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Comment by rendx | Hacker News Reader

Well, that theory says that typically memories of traumatic events are repressed and show up only in form of symptoms like ADHD. Your "claim" that you had a non-traumatic childhood (and your parents did neither?) does not invalidate that theory.

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.

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The way the theory is phrased makes it unscientific and the HN community in general tends to be especially critical when that occurs.

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.

I merely asked a question about the team's position on it.

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. "

I think this is a much better expression of your point as it makes clear that there is a correlation within a subset of people who have ADHD - rather than implying that all people with ADHD were exposed to trauma as children. Everything brain related is extremely complicated and there are quite a few comorbidities that have already been identified (the ASD-ADHD link for instance) and it's quite possible there is a link for some people between their developmental environment and neurological processing. That overlap isn't all-inclusive though - a fair number of people with ADHD grew up in wonderfully supportive environments.

Brain stuff - it just ain't simple.

This supports a theory that childhood trauma may be one reason of many ADHD might eventually manifest, not a theory that it's the reason ADHD ever manifests. Even here, it's saying 27% of the diagnosed peope had identifiable trauma in their past. That seems to hint there are many other possible causes and ways to treat.

Yes, thank you for the sources.

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 only 27% of ADHD sufferers have experienced childhood trauma then we can be certain that such trauma is not its cause.

"Correlation" is the key word here. I think it's really important to keep in mind that a lot of people with ADHD have childhood trauma because of how adults responded to their ADHD symptoms. In my case, I have plenty of trauma, almost all of which was the direct results of adults shaming and criticizing me for traits that turned out to be due to ADHD. If your ADHD makes it impossible for you to focus in school, and the adults in your life shame and yell at you every day because you can't focus in school, you're going to have both trauma and ADHD. There's also a solid chance you'll end up with some anxiety and depression. All we know is that a) there's a correlation, b) lots of people with ADHD don't have severe childhood trauma, and c) it's a huge stretch to assume that every person with ADHD is repressing severely traumatic childhood events and never finding out about it. I think it's potentially plausible that generational trauma might have an epigenetic impact, but we'd need a lot more data to know that.

I really hope this doesn't come across as an attack against you or your environment because I don't mean it that way: My fairly recent understanding is that "shaming and criticizing" is something that can hurt or even traumatize you only when your caregivers didn't show you how to maintain healthy boundaries and regulate your own emotions (mostly by living it) - a.k.a. "self worth". I have learned this the hard way, and it sounds like you too.

I think a larger factor is that there are plenty of us folks with ADHD that didn't have traumatic childhood experiences and have had therapy in the past (with no impact on our ADHD tendancies).

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.

The irony is that ADHD is extremely unscientific. If you go down the rabbit-hole, you will find out that the diagnosis criteria is entirely arbitrary, and the neurodevelopmental claim is unproven. No conclusive brain imaging and no gene studies either. Taking addictive meds which you develop a dependency for your entire life with health risks, premised on a theory of brain dysfunction that is not proven. Also, a medicine that 1/4 college students find benefit from. The symptoms are real, but the cause is still unknown, and the medicine works for everyone. No long-term safety studies either.

I didn't downvote you but I honestly just hate this kind of thing.

"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?

It's always interesting to do some introspection. Why do you take offense from something that is simply not true for you?

"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 know this discussion is from long ago, but I just saw it, so I may as well respond.

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.)

Maybe there's just overlap between CPTSD symptoms and ADHD, not that they're literally the same thing.

Both PTSD and ADHD (and any other mental "disorder") are _defined as_ a list of symptoms, and do not imply different root causes.

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. [...]"

Yes, they do imply different root causes. PTSD requires a root cause of experiencing trauma. ADHD is not PTSD because it is not caused by trauma, and therefore therapy to deal with childhood trauma will not benefit people with ADHD.

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.

Therapy to deal with childhood trauma can absolutely benefit people with ADHD. Having ADHD doesn't magically make you immune to PTSD or other impacts of childhood trauma. It just means you also have ADHD. I know this because I have both ADHD and C-PTSD, and the ADHD was very, very present by the time the trauma started. Trauma symptoms exacerbate ADHD symptoms, and often vice versa. Both need to be treated. If kids' ADHD symptoms improve with trauma treatment, that doesn't necessarily mean they never had ADHD. It just means their overlapping symptoms might be less difficult to handle or, just as likely, mask. Ignoring the reality of overlap between trauma and ADHD serves only to erase people who have both. It benefits no one.

I'd go further and claim anyone benefits from trauma therapy, which is basically about healthy boundaries between you and the world, how nobody but you yourself are responsible for your feelings, how to regulate and enjoy every emotion, how to accept and welcome death, nonviolent communication, trauma-sensitive awareness of your own thoughts and (re)actions, how to tune your own belief systems more towards your own enjoyment and the benefit of those around you, the power of stories you tell yourself about the world and the power of rituals, etc.

No, I definitely didn't mean to say a kid with ADHD can't also have C-PTSD.

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.

While I don’t doubt your experience at all, really, I have great parents and a nice childhood in a happy house.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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