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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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