Why Dr Gabor Mate' is Worse Than Wrong About ADHD

hello everybody R sparkley here and in this video I want to tackle a very serious topic that has been proposed by a family physician out of Canada also a celebrity by the name of Gabor mate Dr mat has proposed that ADHD arises as a result of childhood stressful and traumatic experiences what we would think of as adverse childhood experiences uh this is website if you're interested I'll put the link over in the thumbnail sketch uh and uh over here at Wikipedia we can see that he got his degree in um Family Medicine general family practice

in 1977 at the University of British Columbia and he then operated in a private practice uh in the city of Vancouver for many years Dr mate has written a number of books dealing with addiction uh stress trauma but specifically his book scattered Minds is his book about the origins and healing of ADHD uh in this book and in his lectures he is claiming that it is childhood Adverse Events and Trauma that are the principal cause of ADHD he goes on to elaborate that this trauma can actually be transmitted cross generationally from the parents gener eration

to the child then in addition the culture can generate and transmit trauma to individuals so according to Dr mate there's trauma everywhere and a lot of the problems we are dealing with in life and specifically ADHD specifically appears to arise out of these adverse experiences in life now it's interesting that Dr matate doesn't really Define exactly what he means by trauma it could be something as simple as uh a uh insult or an unkind word to somebody that someone takes offensively as you know the word trauma has been abused badly in our culture to mean

just about anything that the person finds uh unwanted or unhelpful or adverse um but it could also go all the way up to the types of trauma that most people think about which is physical trauma witnessing violence experiencing violence and so on uh and uh so it it's difficult to say which of these mechanisms he is arguing for in ADHD so we're just going to wind up rolling it all into the term adverse childhood events and let it go at that uh Dr mate has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in which he has articulated

these ideas about stress and Trauma being the principal cause of ADHD uh on the show the link to which is in the thumbnail sketch uh Dr matate claims that ADHD is not genetic that it's not inherited and that it is due to this uh within generation and cross-generation Adverse Events trauma as he calls it uh he also has made the same remarks in another video that is posted over at the Norwegian Institute for trauma uh and can find a number of other interviews on the internet where he has made precisely the same claims I'm not

going to take time to play these particular uh interviews or comments we just don't have the time for that you can go and find them uh yourself so here we're going to specifically look at this claim about ADHD being associated with traumatic events and not being genetic so first of all let me bring up up a major review of the genetics of ADHD published in molecular Psychiatry by my good friend Steve Fon along with Heinrich Larsson and Dr fron is probably the leading scientist in the world on ADHD having published hundreds of articles on this

topic throughout his lengthy and distinguished career in this review of the genetics of ADHD as he says ADHD has a high heritability 74% what does that mean it means that the vast majority of variation in the human population in degree of ADHD symptoms is driven by differences in genetics and genetic architecture not by the environment not by Parenting by genetics that's what heritability means now in a subsequent review for clinicians that was um published over in uh the journal current Psychiatry reports we have an article that was written by Oliver grim and others trying to

reduce all of the genetic research the hundreds and hundreds of studies on genetics down to what clinicians need to know uh and as you can see here these authors tell clinicians that the formal heritability of ADHD is about 80% so very similar Toon's conclusions uh that the vast majority of individual differences in the human population in degree of ADHD symptoms is determined by genetic differences now it's not just these people saying this but the fact that we have experts in the field who are themselves experts in the genetics of ADHD telling us that the majority

of variant is due to genetics immedi immediately disproves Dr mate's thesis that ADHD is not genetic and is due to trauma we could stop here end this video mate is wrong he is worse than wrong worse than wrong means that while you could be wrong about a particular idea we go out and research it and we find that one person's right and one person's wrong when it comes to the results worse than wrong means that you continue to adhere and Advocate a thesis that has been resoundingly refuted in the scientific literature why are you worse

than wrong because you are propounding nonsense you are transmitting information that is grossly inaccurate and in doing so you are causing harm now let's take a look at another paper this is a metaanalysis of the degree of genetic and environmental influences on ADHD symptoms it was published by Molly Nicholas was published back in 2010 but there have been many many more studies since then and other metaanalyses but let's just take a look at this one this is a review and combination of 79 separate studies of twins and adoptees in which they examined degree of inattention

hyperactivity and impulsivity and then they took the results of at least 13 of these large scale studies and did mathematics on them to calculate heritability and what do these studies come up with exactly what Fon and others have argued in those reviews ADHD is accounted for by genetic factors with the heritability being about 71 to 73% now that was 13 years ago we have even more studies so let me just emphasize this this review shows that not only is Dr mat wrong he is wrong 79 times in the literature his idea has been refuted by

studies of twins and adoptees regarding the role of genetics in influencing human variation on ADHD again we we could just stop here but is so wrong he's worse than wrong he is propounding what I have called nonsense on stilts it has no empirical basis in the scientific literature but wait there's more let's go further and take a look at some other studies here this one on the role of the genetic determinance of exposure to adversity among youth with mental illness so this is a large study of children between five and all the way up to

27 years of age and they looked at the offspring of parents with various disorders mood psychosis anxiety and ADHD and they looked at the extent to which polygenic RIS scores for certain traits including ADHD predicted exposure to adverse childhood events and what did they find ADHD was the big one ADHD polygenic risk scores uniquely explain variance in the adversity score meaning that the more ADHD wrist genes you had the more severe your ADHD was the greater the likelihood you were going to be exposed to adverse childhood events so we can see here that the genetics

of the disorder is driving the severity of the disorder is driving the risk for Adverse Events both currently and later in life we know this to be true that having ADHD sets you up for a variety of adverse outcomes as a result of your symptoms and risk-taking and limited self-regulation and poor executive functioning and these Adverse Events as you've seen in many of my videos span the whole range of social familial educational occupational sexual substance use disorders and so on and so on all of these adversities are related to ADHD severity so it's not hard

for us to understand that people with ADHD are going to experience a lot more Adverse Events in their life than our typical people now let's take a look at another study here this one is on the role of ADHD and the risk for later Adverse Events in childhood and again what does it find it finds that at time one ADHD individuals had a high probability of experience experiencing Adverse Events both at time one and later at time two so ADHD to start with is predicting Downstream risk for Adverse Events in life precisely the point that

I was making earlier about all of the adversities that link up with ADHD now finally let's take a look at where some of this adverse experiences may be coming from here is a study a very large study of 22,000 parents and 11,500 of their offspring this is a study of twins and siblings that took place in Norway so it's a huge study and it's looking at the cross generational transmission of risk for ADHD uh and of course what it is show showing is that the transmission is largely genetic not environmental I want to emphasize that

once again we have a study among many studies showing that ADHD is not the result of within family environmental factors however unique events out of family experiences May well contribute to some extent to ADHD I've talked about that previously that can be anything from birth complications premature delivery low birth weight being exposed to alcohol in utero during that pregnancy later on exposure to lead poisoning traumatic brain injuries and so on all of which rack up in life and can contribute to risk for ADHD so there are a wide array of unique events that can produce

neurological injury leading to an ADHD phenotype that is not genetic but is environmental but not due to the social environment we know that the family environment from these various studies contributes very little if anything to variation in ADHD so how can we summarize all of this research and there are many many many studies that I could have cited here to prove once again that Dr mat and his thesis are wrong and work than wrong but let's kind of wrap it up here with a graphic to kind of summarize for you very quickly what we think

is going on here so we have this thesis of Dr mat that trauma in childhood forget about the generational transmission of trauma just trauma in childhood leads to ADHD and symptom severity that's mate's claim I have now shown you that many many times over across the various research studies mate is wrong there is a relationship between ADHD and adverse childhood experiences but one cannot conclude that those Adverse Events by themselves are causal of ADHD the fact that two things are correlated as you know does not mean they are causal it can easily go the other

way around from the one that mate wants to propose here so correlation does not mean causation and that seems to be what matay is falling for here is correlation as cause now when we look across time at longitudinal studies what we see is that future adverse childhood experiences are directly predicted by the severity of ADHD and even by the number of genes that predispose to ADHD in those individuals so there is strong evidence that ADHD puts people at risk for traumatic events now there is also some evidence to suggest a little bit of evidence that

there is a weak relationship between time one Adverse Events and worsening your ADHD symptoms particularly in attention I would not be surprised to learn that having ADHD experiencing Adverse Events those Adverse Events can feed back to perhaps worsen your ADHD a little bit it's not causing the ADHD but that doesn't mean it can't exacerbate it particularly for symptoms of attention and of course we know that severity of ADHD at time one because of genetics predicts the continuing Persistence of ADHD at time 2 in most individ idual so you see it's a heck of a lot

more complicated than the simplistic ideas being promoted by Dr mate now more importantly Dr M completely overlooks what is now becoming a wellestablished set of relationships here that further adds to our understanding of the association of ADHD with Adverse Events and that is Parental ADHD and its own underlying genetics we know that parental ADHD is the single biggest risk factor or predictor of a child having ADHD if the parent has a diagnosis their offspring are eight times more likely to develop that disorder Than The Offspring of families that don't have ADHD there is no bigger

risk factor than that showing the Striking genetic contribution to this disorder order but wait there is more we also know that parental ADHD and its underlying genetics can contribute to chaotic unsystematic adverse family ecologies that's no surprise I've talked about it in my other lectures on this website so adults with ADHD know that they don't manage households quite the way the iCal families do they try to but there can be more chaos less systematizing a greater exposure to Adverse Events because of other family members having neurodivergent and mental disorders and let's not forget parental ADHD

also links up with depression anxiety substance abuse and other difficulties all of which conspire to create a family environment that could be leading to more Adverse Events so that's a link that Dr matate does not talk about at all but which the research literature is continuing to affirm so do you see how complicated things are it's not this ridiculously simple and silly idea of trauma causes ADHD and that answers the question so I'm sorry there is a whole Suite of underlying genetic and environmental effects that are going on here that we need to appreciate if

we're going to really scientifically understand this Association of ADHD with Adverse Events so I hope that you can see from this diagram that the scientific literature paints a much much more complex picture than the thesis of Dr mates now one final comment here let's look at what Dr mate is inferring who is supposedly creating these adverse childhood traumatic experiences that are supposedly according to him causing ADHD well largely it has to be the family doesn't it and largely that has to be parents and specifically in this country anyway we like to pick on Mothers more

than fathers since they continue to carry a heavier burden of child care so indirectly what mate is doing is what Bruno bleheim did 50 to 60 years ago for autism and what re researchers in ADHD were doing 50 years ago as well blaming the parents for the child's condition and I don't mean the parents genetics I mean the parents parenting their behavior is what was creating this neurodevelopmental disorder we know that's not true we know it's been disproven many times for autism no one holds to that idea anymore that refrigerator cold uncaring unloving mothers cause

autism and nor do we hold to that idea that bad parenting is creating ADHD we disproved that 45 years ago in our research but that's what mate is inferring here he's parent bashing he's family bashing and it just won't sell unless of course you adhere to the subculture of victimization so common in our country that you're not responsible it's all these Adverse Events that are leading you to have these problems it's what your parents did to you it's how other people have treated you it just caters to a culture of victimhood well I'm sorry our

research literature just doesn't support these ideas about the role of parenting and childhood adversity causing ADHD if anything what we see is that having ADHD sets you up for many different opportunities for experiencing adversity and even emotional trauma and especially physical trauma in your life and that yes once experienced that might make the ADHD symptoms a little worse particularly in attention but it does cause them denovo so thanks for joining me for this I hope you can see why Dr matate is worse than wrong when it comes to his thesis about ADHD arising from childhood

adversity so hope to see you again on another video if you enjoy this content please recommend us to others and if you are not a subscriber consider hitting that subscriber button thanks again for joining me everyone hope you learn something be well