Comment by INTPenis
4 hours ago
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 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.
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.
I dunno isn’t sex a huge confounder?
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 :)
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'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."
> You need a trusted therapist to guide you into exposing what the subconscious mind is holding onto from infancy.
This sounds like a great way to implant false memories
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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.
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.
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."
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.
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100%. it's genetic, what's unclear about that?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8328933/
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> 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.