I'm 51 now and I feel like I will never be an adult. Looking around I see a lot of broken people, each in their own peculiar ways. Everyone has some coping mechanisms, triggers, and behaviours rooted in childhood. I don't see it in a bad light, I think it is just humanity.
It's not just "broken people", everybody has their cross to bear. Some are outwardly visible, but many are not.
As a high schooler, there was a girl in my class who seemed to have it all: smart, gorgeous, popular, you name it. Then one day, she confided in me her deepest, darkest secret: at the age of 17, she had gone to a neighboring country to get liposuction on her thighs, because she was deeply distressed about not having the "thigh gap" demanded by beauty standards at the time. (This was also the first time I had heard of the existence of such a thing.) Now it's easy to dismiss this as shallow, but to her this was debilitating to the extent that she was willing to put up with the cost and pain of surgery to get it fixed.
Child abuse might be a large driver behind dysfunctionality in adulthood, with disability or early retirement as a consequence. There were some big child neglect cases around the millennium, since them, the topic got more attention from researchers.
It used to be that traumatised kids got slapped with a ADHD, autism and/or borderline diagnosis and it got called a day. These are "that's just how you are" style diagnoses. Since 2018 there is CPTSD which finally connects the symptoms to how you got treated as a child. The denial phase is over.
Lawmakers are a bit behind, as usual, but at this point the scale of the problems can't be denied anymore. Its too late for you and me, but I'm optimistic for future generations.
We're in the over-correcting phase, where every person alive is an abuse survivor of varying seriousness.
For what it's worth I'm not a cynical person against psychology, and I read both the DSM and the ICD front to back every time a revision comes out. But with every revision, especially for the DSM, I become more concerned that we're creeping towards the "everybody suffers from a multitude of disorders therefore nobody does" territory which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help.
> where every person alive is an abuse survivor of varying seriousness
An odd way to frame it but probably true.
> which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help
That does not follow - if the environmental sources are known, people (especially teachers and social workers) can look out for them and take measures to improve the outcome for the child. And this is what I'm seeing right now.
See it on a societal scale - for the same effort put into raising kids, you get more functional adults.
ADHD and other mental issues are under-diagnosed in dysfunctional or toxic families, and of course exist in very stable caring families, so I would be very curious in which data link the very different symptoms you cite directly to trauma. It feels like going back to the era of shaming mothers for autism.
This is not ruling out a causal link in the opposite direction, that autism increases vulnerability to traumata.
And while researching case reports on child abuse, i couldn't help to notice that many cases do - indeed - start with an autism diagnosis and only escalate later, example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11886450/
While its true that parents don't cause autism... they can surely cause the diagnosis. Extra bad because it delays appropriate treatment.
> It used to be that traumatised kids got slapped with a ADHD, autism and/or borderline diagnosis and it got called a day. These are "that's just how you are" style diagnoses. Since 2018 there is CPTSD which finally connects the symptoms to how you got treated as a child.
This was my childhood.
Unfortunately for some the narrative of the perfect family is too precious for others to step up and intervene. It's taboo to accuse someone of being a bad parent, even if it's the truth.
Even away from my abusers for decades, the resulting issues have continued into my adulthood and led to near daily struggle that seems to have no end. With my family I've had to choose my battles and my therapist is the only one who both believes me and is trained to give me the support I require to mentally survive in the adult world, one I would otherwise be unprepared for. Without a good enough job I wouldn't be able to pay them and that support would evaporate.
Imagine if a huge percentage of the drama and anger that shows up online is rooted in formative trauma that nobody will ever admit out loud, and as a result we're distracted by trying to address completely unrelated sources of outrage.
I think a lot of people feel this, they just stop saying it out loud.
At some point I realized “adults” aren’t people who figured things out, they’re just people who got used to not knowing — which is both kind of freeing and a little unsettling.
> I'm 51 now and I feel like I will never be an adult. Looking around I see a lot of broken people, each in their own peculiar ways.
One becomes an adult when they learn pretty much everyone around them is desperately trying to act as an adult. There are some children that learn this lesson in their childhood, and some that learn it way too late.
There should be a name for the psychological shock everybody experiences when they figure out mum and dad are not, in fact, superheroes or supervillains, but just normal people, sometimes decent, many times a bit pathetic.
