ADHD and comorbid conditions

Just like a similar question I asked earlier with rejection sensitive Dysphoria, whether the emotional sensitivity is innate or a consequence of ADHD symptoms influencing our lives.

Often those with ADHD are comorbid with other conditions. I was diagnosed with a very mild case of bi polar after having severe ADHD for years. Though not an official diagnosis, my psychiatrist also thinks I’m slightly on the autistic spectrum, though I am missing autisms attention for detail, but I have many uncommon ADHD symptoms that are mostly found in autism, such as how I stim and how I read social situations, how I process being overwhelmed with things, how I dissociate.

Thing is though maybe the autism was innate(My older brother is severely autistic) but I don’t know about my mood disorder. The reason I say this is I know a guy with ADHD that is filled with anxiety and depression. But his entire childhood was getting beat on by his parents for being lazy and a failure, and now he has other problems.

Many people with otherwise kind parents develop anxiety, because people are unforgiving when you BEHAVE as if you don’t care and are lazy, but in truth your trying as hard as possible to stay engaged even though your brain won’t let you, but no one sees that. No one sees that and your trying, they just see someone that is lazy and doesn’t care. And then you become conscious of what people think, that you’ll screw up, and the anxiety becomes a conditioned response.

And it doesn’t matter if that’s now what your real internal motivation is, we’re socially conditioned to judge internal states by external behavior. Lisa Feldman Barret’s research shows body language can be vastly different from person to person regarding the same emotion inside them, but that is not what most people perceive it to be. So no matter what the truth is, you’re going to be judged harshly.

Things that would never leave most regular people traumatized will give a minor sort of PTSD to many people with ADHD, since Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria makes us emotionally sensitive. That’s why so many people with ADHD can have hair trigger tempers, because their nervous system perceives some mundane shit as trauma when it’s just a bad day for everyone else. It sucks.

But again, maybe even if our daily experience primes us for other mental health issues, we could also be wired that way.

It could be both, that life throws shit at us that would make us mental, but also we were always a little mental anyway.