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.
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
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.
There you go. Seems like the academics are either pressured to gaslight people managing ADHD and autism or jump on bandwagon hoping a department notices and perhaps provide funding or other jolly.
They should get fucked with this harmful "research".
I never understood this sentiment. It's just who I am and always have been. And I learned to deal with the circumstances. I don't understand why it makes people feel better to have a diagnosis they can blame.
Perhaps it's a generational thing? I know as a manager it's pretty common for reports to cite them having ADHD as why they can't do this or that. Meanwhile I mentally roll my eyes thinking, "no shit, me too, but I manage to get this done"
(No child is deserving of being mistreated but that's a whole other bag of worms)
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 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.
Assuming ADHD is to some extent a chemical thing (I.e. brain didn’t properly develop impulse control or attention span or whatever), we now live in a world that enables those exact things.
If you lived in a world where the principal media were written articles/books and long-form TV shows/movies, your brain was still trained to focus.
Most media is now basically an ADHD simulator, with constant context switching, intense stimuli etc. which only reinforces whatever ADHD traits one may have.
I would guess it’s somewhat similar to the interaction between smoking and asthma.
Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers. Which is why teenagers test boundaries constantly. They have to divorce from their parents incrementally, and on their own timeline, not the parents’. Your brain has reward systems to encourage that, but can also be hijacked by substances, which is why we pay special attention to substance abuse in children. But there are many reasons for children to fail to socialize, some of them environmental, and a biological drive to fill that with something (including The Internet and “engagement” in particular) if it can’t be filled with social safety. And once it has begun it can be a feedback loop of intentionally choosing one over the other.
There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.
I’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.
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.
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.
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.
The increased awareness genuinely helps to many others.
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?"
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.
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?)
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
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.
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
This worries me.
Also, what's so noble about hiding own struggles?
And also, why shouldn't I be relieved when I understand a big factor in my struggles?
This is a very confusing comment.
Would a valid example of this be the ADHD tag on twitch streamer channels?
ADHD is often an executive function disorder. As a manager, have you offered them an accommodation?
Lots of “I” statements from you and not a whole lot of understanding.
Yes, and that wasn't my point. Except for one case who was definitely abusing the situation, I never once revealed that my inner monologue was pointing out that I have the same issues they do but I don't use it as an excuse for not getting my work done.
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.
Learning that you were not, in fact, a horrible and wicked child that your parents had to endure is life changing.
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.
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.
I'm saying this to offer an honest counterpoint to your anecdote. I don't think you meant to imply that ADHD is entirely due to trauma, but in fairness to parents it's probably worth entertaining the idea that some kids are just born that way.
I think ADHD is something you are born with, but there are many other things that can cause similar difficulties, including trauma. And as the linked article mentions, neurodivergent children are more likely to have parents who suffer from similar difficulties, which may increase their chance of suffering some sort of childhood trauma.
OgsyedIE•59m ago
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•29m ago
What does this mean? Do you mean the congenital aspects of a disorder?
doublerabbit•25m ago
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.
OgsyedIE•20m ago
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