[pygy_]

> Some physicians and researchers have argued for years that emotional dysregulation is not peripheral to ADHD but a central, overlooked part of the condition. Yet this symptom does not appear in the formal diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the manual that doctors use to classify mental disorders. That gap has left clinicians without a clear way to categorize what they’re seeing: Are these children best understood as having severe anxiety, as being on the autism spectrum, or as something else entirely? Or does ADHD itself need to be more broadly defined?

Again and again and again. Psychiatry is an epistemic mess.

Psychiatrists are touristic guides of the Paris catacombs that orient themselves with a map of the subway.

[exq]

"With DSM-V, psychiatry firmly regressed to early 19th-century medical practice. Despite the fact that we know the origins of many of the problems it identifies, its diagnoses describe surface phenomena but completely ignore the underlying causes. Even before DSM-V was released, the American Journal of Psychiatry published the results of validity tests of various new diagnoses which indicated that the DSM largely lacks what, in the world of science is known as, 'reliability', that is, the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity." ― Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.

[AndrewKemendo]

That’s because psychiatry is intended to revert people to the cultural average so that they fit in and don’t have a bad time

Literally the key defining feature of whether something is a disorder is whether it “impedes” your life, and that could be literally anything

[doright]

That "something else entirely" for me was trauma. which has no search hits in this comment thread so far.

I was given an ADHD diagnosis as a child before it was in vogue. From my (admittedly) biased perspective I was given this as a result of hyperactivity which might have stabilized on its own given enough time, but my caretakers reacting poorly to my early behavior caused long-lasting traumatic symptoms which happen to line up with many symptoms of ADHD. So I just assumed that ADHD was the case the whole time. I started to suspect something was off when stimulants did not help my problems, but unfortunately it was not enough to escape the sphere of trying to solve my issues with ineffective ADHD-centric solutions until long into my adulthood.

Childhood trauma on top of misdiagnosis on top of continuing familial issues was an awful combination for me and I can't say that I've made that much progress from therapy, only that at this point I can survive with full awareness of the reality of how I was treated. It felt like I had been living in an alternate reality for decades and now I can't stop thinking about what I've found out.

[givinguflac]

I’m sorry you went through all that; it sounds really difficult. I can relate, having come from a similar background and situation. However, I wasn’t actually diagnosed with adhd until well into adulthood. The meds have helped, but I also have been given other emotional deregulation diagnoses, and I’ve been wondering if it’s all one thing. This article and your experiences add to that perception, for me.

Regarding progress in therapy, it’s a lot of work for sure. I would recommend looking into brainspotting (1) - it’s been hugely helpful for processing trauma, for me. YMMV

Thank you for sharing!

(1) brainspotting.com

[sonicvroooom]

> emotional dysregulation

Not having enough sex is hard to formalize as a diagnostic criterium.

Joke aside (which is on me), I have doubts that it's about psychiatry being an epistemic mess. And when I say "that it's (not) about", I mean that it's not (or is) relevant to the framing of the problem.

a) it's only been almost 200 hundred years, most of which were spend building crowd control rather than exploring minds, so it's not an issue of semantics and 'mental' x 'neural' topologies defined in as unambiguous terms as possible. psychology drew lines for the wrong reasons but men, who build and still run the field, are, ... well ... not very manly, are they? nobody is, these days. Some mafia says jump & people jump, you read it in studies and subtext all the time, and in real life, just look at the the amounts of highly functioning autistic people just rolling with the rules of conformity in 'realms' with 'grander'--meaning, in context, requiring high education (not the half baked kind)--purpose. It's weird.

b) "regulation" implies continuity, which requires literally no more than 2 things:

1. learning a few rules, which is an active thing, much easier for ADHD and other people than the thing they have no control over whatsoever, which is

2. brain circuits that don't (or do) constantly break continuity of ... all the things that return thoughts and emotions even though the "main" function isn't done, or any (or only some) of the concurrent, async functions called by the "main" function are or are not done, (yet), all while all the 'context and reality and "presence" sustaining functions' are just stable enough ... (minus that cool part of the CNS that does it's thing no matter what)

All that said, I have to check the study in detail. We should never forget that the personalities of parents (and other involved parties) play a 1337% more important role than the subtype of ADHD or whatever symptoms a person "shows".