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tossintowind320 3 minutes ago [-]
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?
E-Reverance 1 hours ago [-]
> 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
exe34 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
digitaltrees 53 minutes ago [-]
What was the funny story.
exe34 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
mootothemax 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
varispeed 1 hours ago [-]
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.
E-Reverance 5 minutes ago [-]
> You don't have ADHD or autism, you just suffered from trauma.
Yeah that's exactly what I'm saying, but more specifically I wanted to relieve myself of blame through a label my parents could more easily empathize with
tecleandor 3 minutes ago [-]
It can be both. It frequently is when you're trying to navigate a condition and everybody is downplaying it or just pointing it as your fault for being stupid or lazy. And, yes, years of that (frequently involuntary) gaslighting creates trauma.
binary132 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
evil-olive 15 minutes ago [-]
this dismissive attitude, with the scare quotes, is so bizarre to me.
to make an analogy to physical health:
someone has chronic gastrointestinal pain, but they just live with it and have never talked to a doctor about it.
they watch a video from someone talking about having chronic GI pain and getting diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.
they go to a doctor and say "I think I have ulcerative colitis"
the doctor runs tests, and they come back negative.
I get that it's tempting to say "oh this person was misled by a video on social media"
but, the pain they were feeling was real. even if they jumped to an incorrect conclusion about its cause.
and after those negative tests, they can work with their doctor to find out "ok, what else might be causing my symptoms?"
taurath 28 minutes ago [-]
Yes and a lot of folks do too, it’s not useful to make sweeping statements either way.
amatecha 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
KerrAvon 24 minutes ago [-]
Yes? That why you go to a certified professional to see if you have it.
mhurron 32 minutes ago [-]
Diagnosis isn't 'read online.'
varispeed 42 minutes ago [-]
Of course. You know better other people minds than they know themselves. Why being spiteful? Are you jealous that someone is disabled?
taurath 1 hours ago [-]
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.
OgsyedIE 1 hours ago [-]
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.
boplicity 41 minutes ago [-]
> the innate parts that existed prior to birth
What does this mean? Do you mean the congenital aspects of a disorder?
OgsyedIE 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
glenpierce 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
rini17 14 minutes ago [-]
So what if few people started to "misperceive themselves" as ADHD? Why it's considered a reason for panic?
The increased awareness genuinely helps to many others. I suspect there's widespread denial do be untangled, too.
INTPenis 1 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.
rwyinuse 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
cs02rm0 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
dguest 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
sourthyme 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
plufz 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
skissane 47 minutes ago [-]
> 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”
rand_r 35 minutes ago [-]
"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."
jaggederest 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
kelseyfrog 33 minutes ago [-]
I've heard it described as, "Nature loaded the gun, nurture fired it."
varispeed 39 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
luckydata 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
anonthrownaway 44 minutes ago [-]
You are arguing that childhood trauma doesn't have a causal relationship to ADHD?
Clent 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
kelseyfrog 32 minutes ago [-]
Why not bi-directional?
luckydata 30 minutes ago [-]
because science says it's not how it works.
kelseyfrog 21 minutes ago [-]
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?
> For most people with ADHD, many genetic and environmental risk factors accumulate to cause the disorder.
i.e., for most people, there is no singular cause.
yipinwong 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
Fazel94 11 minutes ago [-]
I didn't get which is which at last.
cs1996 59 minutes ago [-]
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
barbazoo 42 minutes ago [-]
I see a lot of myself in this.
cs1996 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
layer8 27 minutes ago [-]
Apparently you didn’t even proofread it, and in all likelihood it’s not just the orthography that’s incorrect in it.
lurk2 42 minutes ago [-]
No one wants to take the time to read something you didn’t take the time to write.
egeozcan 39 minutes ago [-]
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 :)
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.
hinkley 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
rwyinuse 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
d--b 25 minutes ago [-]
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 recommend seeing a specialist for a proper diagnosis. It'll be worth it.
varispeed 1 hours ago [-]
> 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".
MajorTakeaway 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you were abused as a child and you find this upsetting.
varispeed 1 hours ago [-]
More like government doesn't want people to get support they need.
iwontberude 50 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
general_reveal 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
glenpierce 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
general_reveal 25 minutes ago [-]
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” excuse, nothing. 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.
jghn 1 hours ago [-]
> 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"
richardlblair 1 hours ago [-]
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)
jitix 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
barbazoo 45 minutes ago [-]
What about before? When and why did we stop caring I wonder.
jghn 53 minutes ago [-]
A diagnosis did not alter my thinking in this regard whatsoever. That's part of what I was saying I don't understand.
k__ 36 minutes ago [-]
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
x______________ 36 minutes ago [-]
> 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?)
glenpierce 22 minutes ago [-]
Other humans brains work differently than yours. What didn’t work for you did work for them.
CPLX 12 minutes ago [-]
This logic doesn't make sense though. What does "learning you don't suck" mean? You still do "suck" but whatever definition was being used at the time. You still didn't do your homework or stay calm in class, that actually happened. It had consequences.
The only way it does make sense is if you think the consequences should be different because some doctor give it a name. But then you say nobody should have been treated that way regardless of the diagnoses. If the diagnoses doesn't matter why does it matter?
As someone who definitely has dealt with all this for my entire life I've found it much easier to just focus on behavior and consequences and alternatives. Trying to place it all in a moral/medical framework is a black hole. If your actions hurt others or otherwise have negative results you have to address that.
LudwigNagasena 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
8 minutes ago [-]
HighNunChicken 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
jghn 36 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
x______________ 32 minutes ago [-]
> 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).
jghn 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
x______________ 14 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
I suppose that this is a clear case for the commonly used acronym here on Hackernews: YMMV (your mileage may vary (or the other that I forgot)).
Maybe you forgot that despite us being all human, part of the same species, living on the same planet: no individuals will have the exact same life, same thought process, same ability to deal, cope or handle adversity or environmental factors.
It feels wrong to read you saying that you are comparing yourself to others in such a manner...
HighNunChicken 20 minutes ago [-]
Once again, explanation ≠ excuse.
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.
jghn 18 minutes ago [-]
You did see that I had the same explanation and I don't use it to explain away poor performance, right?
And also pay attention to how I said I kept those thoughts to myself. I recognize that the younger generations seem to feel it's all quite alright, and I handle it appropriately in the contemporary style.
HighNunChicken 3 minutes ago [-]
Sure you may have the same diagnosis as them, but you do not have the same life experiences.
Plus, isn’t this comment thread under a post regarding a link between ADHD and complex trauma? Complex trauma is… complex. I doubt that you share the same circumstances that resulted in the diagnosis that you and your reports both share.
cwillu 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
egeozcan 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
x______________ 30 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
tfigueroa 41 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps you should not be a manager beyond rote supervisory responsibilities if you cannot understand this aspect of people.
jghn 35 minutes ago [-]
Did you miss the part where I have the same circumstances as them?
jitix 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
jghn 54 minutes ago [-]
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
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?
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’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.
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.
Yeah that's exactly what I'm saying, but more specifically I wanted to relieve myself of blame through a label my parents could more easily empathize with
to make an analogy to physical health:
someone has chronic gastrointestinal pain, but they just live with it and have never talked to a doctor about it.
they watch a video from someone talking about having chronic GI pain and getting diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.
they go to a doctor and say "I think I have ulcerative colitis"
the doctor runs tests, and they come back negative.
I get that it's tempting to say "oh this person was misled by a video on social media"
but, the pain they were feeling was real. even if they jumped to an incorrect conclusion about its cause.
and after those negative tests, they can work with their doctor to find out "ok, what else might be causing my symptoms?"
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.
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.
What does this mean? Do you mean the congenital aspects of a disorder?
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
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.
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.
The increased awareness genuinely helps to many others. I suspect there's widespread denial do be untangled, too.
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 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'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 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."
Every person with headache I met had painkillers.
Therefore their pain is caused by painkillers.
Daft.
When I search for 'bidirectional causality' I get a lot of scientific results. Are those all wrong?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8328933/
> For most people with ADHD, many genetic and environmental risk factors accumulate to cause the disorder.
i.e., for most people, there is no singular cause.
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.
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.
Updates:
https://imgur.com/a/3xzbW6B
https://i.imgur.com/Gm6GHSi.png
https://i.imgur.com/4pGdaFU.png
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.
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.
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’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.
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” excuse, nothing. 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.
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"
(No child is deserving of being mistreated but that's a whole other bag of worms)
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.
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
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?)
The only way it does make sense is if you think the consequences should be different because some doctor give it a name. But then you say nobody should have been treated that way regardless of the diagnoses. If the diagnoses doesn't matter why does it matter?
As someone who definitely has dealt with all this for my entire life I've found it much easier to just focus on behavior and consequences and alternatives. Trying to place it all in a moral/medical framework is a black hole. If your actions hurt others or otherwise have negative results you have to address that.
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.
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).
I suppose that this is a clear case for the commonly used acronym here on Hackernews: YMMV (your mileage may vary (or the other that I forgot)).
Maybe you forgot that despite us being all human, part of the same species, living on the same planet: no individuals will have the exact same life, same thought process, same ability to deal, cope or handle adversity or environmental factors.
It feels wrong to read you saying that you are comparing yourself to others in such a manner...
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.
And also pay attention to how I said I kept those thoughts to myself. I recognize that the younger generations seem to feel it's all quite alright, and I handle it appropriately in the contemporary style.
Plus, isn’t this comment thread under a post regarding a link between ADHD and complex trauma? Complex trauma is… complex. I doubt that you share the same circumstances that resulted in the diagnosis that you and your reports both share.
Learning that you were not, in fact, a horrible and wicked child that your parents had to endure is life changing.
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?
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