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.
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.
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.
> 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 simply wrote to the psychiatrist a note that whatever my parents say, they'll make themselves look good, and therefore will paint a rosy childhood for me. I guess it also helped that my then partner was there and told her of how my parents told a "funny story" that made his parents gasp in horror.
It was the story of how my brother was asked at school to draw a picture of his last birthday when he was about 5ish and drew stick figures carrying building material because we were building something in the yard and my parents forgot his birthday.
Good grief. I read your comment and … the levels of parental neglect wrapped up in your single story are overwhelming me.
I’m sure you don’t need validation from random internet strangers, but as one with a similar enough childhood, I wanted to share that it’s a thoroughly shit club to be in.
I’m sure a lot of people seeking an ADHD / Autism diagnosis after “discovering” they “totally have it” after seeing a video on social media do not in fact have ADHD / Autism.
Who knows? At least a YT video puts them in the direction of getting a proper evaluation after potential decades of struggling and not knowing "what's wrong with me", etc.
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 result mentioned here but worth highlighting is the capacity to dissociate and the existence of dissociative disorders. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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."
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.
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 would argue the relationship is in the other direction. People with ADHD often have childhood trauma caused by the way others treated their ADHD symptoms in childhood.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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".
There’s 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.
God sees through ALL bullshit, especially the ones we tell ourselves.
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.
Is that honest? Most parents are corrupted with the academic pursuit such that they seek better and better results and are now drugging their children (rather, that is a well known thing, so much so that the fucking children grow up and give it to their children with the same mental corruption of academic excellence - it’s godless shit).
God is god dude. Nothing is god, not your parents, not their “doing what is best”, they aren’t. They are playing god. No one is getting away with this bullshit in the end, because it’s a lie, and God knows and cares.
Thank you. There is no adhd , there is simply a drug that people resorted to when the sinful academic shitheads created a fucking impossibly ridiculously unnecessarily competitive and elitist institution that they force people to worship - Education.
This happens because most parents are godless. They don’t actually know what God wants from them and thus follow what this world tells them to follow, and this world is evil. This evil world tell them to enslave their children and feed them drugs for “education”, this is insanity.
> 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"
Think of growing up feeling inadequate. Even in the eyes of your parents. Then learning that you don't suck and were completely undeserving of being mistreated as a child.
(No child is deserving of being mistreated but that's a whole other bag of worms)
100%. And this has been repeated generation after generation. Its just that in the past 50 years we have started caring and being kind towards ourselves and it has shown tangible results in the progress of human civilization as a whole.
But some regions/cultures are lagging (but catching up fast) as per my experience living in 5 states across 3 countries spanning two very different continents.
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.
> but I don't use it as an excuse for not getting my work done.
Maybe it's not just a label as your are painting it, but rather a complex situation over ones entire life with many layers, which cannot be easily understood in a short time (and much less in a manager-employee conversation).
We're talking about a circumstance where it's something I personally have dealt with, for longer, often decades longer, than the people who are complaining about it to me. It's not as if I don't understand the situation.
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.
A lot of traditional ways of "dealing with circumstances" are very unhealthy (and often toxic) and have adverse effects on people around you. Unless your methods are deemed healthy by a mental health professional you can't be sure.
Sure, and I have plenty of unhealthy habits. But getting a Dx didn't lead me to say "oh my god, the sun is brighter, the air smells fresher, all is revealed!". My response was closer to "yeah, no shit".
I should add, even when I was in grade school it was discussed for me to get evaluated. But that was far enough back that it was just "hyperactivity" & before people started talking in terms of ADD, ADHD, and subtypes, and I didn't match the criteria back then. So it wasn't like it was a big surprise decades later when revised criteria started matching my phenotype
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 innate parts that existed prior to birth
What does this mean? Do you mean the congenital aspects of a disorder?
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.
This may be useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diathesis-stress_model
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.
> 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 simply wrote to the psychiatrist a note that whatever my parents say, they'll make themselves look good, and therefore will paint a rosy childhood for me. I guess it also helped that my then partner was there and told her of how my parents told a "funny story" that made his parents gasp in horror.
What was the funny story.
It was the story of how my brother was asked at school to draw a picture of his last birthday when he was about 5ish and drew stick figures carrying building material because we were building something in the yard and my parents forgot his birthday.
Good grief. I read your comment and … the levels of parental neglect wrapped up in your single story are overwhelming me.
I’m sure you don’t need validation from random internet strangers, but as one with a similar enough childhood, I wanted to share that it’s a thoroughly shit club to be in.
Not sure if you noticed the play. You don't have ADHD or autism, you just suffered from trauma.
Government doesn't like that "too many" people want to get support, so looks like they reach for academics.
Same crap they did with cannabis and others when it was impacting certain interests.
I’m sure a lot of people seeking an ADHD / Autism diagnosis after “discovering” they “totally have it” after seeing a video on social media do not in fact have ADHD / Autism.
Who knows? At least a YT video puts them in the direction of getting a proper evaluation after potential decades of struggling and not knowing "what's wrong with me", etc.
Yes and a lot of folks do too, it’s not useful to make sweeping statements either way.
Yes? That why you go to a certified professional to see if you have it.
Diagnosis isn't 'read online.'
Of course. You know better other people minds than they know themselves. Why being spiteful? Are you jealous that someone is disabled?
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 result mentioned here but worth highlighting is the capacity to dissociate and the existence of dissociative disorders. 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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4340974/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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."
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.
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.
I've heard it described as, "Nature loaded the gun, nurture fired it."
> every single person I've met with ADHD has had severe childhood trauma.
Every person with headache I met had painkillers.
Therefore their pain is caused by painkillers.
Daft.
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.
You are arguing that childhood trauma doesn't have a causal relationship to ADHD?
I would argue the relationship is in the other direction. People with ADHD often have childhood trauma caused by the way others treated their ADHD symptoms in childhood.
Why not bi-directional?
because science says it's not how it works.
Huh, can you tell me the name of the rule?
When I search for 'bidirectional causality' I get a lot of scientific results. Are those all wrong?
100%. it's genetic, what's unclear about that?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8328933/
Take it with grain of salt.
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.
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.
I think another cause is our media environment.
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.
i apologize for my use of AI but this is such a big topic in my family I needed to make an image to send around; https://i.imgur.com/Oyaivfl.jpeg
I see a lot of myself in this.
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.
Apparently you didn’t even proofread it, and in all likelihood it’s not just the orthography that’s incorrect in it.
No one wants to take the time to read something you didn’t take the time to write.
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 :)
Must be challenging, and I'm rooting for you.
lol got it: https://i.imgur.com/WypRMww.png
Updates:
https://imgur.com/a/3xzbW6B
https://i.imgur.com/Gm6GHSi.png
https://i.imgur.com/4pGdaFU.png
> 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".
Sounds like you were abused as a child and you find this upsetting.
More like government doesn't want people to get support they need.
There’s 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.
God sees through ALL bullshit, especially the ones we tell ourselves.
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.
Is that honest? Most parents are corrupted with the academic pursuit such that they seek better and better results and are now drugging their children (rather, that is a well known thing, so much so that the fucking children grow up and give it to their children with the same mental corruption of academic excellence - it’s godless shit).
God is god dude. Nothing is god, not your parents, not their “doing what is best”, they aren’t. They are playing god. No one is getting away with this bullshit in the end, because it’s a lie, and God knows and cares.
Thank you. There is no adhd , there is simply a drug that people resorted to when the sinful academic shitheads created a fucking impossibly ridiculously unnecessarily competitive and elitist institution that they force people to worship - Education.
This happens because most parents are godless. They don’t actually know what God wants from them and thus follow what this world tells them to follow, and this world is evil. This evil world tell them to enslave their children and feed them drugs for “education”, this is insanity.
It’s godless.
> 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"
Think of growing up feeling inadequate. Even in the eyes of your parents. Then learning that you don't suck and were completely undeserving of being mistreated as a child.
(No child is deserving of being mistreated but that's a whole other bag of worms)
100%. And this has been repeated generation after generation. Its just that in the past 50 years we have started caring and being kind towards ourselves and it has shown tangible results in the progress of human civilization as a whole.
But some regions/cultures are lagging (but catching up fast) as per my experience living in 5 states across 3 countries spanning two very different continents.
What about before? When and why did we stop caring I wonder.
A diagnosis did not alter my thinking in this regard whatsoever. That's part of what I was saying I don't understand.
Other humans brains work differently than yours. What didn’t work for you did work for them.
The main issue with undiagnosed ADHD is, that people assume they can solve your issues with ideas don't work for people with ADHD.
So, your life is sprinkled with unhelpful people that mean well but think you're just not listening to them.
And you yourself think, your too dumb or lazy or whatever to get things done consistently.
The you find out it's ADHD and you learn different methods to get things done. Which is nice.
But it's also very sad if that happens years after childhood. Because you realise, you might had a more successful life if you knew earlier
> A diagnosis did not alter my thinking in this regard whatsoever.
YMMV, maybe other individuals need confirmation/closure on the topic in their lives to help them move onto the next chapter? Knowledge is power.
(Post-comment reflection: this is needed in a lot of other aspects in life, why not here as well?)
What does a diagnosis have to do with any of that? How is that a whole other bag worms, that’s exactly the topic at hand.
Sounds like bad management. Explanations aren't excuses, they're simply the reason something happens.
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.
> have you offered them an accommodation?
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.
> but I don't use it as an excuse for not getting my work done.
Maybe it's not just a label as your are painting it, but rather a complex situation over ones entire life with many layers, which cannot be easily understood in a short time (and much less in a manager-employee conversation).
We're talking about a circumstance where it's something I personally have dealt with, for longer, often decades longer, than the people who are complaining about it to me. It's not as if I don't understand the situation.
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.
Perhaps you should not be a manager beyond rote supervisory responsibilities if you cannot understand this aspect of people.
Did you miss the part where I have the same circumstances as them?
Even some other people with ADHD seem to treat it like a trait, and not like a disorder.
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.
> Even some other people with ADHD seem to treat it like a trait, and not like a disorder.
Would a valid example of this be the ADHD tag on twitch streamer channels?
Then you don't have adhd
sure thing, mr scotsman
A lot of traditional ways of "dealing with circumstances" are very unhealthy (and often toxic) and have adverse effects on people around you. Unless your methods are deemed healthy by a mental health professional you can't be sure.
Sure, and I have plenty of unhealthy habits. But getting a Dx didn't lead me to say "oh my god, the sun is brighter, the air smells fresher, all is revealed!". My response was closer to "yeah, no shit".
I should add, even when I was in grade school it was discussed for me to get evaluated. But that was far enough back that it was just "hyperactivity" & before people started talking in terms of ADD, ADHD, and subtypes, and I didn't match the criteria back then. So it wasn't like it was a big surprise decades later when revised criteria started matching my phenotype
Then you don't have a good therapist.