ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]

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?

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't get which is which at last.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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".

> 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"