Comment by kstrauser

I think a larger factor is that there are plenty of us folks with ADHD that didn't have traumatic childhood experiences and have had therapy in the past (with no impact on our ADHD tendancies).

If the comment was intended to say that some people may have ADHD like symptoms due to childhood trauma and that might be resolved by working that out it was quite poorly worded - to me at least it read as coding all ADHD as treatable by therapy and environmentally caused and that is simply untrue for me. There may be a certain amount of defensiveness in our community in particular because for a long time ADHD was written off as behavioral issue causing laziness rather than being treated as a true neurologically divergent condition. I was diagnosed about twenty two years ago and I've seen a lot of FUD around my condition and the ineffectiveness of ritalin and other stimulants - they very well may have been mis-prescribed in the 90s but for a decent chunk of us it has been highly impactful.

The irony is that ADHD is extremely unscientific. If you go down the rabbit-hole, you will find out that the diagnosis criteria is entirely arbitrary, and the neurodevelopmental claim is unproven. No conclusive brain imaging and no gene studies either. Taking addictive meds which you develop a dependency for your entire life with health risks, premised on a theory of brain dysfunction that is not proven. Also, a medicine that 1/4 college students find benefit from. The symptoms are real, but the cause is still unknown, and the medicine works for everyone. No long-term safety studies either.

I merely asked a question about the team's position on it.

To pick a random study of many: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29086104/

"Children with ADHD were more likely than controls to have ever experienced a traumatic event (27 vs 16%; OR: 1.99; 95% CI 1.21, 3.27). This difference remained significant in the adjusted model (OR: 1.76, 95% CI 1.03, 3.01) accounting for child factors (age and gender) and family socio-demographic factors (parent age, parent high school completion and single parent status). Among those with ADHD, trauma-exposed children had higher parent-reported ADHD severity and more externalizing problems than non-exposed children, however, this effect attenuated in adjusted model. Children with ADHD were more likely to have experienced a traumatic event than controls. The high prevalence of trauma exposure in our sample suggests that clinicians should evaluate for trauma histories in children presenting with ADHD. "

Or another: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27816036/

"Childhood Trauma Exposure is common in Substance Use Disorder patients and associated with adult ADHD but not with the persistence of childhood ADHD into adulthood. These findings suggest that the increased rate of adult ADHD in SUD patients with CTE is not the consequence of a negative effect of CTE on the persistence of childhood ADHD into adulthood, but a direct expression of the high rate of childhood ADHD in SUD patients with CTE."

Or this one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19337826/

"Controlling for demographic variables, comorbid disorders, and ADHD severity, we noted significant associations between lifetime depression and environmental adversities, including victimization trauma, parent-child conflict, and behaviorally-independent negative life events. "

It's always interesting to do some introspection. Why do you take offense from something that is simply not true for you?

"There is a theory that claims everyone who has ADHD has pink hair." - "I don't have pink hair." - "Are you sure? Did you check?" - "Yes, I did."

Actually, this kind of thing is exactly what you learn in trauma therapy to watch out for, take note, and investigate. You call it "triggers".

Nowhere in this thread did I claim that the theory is proven. Just that it is out there, has a big following, and is also actively being investigated by the research community. I do think that it is worth discussing, which I tried to do in ways that should not offend anyone.

Also, very likely what we have here is a misunderstanding of what we agree to call "trauma", or "adverse childhood experiences" (and more importantly, what they have meant for a little child that went through them).

Both PTSD and ADHD (and any other mental "disorder") are _defined as_ a list of symptoms, and do not imply different root causes.

see e.g. "The hidden links between mental disorders" https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00922-8 available on sci-hub

"Since the 1950s, psychiatrists have used an exhaustive volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition. It lists all the recognized disorders, from autism and obsessive–compulsive disorder to depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. Each is defined by symptoms. The inherent assumption is that each disorder is distinct, and arises for different reasons. However, even before the DSM-5 was published in 2013, many researchers argued that this approach was flawed. “Any clinician could have told you that patients had not read the DSM and didn’t conform to the DSM,” says Hyman, who helped to draft the manual’s fifth edition. Few patients fit into each neat set of criteria. Instead, people often have a mix of symptoms from different disorders. Even if someone has a fairly clear diagnosis of depression, they often have symptoms of another disorder such as anxiety. “If you have one disorder, you’re much more likely to have another,” says Ted Satterthwaite, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

This implies that the way clinicians have partitioned mental disorders is wrong. Psychiatrists have tried to solve this by splitting disorders into ever-finer subtypes. “If you look at the way the DSM has evolved over time, the book gets thicker and thicker,” says Satterthwaite. But the problem persists — the subtypes are still a poor reflection of the clusters of symptoms that many patients have. As a result, the world’s largest funder of mental-health science, the US National Institute of Mental Health, changed the way it funded research. [...]"