempts to get me to do things like clean out the garage, etc. I'd catastrophisize about the amount of time it would take, and spend the entire time in a sour mood, squirming for ways to get out of it. What ended up helping a great deal was explicitly setting time boxes at the outset, such as we will spend exactly three hours on this and stop at the three hour mark no matter what. Being able to "see the exit" in advance (and trust that it would be honored) pretty much completely resolved the issues.
* It has hints of helplessness/trappedness/persecution avoidance that feel like they could relate to growing up trapped in a house with a violently abusive father.
* It has high seeking for routine, predictability, and certainty that feel like they could be autism-coded.
* The "this genuinely feels in my body like the task will be forever" has time blindness, task-abandonment and followthrough issues that present like ADHD.
What is the actual balance of those 3 things in contributing? IDK, and it's probably different in various situations.
But for me, the PDA angle fits like a glove, and was the first thing felt like it succinctly encapsulated what was actually going on in my head.
Most people are diagnosed with autism or ADHD because they have problems due to trauma, or they have problems which gave them trauma, or them being having these problems made them more sensitive, which in turn traumatised them when it wouldn't have done the same to others. Many of the diagnostic criteria are trauma responses or otherwise external signals which have very little to do with the internal experience of actually having autism or ADHD.
What does a well-developed, untraumatised person with autism or ADHD even look like? We can make some broad statements based on assumptions, but many of those people won't even be diagnosed, since they've never had reason to. What made life work out for them isn't an active area of study, since finding that group of people is close to impossible.
I continue to be traumatized by my disorder. In fact, I’m currently homeless living on disability with my mental illness and also connective tissue disorder.
You can’t have these disorders and not be traumatized, at least not at the level of disorder I have. I was a brilliant child and a brilliant college student, but had psychosis that made me drop out and having me change my major every other year. I still manage to graduate on the Dean’s list though it took me seven years.
So yeah, still traumatized by my family just not wanting to talk to him anymore because I remind them too much of my nephew who died by suicide. And that’s literally the truth. I didn’t do anything to them. I’ve never heard anyone in my life or even punch someone.
I was relentlessly bullied in junior high through high school not only by fellow students but also by my brothers all older than me. Mostly due to the fact that they had mood disorders as well.
But I know trauma isn’t the cause of my disorder. I know it cause I see it in my genetics. I’m a genetic freak and I can’t get anyone to care about it. And that further is a trauma. The sense of being alone and ignored even though you’re highly intelligent. I mean, I taught myself genetics and have conversations pretending I’m a scientist all the time with people who write all these studies it only falls apart when they ask me what school I went to, and I finally tell them the truth. Then they just stopped talking to me. That’s crazy right? That’s trauma. Anyway, just venting.
I think it’s a miracle that you’re still alive. I can relate to a certain extent.
It was during the last year of my education as a Systems Engineer, where I was hospitalized into a mental institution due to a failed suicide attempt. I was 19 at that time. There I got my first diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia (ICD-10, F20.0). Due to my persistent depressive mood and suicidal ambivalence (as I understood) it was revised to schizoaffective disorder (ICD-10, F25.1). Several antidepressants, mood stabalizers and antipsychotics were tried like: Escitalopram, Duloxetine, Sertraline, Lithium, Quetiapine, Haloperidol, Clozapine and Olanzapine (as far as I can remember) and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
By a coincidence, I was assessed for autism spectrum disorder, because my behavior couldn't still really be explained (myself was also unable). My parents also got interviewed. It has become apparent that my father is also on the spectrum. Autism spectrum disorder (Asperger syndrome ICD-10, F84.5) and with recurrent depressive disorder with psychotic symptoms (ICD-10, F33.3) were the diagnoses when I was transferred to a locked care facility after more than a year.
In the facility I had weekly therapy with my psychiatrist. He confirmed the autism diagnosis and additionally diagnosed a PTSD (ICD-10, F43.1), after I told him about situations in my early childhood and my time in high school. The psychiatrist told me that, people in the spectrum are often victim of abuse, because of a certain vulnerability malicious people (like NPD) make use of.
Today, 9 years later I am still living in the facility.
> provide treatment
Yes, they can force you to stay in an isolation room for weeks or longer and inject medication. Sounds like a trauma, but it is sometimes necessary.
> effective treatment
Something like that is always desirable. However, reality can look different.
It does sound like we are similar, and frankly I wish I could be institutionalized as well. I have twice attempted suicide but managed to avoid ECT. I think scizoaffective is another name for complex Asperger's.
what country are you in? Just curious because I believe my illness comes from my mothers side, Finnish/Sami heritage.
@Telaneo >>>What does a well-developed, untraumatised person with autism or ADHD even look like? We can make some broad statements based on assumptions, but many of those people won't even be diagnosed, since they've never had reason to. What made life work out for them isn't an active area of study, since finding that group of people is close to impossible.
I was diagnosed ASD quite late, but only because of circumstances, where I was sliding even further down. Before that I was surviving, sometimes struggling, but I did not thought it as something to blame others or even life circumstances, including traumatic events(like death of my dad, when I was small), but simply because I was different, but clearly that attitude can only last as long. So, yeah - it really depends on how you look at it - if you think that you have a trauma, then you can find it, especially when dealing with traumatic events in later life. But if you ignore trauma and as long as you ignore it - you can be trauma free. It is rather contradictory, but mind works that way - and even now only my mind is the wall, that stops me from going further, while before I was able to circumnavigate that wall. The "wall" in my case right now is understanding that there is lack of helpful people around, that I can call my own. No real friends, and loss of those that were thought to be friends and no means to bond with people to make friendship, especially when getting older.
There is no way anyone can tell me there is not a large genetic risk factor in developing ADHD and autism. Because I see it in the genetics of people who have ADHD and autism. The most frequent polymorphisms I found in ADHD belong in a gene called DDC or dopamine decarboxylase.
Does trauma play a role? Probably. But genetics amplifies the risk that trauma will initiate these disorders..
I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type and OCD and I see those in my genetics as well. And my childhood was traumatic as all get out. But that’s also because my disorder is genetic, and my mother and brothers were also mentally ill.
It’s not nature or nurture, it is always nature and nurture.
Any mental issue, symptom or disease lie on a spectrum, in terms of quality and severity. Psychiatric diagnoses are overlapping in more than 50% often making a single diagnosis incomplete.