ADHD Ignites Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

Can't wait until people start recognizing ADHD as being linked to dissociation spectrum disorders.

These are not novel symptoms. This is not unexpected. This is exactly what you'd expect to see from someone benefitting from/struggling with dissociation. ADHD is highly correlated with trauma in a lot of ways, it really needs to stop being its own subclinical diagnosis.

This is the reason that a purely categorical system is so dangerous for the mental health narrative in the US & etc. Van der Kolk and co have worked a ton at bringing complex trauma into the narrative, but the politics of the scene really don't allow for that as much, at least at the broader levels that I can see.

What you get with a purely categorical system is reinventing the wheel many times over without being able to connect seemly disparate concepts, a common problem with attempting to model a higher dimensional problem with a lower dimensional projection. You lose your locality constraints because things can't reasonably live "next to" each other, and so you get branching tree structures that are clones or near-clones of each other.

Someday we'll move past this. RSD is just another name for a protector response, which is generally mediated by the lack of the prefrontal cortex operating as much as it does normally paired with the fight-or-flight (+ the other fs) resulting from an engrained trauma response. You also get shutdowns, etc that aren't accurately described by RSD, because it fails to capture the breadth of what's actually going on behind the scenes there.

Unfortunately the state of mental health in America is rather barbaric at the moment, it'll in all likeliness be the thing we look back on in 50 years like we do at smoking. However, it's a good reminder that even though we're at the latest year we've ever been to as a world, we're not "all the way there" on things, and never quite/exactly will be.

well, this explains a lot.

thank you very much for posting this. :)