I like this theory but considering the very high correlation with adhd …

First of all, my wife has a cPTSD associated with social anxiety and depression diagnosed, and we suspect she might also have ADHD and chronic fatigue, because some of her issues could not be explained by cPTSD and depression alone. And I believe that all my friends with diagnosed ADHD talked about some ACEs… So it would fit into my personal anecdotal evidence.

But… Phew, where do I start? … I have to admit, I only looked at the abstract, methods and results, but from looking at just these aspects, this study you linked seems to be very weak.

• They only looked at caregiver-reported ADHD.
  • One explaining factor was whether they had a public health insurance. Maybe because those without one can’t afford it and private ones don’t cover the diagnostic? Just an idea, of course.
  • I somehow don’t trust caregiver-reported data to be free of biases. Are parents with undiagnosed ADHD exactly as likely to correctly report their children’s ADHD? If it’s undiagnosed, their children’s issues might just appear normal to them. Are parents working to jobs to get by or even parents with untreated trauma directly subjecting their children to ACEs likely to notice their children’s ADHD? I’m an engineer, not a social scientist or expert in medicine, but somehow, I believe that some scepticism towards the underlying data is in order.
• “race” was an explaining factor. That might actually support the “hunter-gatherer vs. farmers” hypothesis, because farming developed in very different paces in different regions and that hypothesis assumes that ADHD was an adverse factor in natural selection in these communities. But as always, “race” is scientific bullshit because it mixes up and oversimplifies so incredibly many economic, cultural, political and biological factors that might actually have an influence.

It can be all of the above!

That’s the w o n d e r f u l thing about disorders (rather than diseases). A disorder is just any embodied experience that’s unpleasant or makes your life harder.

So it: 1) doesn’t need a single, unambiguous, canonical cause; and 2) is (at least partially) culturally-defined.

You can imagine a society that caters more towards ADHD and doesn’t even treat it as a disorder, and instead identifies (our society’s) neurotypical executive function as a disorder.

We have to keep in mind that no scientific field is purely descriptive. Yes, even the hardest of the hard sciences have some normative component. (Lookin at you, math and physics — but especially physics.)

So when we talk about disorders, it’s not just about biological function. It’s also about everyone’s favorite thing: politics! Salient example: Homosexuality is a disorder, until it’s not.

adhd is genetic, not a trauma response. this just sounds like someone cherry picking evidence to support their “its the parents fault” bias and couching it in the language of science to seem more valid. it also, disgustingly, implies that adhd can be “cured” by addressing the underlying trauma. im honestly offended you would spread this trash.

I think adhd is far more likely to be a ‘default’ trauma response prevelant in folks genetically predisposed to autism.

Absolutely not. If the correlation is causal, it goes the other direction (i.e., it’s hard to get through the developmental period as a neurodiverse person without trauma).

how much difficulty clinicians have telling all these conditions apart

Clinicians who have difficulty telling them apart should recuse themselves from attempting to tell them apart. Unfortunately for clients, insurance (at least in the US) requires a diagnosis for treatment, so if you don’t have a diagnosis yet, you’re gonna get a quickly determined one by a clinician who’s doing it because they’re required to rather than because they actually know what they’re doing

And the fatigue and other autoimmune issues which we [adhd/asd/ptsd] also seem to commonly deal with is likely just the toll all this stress has on our bodies.

This is at least partially true, but also outside my wheelhouse so I don’t intend to get into it, but I wanted to balance my comment a little instead of just calling out the parts where you’re wrong

Source: Am therapist who specializes in ASD & ADHD and also has ADHD, ASD, & cPTSD