Yet another Hacker News

88 points skeptical1884 1 hour ago 27 comments

OgsyedIE 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

taurath 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

E-Reverance 23 minutes ago | parent

> 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

varispeed 14 minutes ago | parent

Not sure if you noticed the play. You don't have ADHD or autism, you just suffered from trauma.

Government doesn't like that "too many" people want to get support, so looks like they reach for academics.

Same crap they did with cannabis and others when it was impacting certain interests.

exe34 12 minutes ago | parent

I simply wrote to the psychiatrist a note that whatever my parents say, they'll make themselves look good, and therefore will paint a rosy childhood for me. I guess it also helped that my then partner was there and told her of how my parents told a "funny story" that made his parents gasp in horror.

digitaltrees 6 minutes ago | parent

What was the funny story.

varispeed 19 minutes ago | parent

> 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".

MajorTakeaway 16 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like you were abused as a child and you find this upsetting.

varispeed 14 minutes ago | parent

More like government doesn't want people to get support they need.

jghn 16 minutes ago | parent

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"

neta1337 14 minutes ago | parent

Then you don't have adhd

jghn 6 minutes ago | parent

sure thing, mr scotsman

richardlblair 14 minutes ago | parent

Think of growing up feeling inadequate. Even in the eyes of your parents. Then learning that you don't suck and were completely undeserving of being mistreated as a child.

(No child is deserving of being mistreated but that's a whole other bag of worms)

jghn 6 minutes ago | parent

A diagnosis did not alter my thinking in this regard whatsoever. That's part of what I was saying I don't understand.

jitix 6 minutes ago | parent

100%. And this has been repeated generation after generation. Its just that in the past 50 years we have started caring and being kind towards ourselves and it has shown tangible results in the progress of human civilization as a whole.

But some regions/cultures are lagging (but catching up fast) as per my experience living in 5 states across 3 countries spanning two very different continents.

jitix 11 minutes ago | parent

A lot of traditional ways of "dealing with circumstances" are very unhealthy (and often toxic) and have adverse effects on people around you. Unless your methods are deemed healthy by a mental health professional you can't be sure.

jghn 7 minutes ago | parent

Sure, and I have plenty of unhealthy habits. But getting a Dx didn't lead me to say "oh my god, the sun is brighter, the air smells fresher, all is revealed!". My response was closer to "yeah, no shit".

I should add, even when I was in grade school it was discussed for me to get evaluated. But that was far enough back that it was just "hyperactivity" & before people started talking in terms of ADD, ADHD, and subtypes, and I didn't match the criteria back then. So it wasn't like it was a big surprise decades later when revised criteria started matching my phenotype

jitix 5 minutes ago | parent

Then you don't have a good therapist.

egeozcan 3 minutes ago | parent

Even some other people with ADHD seem to treat it like a trait, and not like a disorder.

This worries me.

Also, what's so noble about hiding own struggles?

And also, why shouldn't I be relieved when I understand a big factor in my struggles?

This is a very confusing comment.

INTPenis 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

jaggederest 8 minutes ago | parent

Too much heritability for trauma alone to be the whole story. It's likely genetics produce latency and environment triggers, if trauma is indeed a big part of the picture.

luckydata 7 minutes ago | parent

this is simply not true, and there's tons of scientific evidence of the contrary. ADHD makes you vulnerable to abuse because generally speaking people have a hard time dealing with the foibles of ADHD people. That makes you a target. We know that from science, there's no point in theorizing. ADHD is mostly genetic, highly hereditary and both under diagnosed and under treated. That's all there is to it.

sourthyme 4 minutes ago | parent

I have some friends that had hard experiences growing up from their parents because of their ADHD. ADHD effects kids earlier in development and requires some extra attention from parents (who also may have ADHD). It might be more likely that kids with ADHD have trauma because of their parents reaction to it.

cs1996 13 minutes ago | parent

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

FinnLobsien 5 minutes ago | parent

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.