World Leading Physician View On ADHD: Gabor Mate

no proof whatsoever that medications help anybody heal from ADHD Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children poor kids are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD I'm telling you if your friends got ADHD I can tell you here to stressed early for years one of the really interesting things I wanted to talk to you about is is ADHD yeah um I've had a few of my friends in my close Friendship Circle diagnosed with ADHD recently and then I looked into some of the statistics around ADHD and I found this statistic that said in the 1980s one in 20 U.S children were diagnosed with ADHD today the number is roughly one in nine yeah um and just generally you know around me there's it feels like and this could just be because of my own little narrow Circle or it could be because of a wider thing happening in society it feels like there's been an increase in diagnosis of mental illness and things like ADHD and the causes when I spoke to my friend about what he believed the cause of um his ADHD was and he's posted this on LinkedIn and talks about it very publicly now um it seemed to point to he seemed to believe it was relating to some kind of genetic or heritable um Factor now the issue the issue that I've sort of been contending with myself and why I spoke to Johann Hari about this and others about this is if I if I am to accept that then I am I feel like I'm accepting that we're being born somewhat broken and this is almost what Johann Hari talked about in in the early stages of his teenage years where he he was made to believe that there was this chemical imbalance in his brain and therefore he was born broken and here's the medication to solve it yeah so but I don't want I don't believe that I don't I don't personally believe that we're we're born broken well um anybody interested in the subject might do it I think Joanne and actually did is to read my book and it is called scattered minds and um I was diagnosed within my 50s and so were a couple of my kids but but I never bought into the idea this is a genetic disease or there's a disease at all genetic or otherwise um now as for the rising number of um people being diagnosed with it there could be two reasons at least one is a better diagnosis so before we wouldn't have noticed it but now we are or genuinely there's more people who are having trouble in certain ways such as with attention and impulse control and so on but either way the fact is that many more children are being diagnosed and medicated for this condition particularly in the U.S but also increasingly uh here in the UK as well and in China and elsewhere now um as I said earlier if we the fact is here's the actual reality nobody's ever found the gene for ADHD nobody's ever found the gene that says if you have this Gene you're gonna have ADHD no group of genes ever been found that says if you're gonna have this Gene you're gonna have this condition nor ever will be and no such gene or group of Genesis have ever been found that if you don't have these genes you will not have the condition now there are some diseases there are genetic one runs in my family muscular dystrophy if you have the gene you're going to have the disease my mother had it my aunt had it that's a genetic condition and if you have a the gene you'll have the disease very rare those kind of diseases no there are some genes that the more them you have the more likely you are to have any number of mental health diagnoses ADHD depression anxiety even psychosis bipolar Illness but there's no group of genes or set of genes or Gene that themselves determine any one condition as a matter of fact you can have those same genes and not have any condition whatsoever so something is being passed on but it's not any kind of condition that's being passed on what's being passed on is sensitivity and the more sensitive you are the more you're going to feel whatever is going on in the environment so you take the same sensitive care with these genes that confer greater sensitivity of them and sensitive means to feel from the Latin word to feel sincere the more sensitive you are the more you're going to feel the more you feel the more bad stuff happens the more pain you're going to be in and the more compensating you're gonna have to do at the same time with those same genes if you tweeted well and you grow up in a healthy environment you just be creative and happy and joyful and a leader and a artist or a shaman or or a very creative CEO or whatever you're going to be so the genes don't determine they make you more sensitive to their environment no if you go back to what I said about the tuning out it's simply a defense so the more sensitive you are and the stress in the environment the more you're going to feel the stress the more you're gonna need to escape from it by tuning out so he didn't inherit ADHD you inherited a sensitivity that makes it more likely under stressful circumstances that you revert to tuning out when your brain is developing which by the way is an organ that develops physiologically under the impact of the emotional environment so if there's a lot of stress in a child's life and what I'm saying is in this Society is that more and more parents are stressed not because they don't love their kids not because they're not doing their way utmost to provide for them but because they're more stressed to all kinds of social political economic reasons I mean if you look at inflation in Britain is a high risk right now more people are going to be stressed financially Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children those children may want to tune out because there's too much to be in their present some of them will be diagnosed with ADHD they didn't inherit anything in terms of a disease they're just reacting to the environment so if we're diagnosing more and more kids these days I think it's because the parenting environment has been much more stressed and that's backed up in this book where you mentioned that study of 65 000 parents yeah um and their children with ADHD right you say well there's more trauma in their lives yeah so the children they do a study with 65 000. I forget I read it yeah yeah yeah about 90 thousands of kids yeah so because I found that to be really really sort of um supportive of what you just said where I I'm again I'm I'm saying this from memory but a study of 65 000 um children and their parents and they found that those parents who had more adverse um traumatic events in their lives ended up having having a higher chance of having a child that had ADHD well look if you look at um the United States at least poor kids and kids of so-called color are much more like to be diagnosed with ADHD interesting no why would that be the case because they're living with so much more stress men as well right men as well adults you mean men yeah so I've read that more men yeah more men are diagnosed partly because in men the the symptom of hyperactivity seems to be there more often so when a kid is sitting in school and the cancer still that's obvious the teacher will notice it the girl who's kind of dreamy and tunes out kind of Fades away at the back of the class she doesn't create any problems so they don't then that's one of the reasons but also um funny to say but young boys infant boys are more sensitive to a mental environmental pressure than girls are for some strange reason so they're more likely to be affected by these factors Singapore like that in the class that's a fidgety that has a poor attention span bad response to stress we medicate what is the impact of that approach to treatment medicating super early I used to when I worked as a physician I would certainly prescribe medication sometimes it's a question of who's prescribing it and what intention if I understand that the real problem in this child is not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with the child but that they were developed in a stressed environment and those stresses are still acting on them and one of the stresses is that parents don't understand the kids behaviors and they tend to react rather harshly then if I change if I can help the parent understand the sensitive nature of their child which also means that when positive changes occur in the environment the kid will be very responsive to that as well if the parents can create a positive accepting understanding atmosphere in the home and work on their own stresses so they don't unconsciously pass them on to the kids that kid will change very quickly and I say well if in the short term the child wants the medication to function better and no child should be forced to take medication and medication are never the final answer that the very most their stop Gap there's no proof whatsoever that medications help anybody heal from ADHD they simply suppress symptoms which may be helpful in the short term but for God's sakes go to work on the long-term development of that child and what does that mean create the conditions image healthy development takes place that child will do very very well if you think the problem is a disease they're just going to medicate away the symptoms of what about adults they might I'm thinking of my friend that he's he's in his 30s and he got the diagnosis of ADHD in his 30s yeah he's been given this medication which he presumably has to take for Life he's told me the medication has helped helped him Focus this helps him Focus has helped him Focus yeah it's been a game changer Steve you know yeah yeah I I've taken medication myself for ADHD and it helped me focus it helped me write my first book um I didn't dig it for this one as a matter of fact more recently when I was beginning to write the medication I thought maybe I would take a bit of stimulant like I used to and just to see if it helps me write the book better all it did all it did is give me side effects my brain has changed I don't need it anymore you know so I I would say to your friend if the medication is helping right now and it's not causing you side effects I got nothing against it and you might want to give it a break if you know every weekend if you don't you know you might want to use it for when you're having to work or having to you know they concentrate but it's up to you if it helps you function take it but go to work on the traumas and stresses that are driving the ADHD going back to your childhood you know I may say in my book in ADHD scattered Minds does outline some ways to do that um you might find that you don't need the medication uh so much anymore or not at all perhaps number one number two even if you do your life will be so much Fuller and so much more um less stressed if you deal with the underlying factors than if you simply medicate the symptom like I'm telling you if your friends got ADHD I can tell you he had to stressed early for years and his parent was her parents were strapped his pants were stressed so deal with that deal with what conditions are you creating now in your life to create more stress for you are you taking care of your body are you exercising are you eating well do you get out there in nature nature is a some kind of Harmony to it which actually calms the mind you know so are you doing all these things if you're not all you're doing is medicating a symptom if you are taking the medication specifically to help you focus but you're working on these other issues you'll have a much full life and you may find you don't need the medication after a while if you love The Driver's CEO brand and you watch this Channel please do me a huge favor become part of the 15 of the viewers on this channel that have hit the Subscribe button it helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets the bigger the guests [Music]

Channel: The Diary Of A CEO Clips

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Keywords: the diary of a ceo, podcast, the diary of a ceo podcast, life lessons, ceo, Steven Bartlett, Steve Bartlett, life advice, doac, diary of a ceo, diary of a ceo clips, Steve Bartlett Podcast, gabor mate, gabor maté, gabor mate trauma, gabor mate adhd, when the body says no, adhd, what is adhd, how to deal with adhd, dr. gabor maté, self identity, motivational video, inspire, inspirational, change your life, psychiatry, dr. gabor maté interview, dr. gabor interview, dr. gabor

Id: itcD7f0H64A

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022