How Childhood Trauma May Be a Root Cause for ADHD
It doesn’t take a major adverse event to develop a trauma response
I’m a former mental health nurse and as such, I have a special interest in the roots of trauma and how it affects our behavior and neurological development over our lifetime. I also have ADHD which I didn’t know about until I hit my adult years. As a Gen X woman, none of my classmates were ever evaluated for ADHD as it wasn’t a “thing” in my day.
In recent decades though, ADHD has become a much talked about and controversial topic. There are some who hold hard to the diagnosis being the cause of all maladaptive behavior and there are some who believe it was invented by the pharmaceutical industry to sell more drugs.
As for me, I am open to looking at a variety of angles of the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. In particular, I’m curious about how trauma plays into the behaviors and perceptions common to the ADHD diagnosis. Although I believe that people with ADHD were born with “different” nervous systems, I do think there’s a component of trauma that may interact with this nervous system creating these unique behaviors and perceptions.
I’m not the only one curious about this connection. Dr. Gabor Mate, a renowned doctor who looks deeply into the things like trauma…
