Hi all,

reading through a lot of stuff on ADHD, there was always one question poping up: "Are they mixing cause with effect?"
So I am playing around with that and see if there is a way to seperate those two in a way that makes sense.
I have to different angles from which I am approaching.
Let me explain:

1. How we percieve ourselfs, the world around us and us in it is being reinforced by ourselfs and by those around us. If you're being told that you're stupid you will eventualy believe it and act according to that, if you tell yourself that it get's even worse.

2. Now take into consideration that ADDers develop slower in childhood then other kids do.
One thing I am wondering is whether this is because we simply have more work to do, thus our brain has less ressources left to develop. (Or needs to develop different to adapt. Much like you need bigger tubes to have more water running through. Bigger tubes -> more iron needed to build them. "...is not dump truck. It's a series of tubes" *grin*)
The idea being that the way we percieve information and process it in itself is ok (Barkley's idea, and "ok" doesn't mean it's not deviant), it's "just" the bigger amount of information that makes us distracted etc.

Let's toss those two ideas together :)

If as a child, for example, your concept of time develops slower, then you will pick this up from your own action, in comparison to what others do and what their feedback is. So at a very young age you learn that you percieve time differently, keep that believe and go with it. (This is on a subconcious level)

What I am wondering now is if this perception detaches from the RrRrRreality at some later point? (Does it get "fixed" without you knowing it)
Also, does this mean that our ways of thinking is something that we partialy learned or at least cultivated throughout the years?
If so, could ADD thinking be learned? (btw, it's 10am right now.. YES, I am sober :))

Ok, in short:
Too much info causes lag in development, which leads to a different self image and thinking. Because of the constante reinforcement of that different self image we stick to a different thought pattern even after the point where we caught up in development and could use the "appropriate" brain functions.

Thoughts? Am I just stating the obvious here?

Well, sociologists refer to that as the "looking glass" theory of personality, that some part of our self-perception is based on how others act towards us.

I wouldn't be surprised if ADDers internalize a lot from the way others treat us due to our actions...but at the same time, a large part of ADHD involved being fairly oblivious to that sort of thing. Plus, a lot of those action are involuntary anyways, so it's moot in some respects.

However, where I think you may be on to something is more in the area of self-esteem or self-confidence, where many people with ADHD are repeatedly told that they are lazy, or stupid, or a failure or that they are constantly misbehaving or whatever. This can often be internalized, resulting in feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, depression/dysthemia, all of the excess baggage that often results from growing up ADHD. There's another thread here on psychosocial treatment that discusses the difference between ADHD itself, which is neurological, and the psychological baggage that develops from that.

But if you're asking whether the ADHD itself get "fixed," I don't know. Some people do seem to get better, but my impression is that those tend to be either rather mild cases to begin with, or situations where the person found, usually through sheer luck, a career where the disorder was not a major stumbling block...many actors, in my experience, would qualify for the diagnosis (although actors in general tend to be all different flavors of crazy...lots of bipolar there as well, plus aspie techies, OCD stage managers, neurotic directors...and then there's usually the one sane pothead who pipes up occasionally to tell everyone that they need to just relax and it'll all work out).

Hi there,

probably it's a mood point. Just found myself twisting that one around for a while.

Like your sig btw :)

T

Cause and effect are not really the right perception to go with.

I don't like to think in "cause and effect" manner in making choices, we'll just say.

Conditions happen spontaneously, depends on mostly arbitrary conditions.

LOL

for the time being, I do think that, overtime the person will eventually think they are stupid if they keep on seeing it in themselves.

One will forget this, over time however.

Yes, I agree that cause and effect often get confused in research. Life is, at the very least bidirectional or multi-directional.

To put this into other terms, unidirectional research considers the effects parents have on children, or that children have on parents. Bidirectional research considers the effects that parents and children have on each other. Multidirectional research considers how different causes influence each other and how these influences change over time (e.g., financial strain causes stress which causes depression, but depression also can lead people to underperform at work and miss promotions, which also causes financial strain and stress. In the meantime, this changes individuals' self-perceptions, which can influence how they act in social situations, thereby increasing or reducing their social support... and on and so forth).

One reason for why the research seems to confound cause and effect is because we didn't have the stats that allows for disentanging these relationships until relatively recently. Unfortunately, relatively few people know how to use them well. There are also theoretical issues: research is supposed to be initiated in an attempt to evaluate hypotheses based on theories. Theories are developed to differing degrees, and some have adapted these multi-influence models better than others. I don't know of a multicausal, multidirectional ADHD model yet, but I'm sure there's one in the works.

well, just to play devil's advocate (I agree with most of what psych said), part of the reason for that is that scientific research tends to involve eliminating as many confounding factors as possible to isolate a single cause->effect relationship. So all things being equal, is there a direct effect B from cause A.

Unfortunately, this does tend to focus on unidirectional relationships at the expesne of bidirectional ones, but the flip side is that while you may get correlation without causation, at least it isolates correlation, whereas failing to isolate confounding factors creates the risk of spotting correlation where it does not exist at all.

I'd wonder whether some of macroeconomic theory, or maybe modern game theory, might help with that kind of research?

Science is supposed to eliminate confounding factors, but it is rare for a study to include all of them. It's just not possible for many practical reasons, and sometimes also ethical ones. For example, I can't randomly assign people to live in poverty or live in luxury, or to parents who will abuse them or not, etc. We can control for them as best we can (e.g., ask people if their parents abused them and include it in the statistical models), but even that is imperfect (people have been known to lie, after all).

Life is multivariate. Science is still catching up...

I agree, science is very useful. Main stream science is just not to the point where I am satisfied. I get a little upset, I know.

I should do something about it, probably eh? I think I'm just expecting a little too much, you know.. I need to lay off on the metaphysical, philosophical stuff sometimes.

Needs to be presented in a different fashion, I'd say.

Good post, BTW doc!

The universe is like an ink bottle splattered against a white wall. All of a sudden patterns start forming admist the mess as the ink runs down the wall