The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

by Nadine Burke Harris

I believed, ever since we’d opened the clinic in 2007, that something medical was happening with my patients that I couldn’t quite understand. It started with the glut of ADHD cases that were referred to me. As with Diego’s, most of my patients’ ADHD symptoms didn’t just come out of the blue. They seemed to occur at the highest rates in patients who were struggling with some type of life disruption or trauma, like the twins who were failing classes and getting into fights at school after witnessing an attempted murder in their home or the three brothers whose grades fell precipitously after their parents’ divorce turned violently acrimonious, to the point where the family was ordered by the court to do their custody swaps at the Bayview police station. Many patients were already on ADHD medication; some were even on antipsychotics. For a number of patients, the medication seemed to be helping, but for many it clearly wasn’t. Most of the time I couldn’t make the ADHD diagnosis. The diagnostic criteria for ADHD told me I had to rule out other explanations for ADHD symptoms (such as pervasive developmental disorders, schizophrenia, or other psychotic disorders) before I could diagnose ADHD. But what if there was a more nuanced answer? What if the cause of these symptoms—the poor impulse control, inability to focus, difficulty sitting still—was not a mental disorder, exactly, but a biological process that worked on the brain to disrupt normal functioning? Weren’t mental disord...