It's interesting how I was downvoted. I am just curious, I am not saying one or the other is "true". I have no idea, I am not a professional. However, I do think it is a relevant question to ask and discussion to have.
I am just looking into this as someone who only in his 40s discovered that he had significant childhood trauma that he was not in any way aware of, and my mother too which is something we never talked about, and that my symptoms and my "suffering" has finally almost disappeared now that I'm doing proper trauma therapy. I would have claimed I had "great parents" and "no childhood trauma" in the same way as you, and rejected that theory, if you had asked me a few years ago.
I also want to add that the scientific-ness of it or not doesn't invalidate it as an explanatory device in your personal journey - they are on orthogonal axes.
To pick a random study of many: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29086104/
"Children with ADHD were more likely than controls to have ever experienced a traumatic event (27 vs 16%; OR: 1.99; 95% CI 1.21, 3.27). This difference remained significant in the adjusted model (OR: 1.76, 95% CI 1.03, 3.01) accounting for child factors (age and gender) and family socio-demographic factors (parent age, parent high school completion and single parent status). Among those with ADHD, trauma-exposed children had higher parent-reported ADHD severity and more externalizing problems than non-exposed children, however, this effect attenuated in adjusted model. Children with ADHD were more likely to have experienced a traumatic event than controls. The high prevalence of trauma exposure in our sample suggests that clinicians should evaluate for trauma histories in children presenting with ADHD. "
Or another: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27816036/
"Childhood Trauma Exposure is common in Substance Use Disorder patients and associated with adult ADHD but not with the persistence of childhood ADHD into adulthood. These findings suggest that the increased rate of adult ADHD in SUD patients with CTE is not the consequence of a negative effect of CTE on the persistence of childhood ADHD into adulthood, but a direct expression of the high rate of childhood ADHD in SUD patients with CTE."
Or this one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19337826/
"Controlling for demographic variables, comorbid disorders, and ADHD severity, we noted significant associations between lifetime depression and environmental adversities, including victimization trauma, parent-child conflict, and behaviorally-independent negative life events. "
Brain stuff - it just ain't simple.
When I'm hearing now is "ADHD has a correlation with traumatic events." What I was hearing before was "If you don't think your ADHD is a result of trauma, you need to dig deeper."
It goes to show you that what's being written isn't always how folks interpret it.
If the comment was intended to say that some people may have ADHD like symptoms due to childhood trauma and that might be resolved by working that out it was quite poorly worded - to me at least it read as coding all ADHD as treatable by therapy and environmentally caused and that is simply untrue for me. There may be a certain amount of defensiveness in our community in particular because for a long time ADHD was written off as behavioral issue causing laziness rather than being treated as a true neurologically divergent condition. I was diagnosed about twenty two years ago and I've seen a lot of FUD around my condition and the ineffectiveness of ritalin and other stimulants - they very well may have been mis-prescribed in the 90s but for a decent chunk of us it has been highly impactful.
see e.g. "The hidden links between mental disorders" https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00922-8 available on sci-hub
"Since the 1950s, psychiatrists have used an exhaustive volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition. It lists all the recognized disorders, from autism and obsessive–compulsive disorder to depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. Each is defined by symptoms. The inherent assumption is that each disorder is distinct, and arises for different reasons. However, even before the DSM-5 was published in 2013, many researchers argued that this approach was flawed. “Any clinician could have told you that patients had not read the DSM and didn’t conform to the DSM,” says Hyman, who helped to draft the manual’s fifth edition. Few patients fit into each neat set of criteria. Instead, people often have a mix of symptoms from different disorders. Even if someone has a fairly clear diagnosis of depression, they often have symptoms of another disorder such as anxiety. “If you have one disorder, you’re much more likely to have another,” says Ted Satterthwaite, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
This implies that the way clinicians have partitioned mental disorders is wrong. Psychiatrists have tried to solve this by splitting disorders into ever-finer subtypes. “If you look at the way the DSM has evolved over time, the book gets thicker and thicker,” says Satterthwaite. But the problem persists — the subtypes are still a poor reflection of the clusters of symptoms that many patients have. As a result, the world’s largest funder of mental-health science, the US National Institute of Mental Health, changed the way it funded research. [...]"
It is, however, very true that they can look the same. I work with kids who have been through trauma and it is only on the order of years since people started recognizing that in these kids, many ADHD symptoms were caused by trauma and could be reduced or go away entirely with trauma-specific therapy.
What I meant was that a kid who doesn't have any background of trauma can still have ADHD, but does not have PTSD, and no amount of therapy for childhood trauma will help their ADHD symptoms. That's my point - that there is overlap in symptoms but they are still different problems, that require different treatment.
"You didn't have childhood trauma you say? Sounds just like something somebody who did have childhood trauma would say!"
Like what the hell are you supposed to say to something like this?
"There is a theory that claims everyone who has ADHD has pink hair." - "I don't have pink hair." - "Are you sure? Did you check?" - "Yes, I did."
Actually, this kind of thing is exactly what you learn in trauma therapy to watch out for, take note, and investigate. You call it "triggers".
Nowhere in this thread did I claim that the theory is proven. Just that it is out there, has a big following, and is also actively being investigated by the research community. I do think that it is worth discussing, which I tried to do in ways that should not offend anyone.
Also, very likely what we have here is a misunderstanding of what we agree to call "trauma", or "adverse childhood experiences" (and more importantly, what they have meant for a little child that went through them).
I didn't say I find this offensive, I said "I just hate this sort of thing". That implies annoyance and disdain, not offense.
> There is a theory that claims everyone who has ADHD has pink hair." - "I don't have pink hair." - "Are you sure? Did you check?" - "Yes, I did."
> Actually, this kind of thing is exactly what you learn in trauma therapy to watch out for, take note, and investigate. You call it "triggers".
I'm confused what point you're making with these two paragraphs. That example back and forth is a great example of what sort of thing I meant when I said "I just hate this sort of thing". I would suggest that if you don't find the first interlocutor in that dialogue to be really annoying, then you're the weird one, not the person who already knows they don't have pink hair and really did not need to check.
If asking someone with non-pink hair whether they've checked the color of their hair is indeed an important part of training for trauma therapy, then I'm skeptical of those training programs. (But I doubt this is actually the case, and think it's more likely that it's an incorrect representation.)
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.